Security and Development 9780857458612

Citation preview

Security

and

Development

Security and Development

P Edited by

John-Andrew McNeish and

Jon Harald Sande Lie

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

www.berghahnbooks.com

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun

Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca

Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill

Volume 9 Identifying with freedom Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day

Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin

Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE COMMONS’ Edited by Donald M. Nonini

Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Volume 11 Security and Development Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION A Critical Stance Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist

Published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2010 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Security and development / edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie. p. cm. -- (Critical interventions: a forum for social analysis ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-177-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Security, International--Economic aspects--Case studies. 2. Economic development--Case studies. I. McNeish, JohnAndrew. II. Lie, Jon Harald Sande. III. Title. IV. Series. JZ5588.S4284 2010 355’.033--dc22 2010048954 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-177-4 (pbk)

Contents

P Introduction: A Security-Development Nexus? John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie 1 “Are We in This Together?” Security, Development, and the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ Agenda Finn Stepputat 19 Developmentality and the World Bank in the New Aid Architecture Jon Harald Sande Lie 36 Securitization in Stable Settings: The Privatization of Government and Zambia’s ‘War on Corruption’ Jeremy Gould 52 Securing Resources through Exceptional Means in the Americas John-Andrew McNeish 68

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Contents

Securitization of the Social and State Transformation from Iraq to Mozambique Bjørn Enge Bertelsen 84 (In)Security in a Space of Exception: The Destruction of the Nahr el-Bared Refugee Camp Are Knudsen 99 The Strength of Weak Ideas? Human Security, Policy History, and Climate Change in Bangladesh David Lewis 113 Seduced by Security: The Politics of (In)Security on Lombok, Indonesia Kari Telle 130 Plural Security: Moral Order and Security in Cambodia Alexandra Kent 143 Notes on Contributors 156

Introduction A Security-Development Nexus?

P John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie

This is not security as usual or development as usual. Nor is this about what we have come to think of as peace building or peacekeeping. This is about securing development— bringing security and development together first to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold over a decade and beyond. — Robert B. Zoellick, World Bank President, January 20091

Surprisingly few analysts and development practitioners have raised concerns in recent years about the apparently intensifying relationship taking place between the fields of international security and development. Superficial evidence of this relationship is visible in daily international news reports, which relay that humanitarian and development matters are now commonly enforced and backed by the potential threat of sending in the troops. As news coverage of Afghanistan makes evident, peacemaking forces are also increasingly grasping at development as a strategy to quell resistance by winning over the occupied

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population’s hearts and minds. Behind the scenes in international policy circles, violent conflict is rightly seen as a profound development challenge. While debates rage about how goals can best be achieved, the idea of ‘securing development’—the topic of the forthcoming 2011 World Development Report—is often taken for granted as a necessity, and little thought is given to its ideological direction. In an era of ‘terror’, it needs to be asked whether the altruistic rationale provided by development and humanitarianism is being used as a Trojan horse to legitimize military intervention. This volume, and its collection of essays, questions the basis of this mutating relationship by teasing apart its history, causes, and potentially dangerous consequences. In directly questioning the basis of current moves toward ‘securitization’, the book furthermore highlights the need for a return to a more critical and socialized understanding of security and development.

The Relationship between Security and Development Commonly traced to US President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural speech, the relationship between security and development is historically described as signaling a post– Cold War widening of the meaning and mechanisms of security in relation to the ideological and socio-economic divisions that became strengthened in the aftermath of World War II (Duffield 2007). From a concern with the security of states, international dangers (societal breakdown, unsustainable population growth, environmental stress, endemic poverty, etc.), and their interpretation as being linked to political concepts that threatened the ideals of freedom and economic growth, the scope of security was widened by the Cold War powers beyond its traditional

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focus on military threats. Both sides of the Cold War’s security axis utilized instruments of economy and development in their geo-political struggle to establish and maintain alliances among Third World countries and to hamper the strategic advantage and influence of competing ideologies. Aid flows during these decades reflect this strategy, as the volume of development assistance was largely unconnected to the recipient’s level of poverty (Griffin 1991). Whereas the relationship between security and development is not new, there has been growing acknowledgment among academics and development practitioners alike that since the end of the Cold War, the links between these two policy fields have changed. In removing the foundations of the existing security architecture, the demise of the Cold War allowed development discourse to re-establish earlier concerns with poverty and post-conflict reconstruction and thus made it possible for security to share the terrain of development. While development and security policies were clearly associated in the past, the relationship was opportunistic, geared to national interests and often covert. The current merger of development and security appears to be much more inclusive, organic, and transparent (Duffield 2007). Attention has been drawn to the increasing recourse by politicians, policy makers, and security professionals to a process or strategy of ‘securitization’ (Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde 1998; Huysmans 2000; Wæver et al. 1993). There is a tendency for such groups to describe an ever-widening range of social trends, conditions, and practices through a lens of security. For example, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in proposing its thesis on ‘human security’, backs the idea of widening the concept of security to include people and society, as well as states. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) initiative, endorsed unanimously by the UN World Summit in 2005, seeks to provide a robust normative

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framework for ensuring individuals’ security by redefining the notion of sovereignty in terms of the sovereign’s ability to protect its population, whereby the failure to protect can, as a last resort, result in an external military intervention (Lie 2008). Since 9/11, ideas of security have been focused not only on control but also on the development of ungovernable spaces. According to former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, as weak governments and state institutions are identified as potential security threats, development is simultaneously being flagged as a key tactic to “take away the reasons that people are susceptible to the approach by fundamentalist hardliners.”2 In the contexts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other sites of current humanitarian intervention, international support has grown for the practice of securing the peace, not only through the strategic location of troops on the ground, but through the implementation of ‘winning hearts and minds’ campaigns. Reminiscent of the Winning Hearts and Mind (WHAM) project during the Vietnam War, this approach aims to gain support and re-engineer the thinking of the populace through a combination of infrastructural and governance development projects.3 Recognizing the shadow of imperialism in the contexts and climate of these new, militarized humanitarian actions, concern has grown in the fields of international relations, politics, and development studies, as well as in the wider social sciences, about the present nature of the security-development nexus, that is, the tighter intersection between these two fields of international policy. Important discussions and debates are now taking place in academia about the nature, impacts, and outcomes of the numerous policy statements made by Northern governments, NGOs, and international institutions (such as that of Zoellick quoted above) in which the complementarity between security and development is seen as both unproblematic and progressive.

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This volume aims to contribute further to the discourse on the new security-development nexus. Existing scholarship on the subject has contributed important reflections on the ideological content and impact of this policy turn (Agamben 2005; Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat 2007; Duffield 2001, 2007; Langille 2000). However, it is the contention of this book and its contributors that these reflections can be significantly furthered through an anthropological consideration of the specific and generative contexts within which these policies are applied. The essays in this volume include detailed analyses of internal institutional logics and specific instances of the security-development nexus that, while working as critical interventions on the topic in their own right, can also be read as advancing new thoughts on the nexus as a whole. Here, the study of specific contexts illustrates the operations of policy, its dangers, resistances, and complicity with other local and national social processes. Indeed, the subtle understanding of power relations on which this volume’s anthropological research rests reveals the intricacy of the decisions and practices needed to form policy and helps tease apart the technologies, political mechanisms, biases, and sources of knowledge that drive their implementation. By drawing on ethnography, the contributors provide new vantage points from which to understand the workings of multiple, intersecting, and conflicting power structures that, while local, are tied to non-local systems and operate across time. Indeed, it is this subtle approach to the workings of power that is increasingly being commented on and highlighted in anthropological investigations focused on politics, policy, and development. These studies, we contend—as a group of scholars working on the frontiers of academia and applied development research—help anthropology to regain its importance as a forum for vital social and political critique.

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The Liberal Will to Power In recognizing that the relationship between security and development has a long genealogy, a number of authors have highlighted that its current prominence can be connected to the return to the political foreground of a liberal problematic of security (Agamben 2005; Duffield 2001). As they have noted, “this foregrounding focuses attention on the existence of a liberal will to power that, in securitizing the present, is also able to vector across time and space, that is, bridge the past and present as well as connecting the national and international (Duffield 2007: 4). Here, liberalism can be taken as a particular technology of government involving specific mechanisms or technologies for strategizing power, in which people and their life and freedom are essential reference points (Mehta 1999). Drawing on this recognition, an increasing number of scholars studying development processes (Cruikshank 1999; Larner and Walters 2004; Mosse and Lewis 2005) have highlighted the explanatory validity of Michel Foucault’s (1975, 1991) ideas of biopolitics and governmentality. Foucault used the emergence of biopolitics as the terrain on which to situate the classical liberal problematic of how much to govern. As Nikolas Rose (1999: 70) expresses it, while not co-determinate “liberalism denotes a certain ethos of governing, one which seeks to avoid the twin dangers of governing too much, and thereby distorting or destroying the operation of the natural laws of those zones upon which good government depends—families, markets, society, personal autonomy and responsibility— and, governing too little, and thus failing to establish the conditions of civility, order, productivity and national well-being which make limited government possible.” As the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1991), these techniques comprise a ‘governmentality’ where the aim is “to govern

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without governing society, that is to say, to govern through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents—citizens, parents, employees, managers, investors” (Miller and Rose 2008: 25). Foucault did not consider biopolitics directly in relation to colonialism or development, but in recent years several critical development scholars have picked up on his ideas as a possible means to explain the way in which biopolitics, liberalism, and development are intimately connected. Since the end of the eighteenth century, development has embodied a recurrent deference to the theory and practice of an enlightened, gradualist, and educative trusteeship over life (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 27; Mehta 1999: 191– 216). Although at odds with the worst of imperial violence and excess, development trusteeship became a framework of governance that allowed the powers of freedom to be learned and safely imposed, both at home and abroad. With the renewed wave of Western humanitarianism and the liberal peace-building agenda, liberal imperialism has been refounded, along with its self-proclaimed role of protecting and bettering the world (Coker 2003; Cooper 2002; Ferguson 2006). In this new era, trusteeship encourages local self-reliance and self-realization, “both through and against the state” (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 5). Such a trusteeship operates today in the ideas and institutions of sustainable development. It can be seen in the moral, educative, and financial tutelage that aid agencies exert over the attitudes and behaviors of those who are subject to the international development apparatus (Ferguson 1994; Pupavac 2005). Although it operates through a relation of governance, this trusteeship nonetheless speaks in terms of empowerment and partnership (Cooke and Kothari 2001). In the contributions to this volume, study is made of the specificities, contradictions, and ambiguities of the liberal will to power expressed in the security-development

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nexus. Instances of this can be found, for example, in the relationships between assistance and oppression described in the essays by Bertelsen, Telle, Knudsen, and McNeish. We also find detailed explanations of the development and institutional anchorage of the security-development nexus in the contributions of Stepputat, Lewis, and Lie. Importantly, whereas previous writers limit their usage of governmentality to the workings of state governance, there is evidence in these essays to suggest that the same liberal logics and technologies not only have been assimilated in the workings of the international financial and governance system, but also can be traced to the interactions of conflicting sovereignties. Lie, for example, argues that whereas Foucault saw governmentality as a modality of power emerging as an effect of new liberal technologies of governance employed by the evolving modern state, it is possible to consider ‘developmentality’ as an expression of the World Bank’s explicit intent of state formation under the auspices of the good governance agenda and by engaging the client in the new aid architecture. Developmentality, Lie argues, recognizes that the power of the World Bank—and of donors in general—is primarily founded not in its capacity for direct coercion, but rather in its primacy over development knowledge and power formation, which is made operational through various techniques of cooperation by means of which client governments agree to the World Bank’s discursive realm and aid architecture. Stepputat describes the contemporary origins of the security-development nexus as a remedy to recent emergencies and humanitarian crises. In contrast to other studies, he furthermore highlights that the security-development nexus should not be understood as the product of a single, coherent liberal discourse. Rather, it should be viewed as an outcome of the process of tension, contradiction, and overlap

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between differing development and military interests, each with their own discourse and understanding of sovereignty. This analysis can be seen both to fit and to further extend Hansen and Stepputat’s (2001) earlier critique of the state and proposals for the abandonment of sovereignty as the site of a de facto source of power and order, expressed only in law or in terms of enduring ideas of legitimate rule. Sovereignty is instead understood as a tentative and always emergent form of authority that is grounded in violence. Designed and enacted to generate loyalty, fear, and legitimacy, it operates at different levels, from the neighborhood to the summit of the state and beyond (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 297; cf. Kapferer 2004). Hansen and Stepputat (2006: 305) furthermore argue that sovereignty, always an unattainable ideal, is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies, where sovereign power was in fact distributed among many forms of local authority. Historically complex and often unsettled configurations of sovereignty have persisted in many post-colonial societies, giving rise to a complex range of informal sovereignties.

The Nature of Securitization Another area where this volume makes considerable contributions to an understanding of the security-development nexus is in terms of broadening and questioning current perceptions of securitization. In recent work on the security-development nexus, frequent reference has been made to Agamben’s argument that a “state of exception” or emergency—that is, the state’s suspension of the normative rule of law and introduction of extraordinary powers of militarized control—has progressively become “the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (Agamben 2005: 2). As a result of crisis situations

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and the perceived spread of threats from the Third World to the First World, particularly after 9/11, several writers have joined with Agamben in arguing that the invocation of a state of emergency by politicians and policy makers has now become a normal part of government (Wæver 1995). Development assistance is therefore increasingly aimed not only at improving the living conditions and self-reliance of Third World populations (or propping up Southern elites), but also at conflict resolution through the militarily backed imposition of a liberal peace. This meshes with the idea that what we are seeing is a new kind of warfare—what Mary Kaldor (2001) has termed “new wars”—in which the combatants are networks of state and non-state actors organized in loose horizontal coalitions rather than hierarchical military organizations. Supporters of this process accept the radicalization of development policy as a form of ‘Empire Lite’, that is, imperialism “in a hurry: to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to the locals and get out” (Ignatieff 2003: 19). It is, however, also noted that this approach is incredibly ambitious in its goals. The principal aim of humanitarian assistance and reconstruction efforts is no longer to restart development in a war-affected country. Instead, it is to avoid future conflicts by pushing through “the transformation of institutions, the creation of new social capital and new capacities, in some cases to replace traditional institutions that will inevitably be weakened in the process of development” (Stiglitz 1998: 11). As Mark Duffield (2007) argues, Northern powers perceive the need to achieve these goals, but also recognize the ultimate impossibility of doing so. Thus, we find ourselves at the global level in a situation of ‘unending war’. While a number of the contributors to this volume accept the relevance of Agamben’s ‘states of exception’ thesis as a paradigmatic explanation for the current securitization of

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development practice, they additionally point out that the application and basis of these ideas have until now been too narrow. McNeish, for example, argues that acknowledgment should be made of the formative processes involved when applying the ‘states of exception’ theory to the history of interventionism in the Americas. He also asserts that recognition of this history is important because it underlines the commonalities in exceptional technologies of governance across time, and that the interrelationship between development and security is necessitated not only by fear of terrorism or population control but also by the accumulation of natural resources. Knudsen’s and Gould’s essays expand on the existing practices and understandings of securitization, making it clear that its limited application to contexts of open conflict is misleading. In highlighting the interrelationship between hard and soft power, the essays by McNeish and Gould underline the essential nature of Foucault’s biopower and the liberal will to power mentioned above. This is a point supported and expanded by Bertelsen’s contribution to the volume. Commenting on the contrasting cases of the US’s introduction of the Human Terrain System (HTS) in Iraq and post-war Mozambique’s community policing partnerships, Bertelsen illustrates the global tendency wherein the structures and capacities of the state are being transformed in relation to changes in international understandings of security and development, strongly in line with wider processes toward privatization. As an antidote to the exceptionalism of securitization, the authors in this collection suggest returning to a more socialized approach to development and security. However, this is not the cosmopolitan human security approach proposed by Kaldor (2001), in which individual rights and the rule of law are made the centerpiece of outside intervention. Here, while the rights of the population are held as key, both interventionism and the basis of cosmopolitanism are

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deeply questioned. This point is made clearly in the essay by McNeish and more subtly in those by Lewis and Kent. In reference to climate politics in Bangladesh, Lewis asserts that understandings of security need to be expanded beyond external threats (those aimed at states) to encompass and perhaps remember forgotten categories of internal threats (malnutrition, crime, environmental degradation). This, he maintains, demands both a new recognition of the social and an awareness of the details of policy history. Kent, in this volume, also argues for the expansion of present-day conceptualizations of security and warns of the current limitations of security studies. In reference to Buddhist teachings, she contends that prevailing understandings of security exclude the importance of other—and possibly better—socialized (or relationary) constructions of meaning. By highlighting the increasingly blurred boundaries between state and non-state security providers and a political culture that is rife with suspicion and conspiracy, Telle reveals the dangers and social impacts of imported, non-local security thinking in peacetime post-Suharto Indonesia.

Criminalization, Ambiguity, and Resistance Finally, it is important to underline the contribution that the essays in this volume make toward an understanding, not only of the prejudices inherent in the security-development nexus, but also of the possibilities for responses, resistance, and the manipulation of power at the national and local level that the nexus entails. In the 1980s, writers belonging to the so-called post-development school began analyzing development as a powerful and hegemonic discourse, focusing on “the way in which discourses of development help shape the reality they pertain to address, and how alternative conceptions of the problem have been

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marked off as irrelevant” (Nustad 2004: 13). The essential idea of post-development was to see “the discourse on development articulating First World knowledge with power in the Third World” (Peet 1997: 75). Post-development scholars acknowledge the imperialist precedents and ‘Orientalist’ perceptions that have directed both the thinking of the international community and their creation of mechanisms of control, which are just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts (Gardner and Lewis 1996). Throughout these processes, prejudices about the ‘other’ persist and are given governmental power through the repeated recognition of the need for trusteeship of the transient ‘surplus’ populations created by the necessary disruption and dispossession resulting from the expansion of capitalism (Harvey 2003). As Duffield (2007: 9) writes, development has come to embody “a trusteeship of surplus life, that is, an external and educative tutelage over an otherwise superfluous and possibly dangerous population that needs help in adapting to the potential that progress brings.” The power of this process of (re)defining the world, involving the merging of the security and development realms, has meant that, to a large degree, alternative thinking and criticism have been silenced, resulting in structural ignorance of divergent opinions and solutions (cf. Hobart 1993). At least until the 1970s, alternative state-based models of modernity provided a counterweight in the South. International socialism and Third Worldism sought to offer a different view of how wealth should be redistributed and the international system organized. Third Worldism argued that development and underdevelopment were organically connected. Recognition of this nuanced interconnection was an important part of shaping an oppositional position that has now all but disappeared from development discourse. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the effects

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of political infighting, war, famine, and debt crises allowed the discourse of Western developmentalism to become hegemonic. Statist and redistributive economic programs were replaced by trade liberalization, privatization, and stabilization under the auspices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Public spending on health and education declined. In this new context, Third Worldism rapidly lost coherence and expression. Indeed, the groundwork was laid for Northern governments, development institutions, and aid agencies progressively to disqualify Southern political projects as flawed, inadequate, or backward. It is also on this basis that the international governance agenda—and with it ideas of ‘transparency’, rights, climate politics, and ‘fragile’ and ‘failed’ states—has been generated or transformed. These are all elements of the security-development nexus. A number of essays in this volume further contribute to and expand upon this set of critiques. Most importantly, Knudsen graphically depicts, in the political processes surrounding the bombing and securitization of a Palestinian refugee camp, how a ‘space of exception’ is generated through a militarized process of ‘othering’. In this system, refugees are reduced by the illiberal Lebanese Army to criminals—poor and dangerous elements whose basic rights to ‘bare life’ are put in relentless question. Telle recognizes the way in which the language and technologies of the security-development nexus are transformed and given cultural ambiguity in the local context of Lombok in Indonesia. McNeish underlines that although the international political and developmental systems have had severe impacts in Bolivia, this does not mean that Third Worldist ideas and alternatives for development no longer exist. The destiny of the Morales government and of the other supposed ‘left turn’ governments in Latin America remains unclear, yet their efforts and persistence demonstrate the

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continued resistance of Southern peoples to bend to the categories and strategies introduced by the North. In this way, they disprove the international discourse and judgments that have described their societies and political systems as failed or fragile. While McNeish identifies some remaining possibilities for resisting the security-development nexus, Gould underlines some opportunities for manipulating it. As Gould tells us, the common versions of the securitization thesis reproduce the persistent notion that African political agents are either passive victims or complicit partners with regard to the conspiratorial designs of the West. Such a view, he argues, overlooks the ways in which African players exploit the spaces and resources conjured into existence by Western efforts to produce governable subjects. This volume therefore tells us that while there is a lot to fear from the security-development nexus, its power to control people’s hearts and minds is far from established or absolute.

Notes 1. Speech made by Zoellick during the “Passing the Baton” public conference, convened in January 2009 by the United States Institute of Peace. 2. USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, in his address to the US House of Representatives, 1 April 2004. See http//www.usaid. gov/press/speeches/2004/ty040401.html (accessed 18 November 2008). The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a governmental agency that is responsible for most non-military foreign aid. 3. This connection has become more credible with the 2009 appointment of Richard Holbrooke as the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan. Holbrooke started his career in 1963 as a ‘development worker’ within the WHAM program run by the US Department of State in Vietnam (Phillips 2008).

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Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat, eds. 2001. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press ______. 2006. “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 295–315. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobart, Mark, ed. 1993. An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance. London: Routledge. Huysmans, Jef. 2000. “The European Union and the Securitization of Migration.” Journal of Common Market Studies 38, no. 5: 751–777. Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. London: Vintage. Kaldor, Mary. 2001. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. 2nd ed. with a new foreword. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2004. “Introduction: Old Permutations, New Formations? War, State and Global Transgression.” Pp. 1–15 in State, Sovereignty, War: Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities, ed. Bruce Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books. Langille, Peter. 2000. “Conflict Prevention: Options for Rapid Deployment and UN Standing Forces.” Pp. 219–253 in Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution, ed. Tom Woodhouse and Oliver Ramsbotham. London: Frank Cass. Larner, Wendy, and William Walters, eds. 2004. Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge. Lie, Jon Harald Sande. 2008. Protection of Civilians, the Responsibility to Protect and Peace Operations. Vol. 4, Responsibility to Protect. Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. http:// english.nupi.no/Publications/Books-and-reports/2008/Protectionof-Civilians-the-Responsibility-to-Protect-and-Peace-Operations. Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Peter, and Nikolas Rose. 2008. Governing the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mosse, David, and David Lewis, eds. 2005. The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development. London: Pluto Press. Nustad, Knut G. 2004. “The Development Discourse in the Multilateral System.” Pp. 13–23 in Global Institutions and Development:

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“Are We in This Together?” Security, Development, and the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ Agenda

P Finn Stepputat

This essay takes a critical look at the formation and practice of the Comprehensive Approach (CA) agenda. The CA is one of several concepts that have been conceived by Northern governments and the international community in order to increase coherence between civilian and military responses to failed states, fragile situations, and armed conflicts. The essay identifies how different approaches to these problems have made convergence possible and highlights that the differences also explain the continuing diversity in the understanding of challenges and remedies to perceived emergencies. By studying the specific ways in which the civil-military boundary is shifting and development activities are being instrumentalized through application of the CA, this essay puts forth a theoretical interpretation of security and development as two overlapping and interrelated sets of practices of sovereignty. The point is therefore not so much to keep the two separate but rather to see both as mechanisms in a politically guided effort to place seemingly irreconcilable differences on the table for dialogue.

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Urgency and Maelstrom Since 2005, the CA has increasingly become a common point of reference in the debate over international peaceand state-building operations. Emerging primarily from within NATO member governments that have engaged in military operations in the south of Afghanistan, the dynamic of the CA can be understood as a reaction to the problems of the troubled state-building process in Afghanistan. Put briefly, the CA recognizes that intrastate wars such as the one in Afghanistan cannot be won by military means alone. “We cannot kill our way to victory,” the chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff put it bluntly in late 2008.1 While European military leaders are likely to express themselves in less belligerent ways, their opinion is the same. In order to reach the ‘end state’ and bring the troops back, military engagements against armed insurgents have to be combined with development—that is, improved governance, rule of law, public services, and livelihoods—in order to convince local populations that standing behind the government will serve them better than continuing their support for and acceptance of the insurgency. However, the high levels of risk and polarization in the areas of operation represent obstacles for the engagement of the UN, NGOs, and other development agencies. Under these circumstances, and under the assumption that security and development have to be pursued at the same time, pressure is currently on the armed forces themselves or other government agencies to provide reconstruction and development activities. Stretched by the demands of quasi-permanent engagements in high-risk areas and reluctant to withdraw forces from ‘kinetic’ (combat) operations in order to engage in ‘non-kinetic’ (civilian) operations for which they are not well-trained, the armed

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forces have pushed hard for their governments to engage other state bodies in civilian reconstructions tasks. In countries such as the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark, this pressure from the armed forces and defense ministries has first and foremost been directed at foreign affairs ministries, which are tasked with the overall management of foreign policy, and departments for development, which control the funds allocated for development cooperation.2 Referring to countries that have profiled themselves through such development cooperation, these funds are substantial, but they are bound by the criteria of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its Development Assistance Committee (DAC) for international development aid, as well as country-specific poverty reduction agendas and long-term partnership programs. The armed forces are also looking beyond these ministries to see what kinds of contributions other entities of the state could bring to assist with stabilization and state-building tasks within failed states. These entities include the courts, the police, tax authorities, municipal administrations, the health sector, emergency preparedness, the home guard, etc. From the military perspective, it is argued that overseas service should be mandatory if voluntarily mobilized civilian capabilities are not enough (see, e.g., Veichert 2008). In a sense, this is a renewal of the idea of total defense in an advanced, extra-territorial version that is also reminiscent of the colonial expeditionary corps, with ready-to-deploy and out-of-a-box administration structures. This way of thinking seems to be a logical outcome of the post–Cold War transformation of (some) Western armed forces, for whom a focus on territorial defense has been replaced by a policy of protecting against threats to the international order, even well beyond a country’s own borders. In the Danish case,

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this transformation of the army has taken many years and has involved employment contracts that include mandatory international service, a condition that CA proponents would like the state to impose on civil servants as well. Despite decades of accelerating globalization, most of the state administrations are still largely domestically oriented. The ministries of foreign affairs and development are also fully occupied in their current administrative work and cannot react as swiftly as the armed forces, who are trained and organized to respond to emergencies and rapidly changing situations. Government ministries and the military seem to operate in different time dimensions. As a result, the ambition of integrating and synchronizing civil and military operations has made very slow progress. A high-ranking defense ministry representative addressed this issue in a recent interview.3 “Are we in this together?” he asked, expressing his exasperation with the slow release of civilian resources, the limited change of ‘stove-piped’ systems,4 and the lack of deployment of civilian experts to the area of operation. His frustration was palpable, and he gave the impression that the sense of urgency experienced by the armed forces was not shared by other departments of the government—as if only the armed forces were at war. As he pointed out, the conditions of engagement are very different: the ministry of foreign affairs sends a diplomat with a suitcase, while the armed forces send a thousand soldiers with tons and tons of material. And if something goes wrong, defense representatives fear that they will be singled out for blame. Amid resistance from some parts of the military and competing concepts from civilian institutions, the CA has been placed on the NATO agenda and has also had an impact on government agendas in various countries. New concepts, doctrines, institutions, policies, instruments, and practices are being developed, and resources are being

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reallocated. In addition, more civilians are being deployed to high-risk areas to take part in counterinsurgency-inspired stabilization operations. The CA is like a maelstrom that is sucking in people, institutions, and resources. It is worth asking here, how is this happening, and are there different ways of understanding what is happening?

Coherence The CA is one of several concepts being considered as a means to achieve the current ambition of bringing together defense, development, diplomatic, and other institutions. Member states of the European Union (EU) talk about civilmilitary coordination within the overall crisis management concept. The donor governments in the OECD/DAC group talk about the ‘whole-of-government’ or ‘whole-of-system’ approach. The UN has institutionalized its integrated missions, which seek to include UN country teams and, if possible, humanitarian organizations on peace missions mandated by the UN’s Security Council. However, whereas there is a generalized ambition to achieve greater coherence in responses, it is important to acknowledge that there are different motivations and paths that have led to this development. Key fields in the international system have hosted discussions and have undertaken experiments utilizing increased coherence in the international response to armed conflicts, humanitarian emergencies, and collapsing states. These fields include the following: Humanitarian aid, development, and conflict. In the 1990s, the identification of a ‘gap’ between emergency relief and long-term development efforts spurred discussions of coordination and placed demands on relief agencies to incorporate long-term perspectives on matters

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such as institution building and conflict transformation into their concepts and operations. As humanitarian and development organizations increasingly found themselves involved in areas of armed conflict, their interaction with armed actors intensified. Many NGOs chose to develop their ability to operate within conflict areas. Instead of withdrawing from these sites or simply delivering humanitarian aid, a number of them chose to work on conflict by engaging in conflict prevention and (civilian) peace-building activities during conflicts. They also took part in security sector reform and in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration activities in post-conflict operations. Their stance visà-vis military forces changed as they realized the need for protecting civilian populations in areas of conflict. Their relative success in advocacy campaigns (against land mines, small arms proliferation, and cluster bombs) also encouraged some of them to accede to the emerging agenda and templates for coordination with military forces (Gordon 2006). Development aid, security, and the ‘fragile states’ agenda. During the 1990s, development aid aimed at reducing poverty and inequality was increasingly identified as a means to prevent conflict by attacking its root causes. This ‘securitization’ of development5 was radicalized after 9/11 when ‘failed’ states, rightly or wrongly, became associated with terrorism. Suddenly, hitherto neglected states that posed problems for reform-oriented development aid were labeled as poor performers, difficult partners, ‘low-income countries under stress’, or fragile states. They were also recast as security threats and put back on the aid agenda. While the process of forging coherence in development policies and practices through the Millennium Development

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Goals (MDG) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) had previously largely excluded considerations of security,6 linkages between security and development now became a constitutive element in failed and fragile state policies. Development agencies have promoted the concept of security sector reform, including increased effectiveness and democratic control of security forces, in an effort to address the security dimension of state building. The CA and counterinsurgency. Emerging primarily from within NATO and the US, the CA may be seen as a reaction to the problems of an unsuccessful and somewhat misguided state-building process in Afghanistan. General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual (FM 3-24)7 and the recent NATO concept of the ‘effects-based approach to operations’ (EBAO) recognize that the kind of intra-state wars in which NATO is now engaged cannot be won by military means alone.8 The CA draws upon the classic notion of counterinsurgency (COIN), which regards an insurgency as primarily a political problem that should be dealt with by undermining popular support for the insurgency, usually by non-military means (Galula [1964] 2006; McCuen 1966; Trinquier [1961] 2006).9 NATO therefore has to work with civil organizations in order to achieve the desired effects.10 The armed forces do not have command and control over these organizations, but they have suggested that the CA concept could function as an umbrella for cooperation under civilian leadership (see, e.g., Jakobsen 2008). Despite substantial differences in the balance, forms, and objectives of integration, there are sufficient similarities to allow for a degree of convergence between (some) actors,11 since the often difficult conditions of operation represent

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a common challenge. Here the volatility, unpredictability, speed of change, insecurity, and limited administrative capacity that characterize the states in question are seen as common experiences. These conditions, in turn, call for flexibility, swift action, and the possibility of shifting combinations of instruments in organizational responses. The common denominator is an ambition to increase coherence (see, e.g., de Coning 2008), a notion that has come to occupy the same place that coordination did in discussions of humanitarian interventions in the 1990s. As Mark Duffield (personal communication) has remarked, the problem with coordination was that it enabled a vast number of incongruent actors to engage in conversation by providing an agenda that everybody could relate to, but without ever solving the problem at heart. In the same way, the coherence agenda provides a template for a logic of practice that is productive in terms of creating change in the public, private, national, and international systems that make up the security-development complex. It supplies the means and impetus for numerous conferences, inter-agency working groups, and initiatives through which institutional activists can promote this agenda, while dealing with the inevitable resistance from government departments, which stand to lose areas of competence to new, inter-departmental entities, and from agents who protest against the blurring of boundaries between security, development, and humanitarian aid. Many others allow themselves to become caught up in what appears to be an inevitable chain of events.

Generations of Civil-Military Relations As an object of study, civil-military relations are difficult to pin down due to the current political pressure for results

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in the context of the ‘global war on terror’ theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq. We seem to be moving toward a third generation of civil-military relations in the international domain (see Rosén 2009). The first generation came out of the expansion of ‘blue helmets’ peace operations in the complex humanitarian emergencies of the 1990s, which brought armed forces in close contact with humanitarian agencies. This gave birth—or rebirth—to a series of international instruments that regulate military-humanitarian relations. The second generation is associated with the introduction in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq, of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) concept, which institutionalized the merger of security, diplomacy, and development at the tactical level, whereby reconstruction activities would take place under the security umbrella and facilitation of the armed forces. The third generation is the current attempt to move the management of civil-military cooperation from the tactical level to the strategic level by developing concepts, instruments, strategic frameworks, political agreements, and technical templates for an improved cooperation between a complex of military and civilian entities. In the case of Afghanistan, this includes NATO, the UN, the EU, the US, other donor governments, and the Afghan government. With regard to manpower and available funds, the scales are tipped, in practical terms, in favor of the (US) military. Questions therefore arise as to how this imbalance affects political and technical decisions. A case in point is the matter of police reform, which is essential from the point of view of human security as well as counterinsurgency objectives. While the EU has had problems of commitment and output, the US Department of Defense has funded a holistic and ‘smart’ reform concept: the Focused District Development program. This has met with skepticism because of its association with the US military (Rosén 2009).

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The third generation of civil-military relations removes to a large degree the focus on cooperation at the tactical level, which was associated with the highly controversial PRT and the blurring of the civil-military boundary. NGOs have vocally maintained that the involvement of armed forces in reconstruction-related activities undercuts the NGOs’ own acceptance-based security strategy. NGOs are increasingly being viewed, by association, as part of the foreign armed forces. In the long run, the blurring effect is perceived as contributing decisively to the shrinking of ‘humanitarian space’, and the NGO community is divided between those who cooperate with the military, those who try to work out a compromise (the ‘principled pragmatists’), and those who are considered purist (the ‘refuseniks’) (Rana and Reber 2007). Less vocally and behind the scenes, important parts of the armed forces resent their involvement in reconstruction activities and ‘nation building’, which is seen as detracting from their capacity for undertaking combat operations (the ‘sharp end’) and fulfilling their primary mandate of providing security. Military officers have, for example, expressed fears of being transformed into a ‘green-spotted NGO’. This suggests that, for them, involvement in reconstruction activities detracts from the images of masculinity embedded in notions of proper soldiering (Jakobsen 2008). Mary Douglas (1966) might have pointed to such images of impurity as indicators of the foundational importance of the institutional boundaries and identities that are being transgressed. These issues highlight just how important the civilmilitary distinction is to the Western imagination of the modern state and society. This norm of distinction is reproduced despite the frequent blurring of the civilmilitary boundary, which is happening, for example, with the increasing privatization of military tasks. This critical

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differentiation is being exploited and challenged by insurgencies in asymmetrical warfare. Insurgents use tactics that make it hard to distinguish them from the rest of the population, such as infiltration, the use of human shields, the targeting of humanitarian workers, etc. For their part, counterinsurgency operations tend to mirror the insurgencies by breaching the civil-military dividing line, although in different ways: collateral damage and the danger incurred by involving local populations in disputed reconstruction efforts are two examples. But given the norm of distinction, this blurring is easily held against the states behind the counterinsurgency.

Security, Development, and Politics At the practical level, it may be argued that the use of reconstruction and development in areas of open conflict is too expensive. The same money could buy more peace, as it were, if used preventively on development in regions that would be more receptive to peacekeeping and state building rather than in areas of ‘hot’ stabilization (Korski 2007), where armed protection is necessary. While this is a valid argument, the point is that development has several purposes in the context of COIN stabilization operations. It is intended to forge consent, create an incentive for the population to turn against the insurgency, and reinforce the basis for a social contract between the government and the population in the contested areas. This approach, however, tends to perceive reconstruction and development as a technical endeavor of providing goods and outcomes that people want, an endeavor that therefore is likely to forge consent. While wrongly assuming that the insurgency does not have ideological affinities with the population in terms of values and interests,12 this

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strategy also ignores the highly political content (and indeed purpose) of development. In the case of Afghanistan, the building of schools and the provision of education (particularly for girls) have been put forward as a major justification for the presence of international forces, but also as a reason for the population to stand up and speak out against the insurgency that fights the extension of the state’s education facilities for ideological reasons.13 Under militarized conditions, the notion that the encouragement and growth of civil society can bestow legitimacy on a state is a fiction, since most of the population will seek to keep as low a profile as possible. People become specialists in not falling into an enemy category, and it is likely that the only persons who can speak publicly against the insurgency are those who somehow have a security guarantee from the very same insurgency (Schmidt 2009). In the ‘non-permissive’ areas where the military joins forces with reconstruction and governance activities, the primary challenge may not be one of building state institutions as such but rather the more fundamental one of political stabilization, of establishing some kind of workable political order that would permit non-violent solutions to conflicts and antagonisms,14 not least those related to the introduction of state institutions. Reconstruction, development, and new forms of governance change the rules and conditions in many domains. The state-building enterprise influences and cuts through issues of representation, ownership, access, property, trade, status, and values. Historically, states have sometimes been called upon to resolve local conflicts, but in many cases state institutions and central elites have deepened the conflicts by allying themselves with some groups against others. This often takes place in situations where, as in the case of Afghanistan, social and political relations have been in turmoil during decades of war and displacement.

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Thus, whereas security and development are often depicted as apolitical, governments that choose to engage in counterinsurgency operations are well-advised to consider the fields that they engage in as highly political rather than pre-political. The political landscape looks very different under the conditions of armed conflict. Alliances seem to be fluid, and conflicts criss-cross relations involving kinship, families, and religious and political communities. But it is rare that all disputes pertaining to issues of everyday life (water, property, entitlements, leadership, trade, etc.) are organized and distributed along the fault lines of the national-level political conflict, even though there may be a tendency by the protagonists of the national conflicts to bundle up other clashes along these lines (Kalyvas 2006). Whether knowingly or not, this is the political field that counterinsurgency operations are engaged in.

Conclusion From one perspective, development and security may be seen as belonging to very different domains, with one focusing on the logic of self-determination and individual and societal needs, and the other on national security and the containment of threats. However, from another perspective, development and security can be viewed as two overlapping sets of sovereign practices that are engaged in defining and deciding over life and death in different ways (Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat 2007). Development aid, interpreted as a form of biopolitics, is not simply a matter of benevolent assistance for improvement. Unlike humanitarian aid, which, in principle at least, is neutral and impartial, development is explicitly partial in its pursuit of building specific forms of state. Thus, development defines some practices and forms of life as desirable

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and improvable, while others are deemed unworthy and immoral and are assigned to abandonment or to extermination by force, as in the case of poppy production. Meanwhile, the use of force—the hard kernel of sovereignty—has been civilized to some extent and reined in by the rules of engagement and instant media attention. Schmitt’s ([1922] 1985) concept of ‘decisive violence’, associated with the capacity to create moments of change, is no longer possible, as is frequently noted by military officers. In this regard, it is telling to look back at former COIN operations, such as that in Guatemala. Conceptually, there are many parallels between the currently revived version of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and the security and development strategy for national stability applied by the Guatemalan army after 1983. There is, however, one major difference—in Guatemala, the army killed 100,000 and displaced 1 million of its citizens before setting out on the security-development track. The point here is not so much the normative one, that the lines between security and development should not be blurred. Rather, both security and development can be seen as different mechanism through which the conditions for some kind of political order that permits the state to be inserted in local relations can be created (see Schmidt 2009). This shift entails that we see ‘the political’ not as a definitive enemy-friend scenario of irreconcilable differences that may have to be resolved through the use of violence, as Schmitt would have it. Nor should we view the political in terms solely of politics in formal institutions. As suggested above, politics takes place in many ways and involves not only state services and administration but many other interests and conflicts over differences that may well be ideological and irreducible. Thus, security, development, and other means, such as conciliatory measures and local conflict mediation (Suhrke et al. 2009), should

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be managed to allow for a situation to emerge in which differences, including the irreducible ones, are dealt with by discursive means (Mouffe 2000). However, to engage in this kind of state-building enterprise in a strategic way requires significant knowledge of local dynamics—the kind of knowledge that external (national and international) actors rarely have.

Notes 1. Statement made by Admiral Michael Mullen to the House Armed Services Committee of the US Congress. See http://www.cnn. com/2008/POLITICS/09/10/mullen.afghanistan/index.html, 10 September 2008. 2. The US situation is very different from that of the European NATO members, as flexible Department of Defense funds have grown immensely since 2000 (Patrick and Brown 2007). Some countries, such as Canada, Holland, and the UK, have set up special funds for stabilization purposes that may not be ‘DAC-able’. 3. Interview by the author, The Hague, 6 December 2008. 4. ‘Stove-piped’ systems refer to those in which deployed civilian and military entities are operating within separate channels of command, planning, and reporting. 5. The securitization of development, in fact, brought it back to its roots in the Marshall Plan and the national security-oriented plans of the 1960s in developing countries, particularly, in Latin America and Asia. 6. The PRSP program, which is produced by a lending government, can include defense and security issues, but the World Bank’s financial support to a government’s PRSP then omits these issues. 7. An updated US Army manual, Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations, which was launched in October 2008, endorses military involvement in state building. 8. In line with the change of emphasis in development aid from output measures to outcome and impact, the effects-based approach is more interested in the intended and unintended effects of operations rather than the tasks of operations themselves.

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9. The classic phrase talks about ‘draining the water from the fish’, turning Mao Zedong’s guerrilla tactic—that is, moving among the people ‘like fish in the water’—on its head. 10. See NATO, Bi-strategic Command Pre-doctrinal Handbook (Effects Based Approach to Operations (EBAO)), 4 December 2007. 11. In particular, humanitarian organizations have been very critical of the coherence agenda (see Donini et al. 2008), and development agencies have demonstrated deep-seated and principled resistance to security-driven agendas. 12. In the case of Afghanistan, see Suhrke (2008). 13. See, for example, the first Danish strategy for development and reconstruction in the southern province of Helmand (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2007). 14. See Schmidt (2009) for a discussion of the UK’s Stabilisation Unit, which aims to accomplish this goal.

References Buur, Lars, Steffen Jensen, and Finn Stepputat, eds. 2007. The SecurityDevelopment Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. de Coning, Cedric H. 2008. The United Nations and the Comprehensive Approach. DIIS Report No. 14. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Donini, Antonio, Larissa Fast, Greg Hansen, Simon Harris, Larry Minear, Tasneem Mowjee, and Andrew Wilder. 2008. Humanitarian Agenda 2015: The State of the Humanitarian Enterprise. Medford, MA: Feinstein International Famine Center, Tufts University. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Galula, David. [1964] 2006. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Gordon, Stuart. 2006. “The Changing Role of the Military in Assistance Strategies.” Pp. 39–52 in Resetting the Rules of Engagement: Trends and Issues in Military-Humanitarian Relations, ed. Victoria Wheeler and Adele Harmer. Humanitarian Policy Group Research Report 21. London: Humanitarian Policy Group. Jakobsen, Peter Viggo. 2008. NATO and the Comprehensive Approach to Crisis Response Operations. DIIS Report No. 15. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies.

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Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korski, Daniel. 2007. “The Challenges of ‘Hot’ Stabilization.” Pp. 20–30 in Comparative Perspectives on Civil-Military Relations in Conflict Zones, ed. Michael J. Williams and Kate Clouston. London: Royal United Services Institute. McCuen, John. 1966. The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counter-Insurgency. London: Faber and Faber. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2007. Styrkelse af engagementet i Afghanistan: Fokus på Helmand. Copenhagen: Udenrigsministeriet. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. “Deliberative Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism.” Political Science Series 72. http://www.ihs.ac.at/publications/ pol/pw_72.pdf. Patrick, Stewart, and Kaysie Brown. 2007. Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts? Assessing “Whole of Government” Approaches to Fragile States. New York: International Peace Academy. Rana, Raj, and Frank Reber. 2007. “CIVMIL Relations.” Discussion paper for NGO Seminar on Civil-Military Relations (CIVMIL), Brussels, 3–4 December. Rosén, Frederik. 2009. “Third Generation Civil-Military Relations and “the New Revolution in Military Affairs.” DIIS Working Paper No. 3. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Schmidt, Søren. 2009. Afghanistan: Organizing Danish Civil-Military Relations. DIIS Report No. 15. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Schmitt, Carl. [1922] 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Suhrke, Astri. 2008. “A Contradictory Mission? NATO from Stabilization to Combat in Afghanistan.” International Peacekeeping 15, no. 2: 214–236. Suhrke, Astri, Torunn Wimpelmann Chaudhary, Aziz Hakimi, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Akbar Sarwari, and Arne Strand. 2009. Conciliatory Approaches to the Insurgency in Afghanistan: An Overview. Report R 2009/1. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute. Trinquier, Roger. [1961] 2006. Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Trans. Daniel Lee. Foreword by Eliot A. Cohen. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Veichert, Nicolas T. 2008. “Omlæg operationen i Afghanistan.” Op-ed in Politiken, 6 October.

Developmentality and the World Bank in the New Aid Architecture

P Jon Harald Sande Lie

You might be asking, “Now why did John Chipman invite the President of the World Bank Group to speak to the International Institute for Strategic Studies?” — Robert B. Zoellick, World Bank President, September 20081

There are ample reasons to contemplate why the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, posed this question in opening his address to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His friendly and reflective tone are indicative of the enlargement of the security-development nexus that now binds these institutions together and thus merges two traditionally separate realms. The policy world and international society are conventionally understood as compartmentalized into, respectively, security and hard power, on the one side, and soft power and development, on the other. The expanding securitydevelopment nexus enables, for example, a development rationale being used to legitimize military interventions, while security concerns equip development donors with

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more robust backing when pushing their policy conditions upon recipients. Security concerns and how to mitigate them are thus being recast as a matter of state building, a policy franchise usually granted to development actors. This essay discusses the provisions and effects of the World Bank’s increased focus on state building, which evolved as a result of processes internal to the development segment and later gained momentum as state building became a means to manage security concerns. Over the last decade, the Bank has redefined the state as both the means and objective of development. I argue here that the way in which state building is being pursued by the Bank raises cause for concern, not only in terms of traditional understandings of national sovereignty, but also because it places in question the foundational apolitical mandate of the Bank, which should disqualify it from participating in security and political interventions. Although these thoughts are not new, the structures and means to facilitate them are rather novel and can be enlightened by the notion of ‘developmentality’. Inspired by Foucault’s governmentality concept, developmentality focuses on the intentions and effects of the aid apparatus as a modality of governance that is evolving with a ‘new aid architecture’. This essay addresses the conditions that have provided the basis for the Bank’s increased engagement in the recipient state’s internal affairs.

The World Bank and an Evolving Security-Development Nexus So what is the relevance of Zoellick’s opening quotation with regard to the merger of security and development? The World Bank, an institution created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 to aid in the post–World War II

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reconstruction of Europe, is arguably the most important development agency worldwide. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, established at the height of the Cold War, is considered to be one of the world’s leading authorities on security and political-military conflicts.2 In historic terms, these institutions represent two distinct discursive realms of the international community. The Bank has historically avoided direct involvement in political and security issues, due to both structural and practical concerns. Its apolitical mandate restricts involvement in matters belonging to the sovereign domestic realm of its client government counterpart. Moreover, the Bank works with and through its client, which necessitates the host government’s consent in order for the Bank to operate. In pursuing its core competencies of sustainable development and economic growth, the Bank delegates issues of politics and security to other international organizations, notably the UN. Direct involvement with such matters could jeopardize the host country’s consent and thus create a non-conducive operational environment, which would undermine the Bank’s vision of a world free of poverty, supposedly to be derived from their client states’ own development strategies. Although apparently contradictory, the Bank has exhibited, over the last decade and a half, a growing tendency to escalate its involvement in client governments’ internal and political affairs. This is illustrated by its operations in the policy realms of state building and ‘good governance’ and by the parallel ‘recaulking’ of the international development architecture—all three of which have gained momentum following the recent expansion of the security-development nexus. The ambiguity of the Bank president’s opening statement indicates a seeming contradiction that emphasizes the distinction between the spheres of security and development, yet recognizes the fact that these policy realms

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are increasingly converging (Lie 2008a). In his speech, Zoellick (2008) goes on to outline the Bank’s role within the security-development nexus, pointing to a greater involvement in state building: Too often, the development community has treated states affected by fragility and conflict as harder cases of development … Yet these situations require looking beyond the analytics of development—to a different framework of building security, legitimacy, governance, and economy. This is not security as usual, or development as usual … This is about Securing Development—bringing security and development together first to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold over a decade and beyond. Only by securing development can we put down roots deep enough to break the cycle of fragility and violence.

The basic argument laid out by Zoellick is that fragile and conflict-affected states represent a threat to individual and state security. To support this reasoning, he recalls the words of those who had met at Bretton Woods: “As the delegates noted, ‘Programs of reconstruction and development will speed economic progress everywhere, will aid political stability and foster peace’” (ibid.). The evolving security-development nexus should be seen in the context of increased attention to state-building initiatives and Bank involvement in clients’ internal affairs, both being part and parcel of the continuous reordering of the international aid architecture. As such, the emerging security-development nexus is less a matter of development being co-opted by hard politics and global security concerns and more an indication of processes that are integral to the development segment and of the Bank’s shifting perceptions of its mission.

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The Resurgence of the State and Recaulking the Aid Architecture There has been a dramatic recaulking of the international development apparatus over the last decade and a half. This process has altered the way in which donors relate to their recipients—a change that has been both mirrored and driven by the World Bank. Throughout the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s, international development discourse either bypassed or attempted to dismantle the state, which was perceived as too rigid, excessively bureaucratic, and largely irrelevant in an era imprinted by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. This period saw a blossoming of non-governmental organizations. While the political right welcomed them as an expression of private initiatives that were more flexible than the state, the political left celebrated them as the formal acceptance of popular grassroots movements into development decision making. Since the mid-1990s, however, there has been a resurgence of the state within the international development apparatus. While formerly dismissed by both donors and recipients, the state has been resurrected as both an objective and a means in international development discourse. This is illustrated by the evolving policy areas of state building and good governance, which have caused parallel shifts in aid partnership arrangements as increasingly more aid is being channeled directly to and via state structures. As the state assumes a greater role in managing and applying external development aid, the Bank imposes stricter conditions and expectations on the behavior and internal affairs of the recipient state, for instance, monitoring its compliance with good governance policies and the general management of its external resources. The challenging tasks that Bank diplomats and economist are faced with, that is, “to maintain the geopolitical loyalty of

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fickle African politicians, while persuading them to adopt the precept of bourgeois governance—transcendentally transparent, level with the law, and pre-eminently participatory” (Moore 2007: 7–8), rest on the ability to craft the conditions that prevent questions from arising about who rules and how. The Bank-client state relationship is being recast rhetorically as a partnership (cf. Abrahamsen 2004), implying that both partners share the same objectives and purpose. As Fowler (2000: 3) puts it: “Authentic partnership implies, inter alia, a joint commitment to long-term interaction, shared responsibility for achievement, reciprocal obligation, equality, mutuality and balance of power.” However, along with the partnership concept comes a host of other morally charged terms that seek to direct the practice and content of partnership, such as ‘participation’, ‘ownership’, ‘empowerment’, ‘emancipation’, ‘putting the last first’, etc. (Baaz 2005). These gatekeeping concepts, which are integral to the formation of the new aid architecture, endeavor to demote old-style donor paternalism while advancing a more liberal, inclusive, and participatory approach. Intentions and effects, however, do not always correspond. Until the late 1990s, the Bank pursued structural adjustment programs that, in content, attempted to dismantle the client state by imposing policies of liberalization and privatization. In addition, the Bank explicitly undermined the state itself by imposing these policies as lending conditions. Moore (2007: 20) explains the development as follows: “Structural adjustment policies went too far towards laissez-faire and from the dreaded dirigisme with its rent-seeking propensities, so in the mid-1980s and early 1990s the Bank and its peers turned back slightly to politics and the state. The banking behemoth took on political discourses of democracy and good governance.” In

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recognizing the moral dilemma of trusteeship inherent in this approach, as well as the lack of results, the Bank introduced the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) as its new modus operandi of engaging with clients. Rather than dictating lending arrangements, the Bank now entrusts its client governments with the responsibility of producing their own national development strategies—that is, their own PRSP. In this way, the PRSP model conveys the policymaking and implementation processes to the client state. In recaulking the structure of the aid apparatus in this way, the Bank has sought to mitigate trusteeship by establishing a framework of ownership and client participation. However, this aid architecture, in effect, yields a new form of power that radically distorts the notions of ownership and participation and instead perpetuates the innate paternalism of donor-recipient relationships. Rather than instructing clients on what and how to spend Bank loans, the PRSP model makes governments responsible for devising their own national development plans. The Bank’s presumed role here is merely that of a financier. This model was intended to engender stronger commitment and government ownership through the rationale of enhancing the aid effectiveness of Banksupported programs. However, although the PRSP model nominally conveys the responsibility of policy making and implementation to the client government, the Bank applies various instruments to maintain control over the lending portfolio. First, the PRSP needs the Bank’s board approval in order to become effective and qualify the client for the Bank’s lending arrangements. Secondly, the Bank devises a policy response to the PRSP, that is, a Country Assistance Strategy, which is a selection of the government’s policies that the Bank is willing to support financially, not a total support of the PRSP itself. Consequently, the Bank enjoys significant leverage, not only

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because of the size of its purse, but also because of its role as gatekeeper of the prevailing development discourse. The PRSP model has further ramifications: unless the Bank endorses a country’s PRSP, the government in question is unlikely to receive significant support from other donors (Pomerantz 2004). While the PRSP model claims to reinforce the concepts of participation, ownership, and emancipation in order to ‘put the recipient in the driver’s seat’, the Bank nevertheless draws the map. The Bank’s retreat from operational work has been paralleled by an increasing number of surveillance mechanisms, monitoring and evaluation exercises, and new and more comprehensive routines of reporting, all of which, in sum, enable the Bank to retain its paternalist control over clients’ development policy and to ‘govern at a distance’ (Rose and Miller 1992). Although the Bank has ostensibly transferred operational responsibility to its clients, the new forms of managerial and governance mechanisms employed by the Bank enable it to maintain control. This has been manifested in and facilitated by an increased attention to state building, public sector reform, and good governance policies that, in effect, mold client states into the Bank’s realm under the guise of an efficiency regime that interprets increased state capacity and good governance as equal to more poverty reduction per dollar. It also insinuates the Bank into practices conventionally thought to belong to the internal and sovereign realm of states, essentially demoting state institutions and deregulating their responsibilities. Thus, through its PRSP model, the Bank dismantles the distinction between the state’s internal affairs and external actors. In so doing, it challenges the principle of sovereignty on which—perhaps ironically—the Bank itself depends, as both membership in and assistance from the Bank are contingent on the client state’s legitimacy and sovereignty.

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The Bank’s shift from a direct to an indirect engagement in the development process and the purported transfer of power from the Bank to the client state are largely at the rhetorical level and are not reflected in practice. New forms of power are emerging in the aid relationship between the Bank and its clients. As Gould (2005a: 63) argues, the new rhetoric “signals a strategic shift in the management of North-South relations away from the carrot and stick of credits and conditionalities to a subtler dynamic of alleged mutual complicity.” This mutual complicity is produced and illustrated by a paradox—namely, that between participatory approaches and conditionality—which is intrinsic to the current configuration of the aid architecture. While the former involves a bottom-up approach, meaning that the recipient is responsible for devising its own development policy, conditionality brings attention to a top-down modality in which donors enforce their policies by tying them to the financial flow. The Bank repudiates its previous approach and allegations of conditionality by asserting that the PRSP model accommodates participation and engenders ownership through partnership. As the above discussion of the PRSP mechanism highlights, this distinction is not as clear-cut as it might first appear. Conditionality and participation represent mutually exclusive models for organizing aid relations, yet both concepts are important in the construction of aid relationships. In repudiating the use of conditionality, the Bank seeks to distance itself from any allegations of trusteeship and trespassing on client states’ sovereignty. In celebrating participatory approaches, the Bank makes its clients responsible for the overall development process, from inception to implementation. The Bank will not, however, support proposed initiatives indiscriminately, as the clients’ PRSPs need the Bank’s approval in order to become

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effective. Although conditionality and participation are formally mutually exclusive, the concepts co-exist in the practical orchestration of aid. This paradox involves a process aimed at devolving the Bank’s policies and objectives to its clients by installing ownership among clients with regard to policies that they otherwise would not propose. The Bank’s direct domination and imposition have been supplanted by promises of inclusion and self-determination. The client is granted the freedom to devise its own strategy, but this freedom is limited as it must be exercised within the Bank’s development discursive frames.

Developmentality The new aid architecture is infused with a kind of Fou­ caul­dian ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991), a concept that highlights the exercise of hegemonic authority through internalized disciplines of power. This power is related to the mentality of both the governing entity and the governed, the practical tasks of governance and the orchestration of power—‘the conduct of conduct’, as Foucault phrased it. Governmentality denotes “forms of action and relations of power that aim to guide and shape (rather that force, control, or dominate) the action of others … [and] includes any program, discourse, or strategy that attempts to alter or shape the actions of others or oneself” (Cruikshank 1999: 4). Instead of being restrictive and the antithesis of freedom, the power of governmentality is liberal and productive (Lie 2008b). Through the use of freedom as a formula for rule, the individual becomes responsible for his or her self-government—“the modern self is both the object of improvement and the subject that does the improving” (Abrahamsen 2004: 1459). This parallels the role ascribed to the state within the new aid architecture.

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The governmentality concept captures the decentralization and indirectness of state power, as the state maintains itself not only through coercive action but also through citizens’ self-regulatory practices and morale after having adopted and internalized the mentality of the state. While Foucault saw governmentality as an effect of new, emerging liberal forms of managerialism, similar tenets that underpin Foucault’s descriptive analysis are explicit in the normative intentions of the World Bank’s new aid architecture on structural and policy levels. It is for this reason that I have coined the term ‘developmentality’ (cf. Lie 2006). Developmentality grasps both the effects and intentions of the current aid configuration and draws attention to the disconnect between the Bank’s rhetorical claim of having handed over power to the client and the practical effect of the new aid modality, managerial routines, and governance mechanisms, which enable the Bank to maintain control, although in a more subtle manner. The core of developmentality inherent in the Bank’s PRSP model and the ambiguity of engendering ownership through participatory approaches on the client’s side have been aptly summarized by a donor informant, who asserted that “ownership exists when they do what we want them to do but they do so voluntarily” (cited in Randel, German, and Ewing 2002: 8). This paraphrasing of ‘the conduct of conduct’ indicates the heart of developmentality, that is, the depiction of those at the receiving end as free agents. In fact, the current aid architecture forces freedom onto clients, making ownership the condition for support. By using freedom as a formula for rule, involvement in the new aid architecture necessitates and produces self-disciplined clients by enlisting and shaping them as agents who are responsible for their own development. Developmentality illustrates how the asymmetrical power relation that is characteristic of donor-recipient relationships

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is being reproduced in profound ways in the new aid architecture, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Developmentality captures and enables the analysis of key elements of the current model of aid relations. First and foremost, the new aid architecture states that the client is responsible for its own development, including planning, implementation, and monitoring. Retreating from operational activity, the Bank has purportedly assumed the position of being merely a supervising funding agency. The client knows, however, that its proposals need to comply with the dominant development ideas of the day, since funding relies on the plans being endorsed by the Bank. Second, the Bank upholds participation and self-governance at the receiving end as the central means and objectives of development, as illustrated by the wide popularity of the good governance agenda, which views anti-corruption measures, democracy, accountability, and similar notions as key to an acceptable development process. This brings us to a third element of developmentality, the ideas of empowerment, emancipation, and capacity building, all of which have the explicit objective of shaping those on the receiving side in accordance with good governance principles. A fourth element involves the numerous instruments and formats for planning, monitoring, and reporting that are imposed on the client states. These tools structure interventions and policies according to certain logics, enabling donors to monitor—and thus govern—from a distance. A fifth element is that aid disbursement is not simply a result of the Bank giving its approval to the client’s policy choices; it is just as much subject to the Bank’s assessment of the client’s performance. Finally, the Foucauldian notion of a subject-less power alerts us to the possibility that developmentality is just as important for structuring the actions of the Bank as it is for the recipient.

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Seen together, these elements demonstrate the Bank’s intent to apply its ‘productive power’ (described by Foucault as an effect of new governance technologies) of discursive development, although all of them grant certain freedoms to the client at the receiving end. Akin to this, Gould observes that development client states “have entered a new form of state formation … signalled by a reconfiguration of the social forces commanding action in the name of the state … as well as by shifts in the political culture of governing” (Gould 2005b: 1). These changes are expressed by the developmentality concept. There is, however, one significant difference between governmentality and developmentality. Whereas Foucault saw governmentality as a modality of power emerging as an effect of new liberal technologies of governance employed by the evolving modern state, developmentality rests on the Bank’s explicit intent of a particular state formation, to be achieved under the auspices of the good governance agenda and by conscripting the client into the new aid architecture. The developmentality perspective, moreover, enables us to go behind the rhetorical and institutional changes and grasp the full significance of this apparent and enforced freedom. It recognizes that the power of the Bank is primarily found not in its capacity of direct coercion but in its primacy over development knowledge and power formation, which is attained through various techniques of cooperation and by drawing client governments into the Bank’s discursive realm and aid architecture.

Conclusion The discursive tectonic plates of security and development have been grating against each other for a long time. Rather than diverging, these realms are now increasingly

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converging and transforming each other. On the side of development, the security-development nexus provides increased leeway for pushing policies that were previously thought of as beyond the remit of the international development apparatus. The effects of the new aid architecture and the focus on state building, as captured by developmentality, are providing further momentum with radical consequences that question client countries’ sovereignty when backed by security concerns. Modifications made to the development apparatus over the last decade and a half have seriously altered how the Bank and donor institutions in general relate to their clients on the receiving end of aid partnerships. These changes, which by themselves call for a developmentality analysis, have furthermore provided the basis for the current expansion of the security-development nexus. This continues to impel the escalation of developmentality and further exacerbates the asymmetrical relation between development donor and recipient institutions, resulting in the formation of an Empire-like (Hardt and Negri 2000) global governmentality (Larner and Walters 2004). However, one should be careful that the analysis does not lose itself in structures or ideology. Rather, one should try to counter what has been paraphrased succinctly as ‘the retreat of the social’ and ‘the rise and rise of reductionism’ (Kapferer 2005). As with any other anthropological study, the analysis of developmentality should be grounded in the ethnographic cardinal of subjectivity that assists the unraveling of macro-relationships in micro-acts without resorting to radical individualism (cf. Sahlins 2004).

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Acknowledgments I am indebted to Knut Nustad, John McNeish, and Leif Manger for useful comments. All remaining shortcomings are my own.

Notes 1. Introduction to speech, titled “Fragile States: Securing Development,” made by Zoellick to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Geneva on 12 September 2008. 2. See http://www.iiss.org/about-us/.

References Abrahamsen, Rita. 2004. “The Power of Partnerships in Global Governance.” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 8: 1453–1467. Baaz, Maria Eriksson. 2005. The Paternalism of Partnership: A Postcolonial Reading of Identity in Development Aid. London: Zed Books. Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” Pp. 87–104 in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fowler, Alan. 2000. “Introduction—Beyond Partnership: Getting Real about NGO Relationships in the Aid System.” IDS Bulletin 31, no. 3: 1–13. Gould, Jeremy. 2005a. “Timing, Scale and Style: Capacity as Governmentality in Tanzania.” Pp. 61–84 in The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development, ed. David Mosse and David Lewis. London: Pluto Press. ______. 2005b. “Poverty, Politics and States of Partnership.” Pp. 1–16 in The New Conditionality: The Politics of Poverty Reduction Strategies, ed. Jeremy Gould. London: Zed Books.

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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kapferer, Bruce, ed. 2005. The Retreat of the Social: The Rise and Rise of Reductionism. Vol. 6, Critical Interventions. New York: Berghahn Books. Larner, Wendy, and William Walters, eds. 2004. Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge. Lie, Jon Harald Sande. 2006. “Developmentality: CDF and PRSP as Governance Mechanisms.” Paper presented at workshop on the World Bank, National University of Singapore, 18 September. ______. 2008a. The World Bank and Conflicts: From Narrow Rules to Broader Principles. Vol. 9, Security in Practice. Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. ______. 2008b. “Post-Development Theory and the DiscourseAgency Conundrum.” Social Analysis 52, no. 3: 118–137. Moore, David. 2007. “Introduction: The World Bank and Its (Sheepish) Wolves.” Pp. 1–26 in The World Bank: Development, Poverty, Hegemony, ed. David Moore. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Pomerantz, Phyllis R. 2004. Aid Effectiveness in Africa: Developing Trust between Donors and Government. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Randel, Judith, Tone German, and Deborah Ewing. 2002. The Reality of Aid, 2002: An Independent Review of Poverty Reduction and International Development Assistance. Manila: IBON Books. Rose, Nikolas, and Peter Miller. 1992. “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” British Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2: 173–205. Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zoellick, Robert B. 2008. “Fragile States: Securing Development.” World Bank News and Broadcast, 12 September. http://web. worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK: 21898896~pagePK:34370~piPK:42770~theSitePK:4607,00.html.

Securitization in Stable Settings The Privatization of Government and Zambia’s ‘War on Corruption’

P Jeremy Gould

The idea that international efforts to enhance development in the South have been subsumed by the West’s concerns with its own security has captured the imagination of researchers and policy makers alike. While the conclusions drawn from this thesis, and from the substantial literature it has generated, may vary widely, ‘securitization’ has become lodged in the conventional wisdom about emerging trends in international relations. According to many analysts, a central feature of securitization is the proliferation of opaque subcontracting chains that link governments and transnational development agencies with private business interests (often operating on the fringes of legality). As duties and resources flow down these subcontracting chains, we find private, self-interested entrepreneurs taking on the characteristics of ‘private indirect government’ (Mbembe 2001)—exercising sovereign powers (i.e., Max Weber’s monopoly of legitimate violence) without the checks and balances of public oversight. This argument finds strong support primarily in empirical research at sites long embroiled in ‘complex political emergencies’. Typically, sovereign power is heavily contested

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under conditions where the boundary between war and peace has become fundamentally blurred. In such gray zones of indeterminate sovereignty, the insinuation of the public-private subcontracting chains associated with securitization can be seen as a manifestation of the Western powers’ will to render post-colonial territories politically legible and effectively subject to its indirect government. The need for governable subjects is linked to the need of mass consumer societies to control sources of strategic natural resources (oil, gold, copper, coltan, etc.) and to secure access to potential markets. As Mark Duffield (2001: 308) argues, the empirical sovereignty of poor, indebted, or otherwise ‘fragile’ states is particularly at risk as “metropolitan states [learn] how to manage the public-private networks of aid practice and, as a result, to govern the borderlands in new ways.” The recent work on the ‘security-development nexus’ has much to recommend it as a robust framework, for example, for thinking simultaneously about the local dynamics and global politics of ‘humanitarian interventions’. Nevertheless, we should also be vigilant to consider carefully its domain of competence. I see two interrelated problems in current debates about securitization. First, unbridled enthusiasm for the securitization thesis among scholars and technocrats threatens to essentialize the heightened demands of the international development apparatus for governability and to see these demands as exceptional, outside the remit of ‘normal’ development business. From this perspective, only those situations wherein basic respect for human dignity has broken down oblige the donor community to empower opaque private players and, through them, to engage in excessive and undemocratic networks and practices. Yet, as I hope to show, a careful scrutiny of sites of relative political stability can reveal ways that the development

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apparatus promotes identical trends toward the privatization of sovereign authority within core politico-administrative functions of the state, with the associated problems of opaqueness and unaccountability. Secondly, many versions of the securitization thesis reproduce the persistent notion that African political agents are passive victims or complicit ‘partners’ in the conspiratorial designs of the West. Such a view gravely underplays the ways in which African actors exploit the spaces and resources—be they territories, states, or civil societies—conjured into existence by Western efforts to produce governable subjects. The temptation, then, to see the securitization of development thesis as a paradigmatic trend in international relations is at once too ambitious and too modest. It is too modest in that central trends in aid management related to the outsourcing of sovereignty to private players are understood too narrowly—as deriving directly from conditions of heightened security problems. The thesis is too ambitious in that it encourages researchers to accentuate the political importance of relatively marginal ‘symptoms of securitization’ in places where the will to produce governable subjects (and undermine sovereignty) works through actors and networks with only tenuous, if any, links to security functions. This is to suggest the importance of distinguishing between the various mechanisms through which the development apparatus promulgates its governmental practices in the ‘underdeveloped’ world. To put the case somewhat crudely, in some situations (such as countries suffering through ‘complex emergencies’), the West’s will to govern uses the threat of violence to impose draconian disciplinary measures over local political structures and populations. Elsewhere, in contrast—above all, under the ‘subsidiary sovereignty’ (Gould 2008) of indebtedness and aid dependence—the governmental aims of the

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development apparatus work through more sophisticated incentives that encourage African states to internalize practices of self-government. These encompass, for example, programs for national integrity and ‘good governance’, which are promoted by donors under the auspices of ‘partnership’ and ‘recipient ownership’. The following narrative about Zambia offers a means to examine these themes.1 My purpose in sketching the contours of this complex and extended case are twofold. First, I seek to illustrate the ways that properties and trends attributed to securitization—above all, the privatization of sovereign authority—can be identified in donor-induced processes that are only marginally linked to security. In this case, the example is a high-profile ‘war on corruption’, sponsored and legitimized via donor support of good governance. Second, I hope to show some of the ways that Zambian political agents have attempted, in many cases successfully, to utilize opaque realms of privatized rule in order to subvert the West’s obsession with governability.

The Spoils of Security The West’s assault on sovereign power in Zambia has, inevitably, been mediated by local politico-economic processes. Heavily indebted single-party regimes, such as that of Zambia under President Kenneth Kaunda (1964–1991) and his United National Independence Party (UNIP), came under especially intense pressure through the structural adjustment loans of the 1980s. Between harsh IMF conditionalities, on the one hand, and ‘softer’ development modalities (e.g., ‘democracy support’), on the other, the Americans and their ideological allies waged a semi-covert war against Kaunda and his government throughout the

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Dramatis Personae Public Actors

Private Actors

Mukelebai Mukelebai Director of Public Prosecution

Mark Chona Chairman, Task Force against Corruption

Xavier Chungu Ex-Director of Intelligence

Mutembo Nchito Private Prosecutor (TFAC) Fred Mmembe Owner/Editor, The Post

Presidents

Parties

Kenneth Kaunda (1964–1991)

United National Independence Party (UNIP)

Frederick Chiluba (1991–2001)

Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD)

Levy Mwanawasa (2001–2008)

Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD)

1980s. The main prize at stake in this campaign was the copper mines, which Kaunda had nationalized in 1968. The economic inefficiencies of the UNIP administration— which bled the country dry through a massive and drearily unproductive para-statal sector—help to explain the UNIP’s dwindling popular support and the smooth and rapid fashion in which Kaunda was deposed in 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The successor administration, headed by President Frederick Chiluba (1991–2002) and his Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD), was a devout disciple of the Washington Consensus (which advocated deregulated market-driven development), and Chiluba embarked on the fervent elimination of the para-statal economy. Politicians

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and their cronies went in for the quick kill, selling off the marketable pieces of the former state companies, but neglecting to invest in long-term business cycles. Unfortunately for the economy, the dismantled bits and pieces of the industrial stock were not, for the most part, redeployed to productive ends. By the mid-1990s, Zambia’s political elite had consumed the windfalls of privatization and were eagerly looking for other sources of rents. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is absurdly rich in natural resources, raged just across Zambia’s northern border and was of keen interest to Chiluba’s circle. Attempts by Zambians to access the unearthed and alienated spoils amid the turmoil of the Congolese civil war were not particularly successful, however. Chiluba was crowded out by the more experienced and better connected ex-freedom fighters, such as Kagame, Mugabe, Museveni, and Nujoma. Not to be completely excluded, Chiluba created a niche for himself as a SADC mediator in the Congolese peace process.2 This role allowed him to insert himself and Zambia’s state intelligence apparatus firmly within the highstakes world of political business that revolved around the complex emergency that engulfed the eastern Congo.3 One apparent spin-off of these efforts was a $20 million deal brokered by Chiluba between the Zambian government and a Brussels-based Congolese opposition presidential aspirant-cum-businessman, Katebe Katoto, for weapons that Katoto never delivered.4 Chiluba’s term as president ended in January 2002, and he was subsequently indicted on multiple counts of corruption and abuse of office.5 Investigations into his dealings as president indicate that during his administration, the Zambia Security Intelligence Service (ZSIS) became a major vehicle for diverting public funds into the private pockets of the political leadership and its allies. Indeed,

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when Chiluba’s hand-picked successor, freshly elected President Levy Mwanawasa (2002–2008), went before Parliament in 2002 to ask the legislators to remove Chiluba’s immunity, he based his request on transcripts from a secret bank account that the ZSIS held at the Zambia National Commercial Bank branch in London. According to these records, Chiluba had been using the ZSIS’s so-called Zamtrop account for various personal purposes, ranging from the lavish purchase of clothes, shoes, and jewelry to paying the private school fees of the chief justice’s children.6 Subsequent investigations into the Chiluba corruption case have revealed a web of beneficiaries that included Chiluba’s head and deputy head of intelligence, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Finance, the Zambian ambassador to the US, several key MMD ministers, and the CEO of a local investment bank that facilitated the siphoning off of public funds via the ZSIS.

Mukelabai, Director of Public Prosecution Chiluba had been in court before. In 1989, as a radical trade unionist pioneering the still clandestine movement for a multi-party democracy, he was arrested by the UNIP government for illegal assembly in the southern province town of Monze. The state advocate assigned to this politically volatile case was a young prosecutor, just out of law school, named Mukelabai Mukelabai. Mukelabai was the son of a policeman, also a state prosecutor. From his father, Mukelabai absorbed a deep respect for the law and an equally profound skepticism toward politics. Mukelabai lost the Monze case, and Chiluba went on to capture the presidency in the 1991 multi-party elections. Mukelabai eventually graduated up the ranks to the Lusaka headquarters of the state prosecution apparatus under Chiluba’s

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administration. In this capacity, he participated in prosecuting a number of controversial cases against Chiluba’s political enemies, who had been indicted on trumped-up treason charges, harassed, and eventually acquitted. In 1998, Chiluba appointed Mukelabai—by then one of the country’s most experienced prosecutors—to the powerful office of the director of public prosecution (DPP).7 According to his colleagues, Mukelabai ran the DPP’s office with a firm hand and uncompromising professionalism. The independent press, however, published evidence of the MMD’s corrupt dealings on a daily basis, and Mukelabai recalls the deep frustrations of this period with a sigh and a shake of his head. Professionalism, he recounted, demanded that he remain aloof from politics, even when, in 2001, a broadly based coalition culled from the cosmopolitan urban middle class (the three main Christian organizations, the umbrella body of the women’s movement, and the Law Association) launched a spirited campaign to block Chiluba’s unconstitutional and grossly unpopular bid for a third term in office (Gould 2006). It will be worth noting for future reference that this coalition—known as the Oasis Forum—was coordinated by Mark Chona, an ex-Kaunda adjutant with close ties to the intelligence services. True to his father’s legacy, Mukelabai kept these political machinations at a distance. But when Chiluba’s successor asked Parliament to lift the former president’s immunity in 2002, Mukelabai realized that the opportunity had come to ‘nail’ Chiluba for his corrupt dealings. Convinced that Mwanawasa was serious about attacking corruption and restoring the rule of law to Zambia’s beleaguered government, Mukelabai approached the president in his role as chief prosecutor and proposed a plan for a coordinated campaign to bring the primary culprits, especially Chiluba, to justice.

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The Politics of Governance It is perhaps needless to point out that Mwanawasa’s announcement, in 2002, that he was instigating a war on corruption was applauded loudly in the development industry. Controversies around human rights and governance abuses under Chiluba had led a number of Zambia’s ‘development partners’, spearheaded by the Scandinavian bloc, to cut back radically on their funding commitments in the late 1990s. The Danish ambassador to Zambia, for example, noted in 1999 that “the Danish government has placed emphasis on good governance and human rights as a condition” for continuing with direct budget support.8 By the 2001 elections, much of the donor community was convinced that ‘governance’ and especially corruption were the main obstacles to development in Zambia. Mwanawasa’s distaste for corruption was genuine enough: in 1994, he had resigned from his post as vice-president in protest over Chiluba’s protection of Michael Sata, who had allegedly abused his ministerial position. At the same time, Mwanawasa was also aware that his success in office was contingent on securing debt relief from the donor community under the World Bank’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.9 From the donor perspective, corruption was inimical to governability; thus, meeting the donors halfway on improving Zambia’s governance record was a necessary condition for debt relief.10 As soon as Mwanawasa had convinced Parliament to lift Chiluba’s immunity, Mukelabai approached Mwanawasa with his proposal for an anti-corruption campaign. His idea was to set up an inter-agency task force against corruption that would bring together the main investigative bodies11 and coordinate their work with the public prosecutor’s office. Mwanawasa agreed, and the campaign got underway in 2002. The aim, according to Mukelabai,

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was to pool resources for an intense investigation, bring a few of the main culprits to trial, and get some quick, high-profile convictions to show that it could be done. Chiluba and his head of intelligence, Xavier Chungu, were the main targets. With Chiluba and Chungu behind bars, the task force could be dissolved, and subsequent cases would revert back to the specialized agencies that would normally be handling them. Initially, Mukelabai headed the task force, which was an extremely demanding administrative challenge. As the complexity of the investigation became apparent, he realized that the DPP’s office lacked the capacity to build the prosecution cases adequately. Chona (who had brokered the Oasis Forum coalition) suggested that they hire private lawyers to beef up the prosecution, and Mutembo Nchito and his brother were brought on board. It is worth noting the somewhat curious fact that none of the arrangements associated with the anti-corruption campaign, from the establishment of the task force itself to the employment of private prosecutors, had any legal grounding whatsoever. There was no legislation or statutory instrument on record defining the powers or limitations of these organs and individuals. Indeed, it would seem that this exercise in good governance was being run the way that covert security forces function—on an ad hoc basis and in a gray zone of legality. Mukelabai’s original concept of an intensive campaign that would last no more than six to eight months fell apart as the task force became embroiled in internal politics. The team began to quarrel about the chain of command, about prosecution strategy, and, above all, about money. Chona and Nchito were private agents on donor-scale contracts, while Mukelabai and his team of state prosecutors were drawing civil service salaries. Mukelabai wanted to act quickly to achieve high-profile convictions, while

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the private-sector agents were in no hurry to complete their lucrative contracts. Their differences escalated, and Chona and Nchito went to the president to accuse Mukelabai of disrupting the task force’s operations. When the public servant Mukelabai tried to fire the private prosecutors, private players Chona and Nchito convinced Mwanawasa that Mukelabai had become an obstacle to the war on corruption, and together they conspired to have him removed from the operation. There was no way, however, that the head of the state prosecution apparatus could be involuntarily sidelined from the state’s biggest cases. The Constitution is unequivocal: the DPP “shall not be subject to the direction or control of any other person or authority.”12 The only way to get rid of Mukelabai was to have a presidentially appointed tribunal of three High Court judges find him guilty of ‘misconduct’. President Mwanawasa asked Mukelabai to resign, offering him the carrot of a ‘study leave’ in India. Mukelabai refused and invoked his constitutional protection. On 12 January 2004, Mwanawasa held an unannounced press conference at which he disclosed that he had received two anonymous letters from the public, alleging that Mukelabai had held secret eight-hour meetings over the Christmas holidays with Chungu. It was implied that Mukelabai was conniving with Chiluba, through Chungu, to sabotage the cases in court. “I have no evidence that these allegations were true,” said Mwanawasa, “but the nation would be both malicious and unfair to me to suggest that I should ignore them.”13 On 15 January, Mwanawasa appointed a tribunal to investigate Mukelabai’s alleged misbehavior. The tribunal sat for three months in early 2004 and found no evidence of misconduct. Despite the fact that Chungu was under heavy surveillance, the government could not produce a single witness placing Mukelabai and Chungu in a meeting

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together. Ironically, there actually would have been no obstacle to Mukelabai interrogating Chungu or negotiating with him at any time in the privacy of his own office at any time. This was fully within his mandate as DPP. Despite its findings, the tribunal recommended that Mukelabai be retired, since “public confidence in the DPP as the office holder has greatly been eroded or undermined.”14 Mwanawasa put the recommendation into immediate effect, which amounted to the unconstitutional firing of the DPP. Depressed and disillusioned, Mukelabai opted not to appeal the decision. He quietly left the country to take a job in South Africa, where he headed a research program on organized crime and corruption in the SADC region.15

Conclusion The Zambian sovereign, like most African presidents, is legally bound by the country’s Constitution, which explicitly defines the scope as well as the limits of executive agency. In Zambia, as in many African states, executive powers have few rigid constraints, and yet—in strict legal terms—the president can never step outside the Constitution and override its explicit provisions or abrogate its realm of competence. This is what is written in law. In practice, however, the executive has access to a ‘pre-legal’ domain of opaque agency, epitomized by the various strands of the ZSIS, through which the president can pursue whatever discretionary ends he or she deems important. Thus, all Zambian presidents, from Kaunda to the current incumbent Rupiah Banda, have been able to “move with impunity between appeals to the form of law and forms of extrajudicial practice that are clearly construed as lying outside or prior to the state” (Das and

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Poole 2004: 13). Such Agambenesque pre-legal powers can be deployed to corrupt ends, as was clearly the case with Chiluba,16 or in the service of a war on corruption, as was the case with Mwanawasa. For some, the ends may justify the means, but the evidence reveals that both presidents invoked extrajudicial privileges in pursuit of their personal agendas. In both cases, these actions damaged not only the Constitution but also the terms of empirical legality as practiced in Zambia and the presidency itself. The Chiluba era witnessed a dramatic accentuation of the role of the security apparatus in Zambian political life. The president deployed his chief of intelligence in a wide range of ‘discretionary’ projects, from obstructing justice to rent extraction in the killing fields of the Eastern Congo. The looming prominence of the security apparatus resurrected a legitimacy crisis in Zambian politics that multi-party democracy was supposed to have laid to rest. A democratically elected sovereign who resorts to dark, pre-legal powers has, at the very least, compromised the terms of his mandate. It is to Mwanawasa’s credit that he dedicated his administration, by means of his uncompromising stand on corruption, to restoring credibility to the executive mandate. It is also indicative of the level of tension between security and legality in post-colonial state formation that Mwanawasa—himself a lawyer—was unable to resist recourse to opaque maneuvers if he felt that the legal apparatus was obstructing his aims. In closing, it is worth noting that the predominance of the security apparatus under Chiluba does not epitomize a security-development nexus. Far from subordinating developmental practices and institutions to the aims of governability, Chiluba deployed the security apparatus to largely ‘anti-developmental’ ends. Under Chiluba, foreign aid was largely cordoned off from the central concerns of government, as his faction focused its attention on

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extracting rents from the privatization exercise and engaging in all manner of dubious business ventures. Zambia’s relatively stable, if impoverished, conditions do not demand, nor indeed allow for, the involvement of private security players in efforts to entrench mechanisms of external government. In countries yet unaffected by complex political emergencies, subsidiary sovereignty can be maintained through the conventional repertoire of aid conditionalities. Increasingly, the enforcement of these disciplinary mechanisms is being farmed out to a wide range of private actors, from international NGOs to accounting firms. The subcontracting of sovereignty has not escaped the attention of players on the recipient end of the stick. Indeed, as the story recounted here illustrates, similar practices are finding their way into the toolboxes of enterprising local players engaged in shaping the course of post-colonial state formation.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this essay was presented in October 2005 at a workshop titled “Security and Development: Recent Trends in Social Science,” organized by Roskilde University Centre in Nexoe, Denmark. I wish to thank the participants for their useful comments. I am especially indebted to my colleagues at the University of Helsinki, Lalli Metsola and Wolfgang Zeller, for their helpful suggestions in improving this essay. The remaining deficiencies are inevitably my own.

Notes 1. The analysis that follows is based on 12 months of socio-legal ethnography in Zambia during 2004–2007. Undocumented claims and observations, as well as references to individuals’

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views, draw on primary interview materials, which I have done my best to substantiate. Nevertheless, it will be obvious to anyone who has studied such contentious and high-profile political processes that the margin of error with regard to facts and interpretation is far from negligible. 2. The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) is an inter-governmental body consisting of Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swazi­ land, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 3. Mark Devenport, “Congo Peacebroker Calls for UN Force,” BBC Online Network, 22 September 1999. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/world/africa/454245.stm. 4. According to David Gordon (2003), Katoto is the nephew of the Mwata Kazembe, the paramount chief of the people of Lunda, whence Chiluba hails. 5. Chiluba has the somewhat paradoxical honor of being the first African president to come to power via a peaceful transition from single- to multi-party politics and also of being the first African president to face trial for acts of corruption committed while in office. 6. Chief Justice Ngulube was at the time hearing a citizen petition contesting the legality of Chiluba’s re-election in 1996. 7. This section draws on interviews that I conducted with Mukelabai in Cape Town on 12 September 2005. 8. “Human Rights Watch World Report 2000—Zambia,” December 1999. See http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/publisher,HRW,, ZMB,3ae6a8c74c,0.html. 9. The aim of HIPC is to cancel or reduce unmanageable debt repayments for countries that meet specific management and performance objectives, such as stabilizing their economies and privatizing public assets. 10. In addition to addressing corruption, access to debt relief demanded that Mwanawasa complete the para-statal privatization program, including the remainder of the copper mines. 11. The principal investigative bodies were the Zambian police force, the office of the president, the Drug Enforcement Commission, and the Anti-Corruption Commission. 12. See http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/ cafrad/unpan004847.pdf.

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13. “DPP Had Meetings with Suspected Plunderers—Levy,” ZANA (Zambia News Agency), 12 January 2004. See http://www. zamnet.zm/newsys/news/viewnews.cgi?category=30&id= 1073898040. 14. ”DPP Mukelabai Cleared, Retired in Public Interest,” ZANA, 1 April 2004. See http://www.zamnet.zm/newsys/news/viewnews. cgi?category=30&id=1080828900. 15. Sadly, on 29 September, Mukelebai Mukelebai was found dead in his Cape Town apartment at the age of 44. 16. Chiluba was found culpable of the theft of public funds in a civil procedure in a London court in 2007. In a 2009 criminal case, a Lusaka court acquitted him of corruption charges (abuse of office). The Zambian government, which was the plaintiff in both cases, has declined to register the London ruling and has opted not to appeal the Lusaka court acquittal.

References Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole, eds. 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; London: James Currey. Duffield, Mark. 2001. “Governing the Borderlands: Decoding the Power of Aid.” Disasters 25, no. 4: 308–320. Gordon, David. 2003. “Technological Change and Economies of Scale in the History of Mweru-Luapula’s Fishery (Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo).” FAO Fisheries Technical Paper. http://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/y5056e/y5056e06.pdf. Gould, Jeremy. 2006. “Strong Bar, Weak State? Lawyers, Liberalism and State Formation in Zambia.” Development and Change 37, no. 4: 921–941. ______. 2008. “Subsidiary Sovereignty and the Constitution of Political Space in Zambia.” Pp. 275–293 in One Zambia, Many Histories, ed. Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar, and Giancomo Macola. Leiden: Brill. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Securing Resources through Exceptional Means in the Americas

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In September 2008, the US ambassador was thrown out of Bolivia, having been accused by the national government of fostering divisions and conspiracy against the country’s democratic order. In the weeks previous to this announcement, Bolivia had been the scene of several violent clashes between rival factions disputing the value of reforms aimed at the democratization of political structures and mechanisms for economic redistribution.1 In the months following this initial announcement, more expulsions followed. The US Peace Corps, the US Drug Enforcement Agency, and USAID personnel were expelled from Bolivia on the grounds that they were involved in covert actions to foster violent opposition in the country. In a show of solidarity with the Bolivian government, Venezuela proceeded to ask its US ambassador to leave, and statements of solidarity on both of these decisions were made by the Ecuadorian and Honduran governments, which concluded that both governments must have had “concrete and verified reasons” to take such actions. In response, the US Department of State maintained that the accusations of the Bolivian and

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Venezuelan governments were baseless. The reaction of the international media was largely one of bewilderment, focusing in some instances on the significance of the decisions in terms of the resulting loss of over $100 million per year in development aid,2 and in other instances on the US government’s criticism of these incidents as a “grave error,” demonstrating the “weakness and desperation of these leaders as they face internal challenges.”3 In this short essay, my aim is not to produce a detailed explanation of these events in Bolivia per se. Rather, I will attempt to link these occurrences to a larger picture in which their significance is revealed through linkages to ongoing regional processes. The analysis will also examine the history of US intervention in Latin America and will include a meditation on global forces and analytical frames. The basic argument made here is that recent events in Bolivia can be interpreted in line with the central theme of the volume, that is, as an expression of confrontation with the connections that exist between development assistance and security politics. It is furthermore argued that events in the Americas demonstrate that the current post-9/11 focus on the spread of securitization politics fails not only to account fully for the extension of governmental power during ‘states of exception’, but also to acknowledge that the interrelationship between development and security is driven as much by an interest in vital energy resources as it is by the fear of terrorism and the goal of population control. Simply put, today’s security-development nexus is an updated expression of colonial interventionism aimed at the accumulation of natural resources. It is also argued that while these events are indicative of a new discursive packaging of interventionism, the actions of the Bolivian and other Latin American governments demonstrate that countervailing voices do exist. While the outcomes of these alternative voices remain unknown in

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a time of fluctuating oil prices, global market crisis, and all-encompassing governmentality, recent events in Bolivia illustrate that attempts at local solutions and resistance continue to be made.

States of Exception In recent social science and critical development studies, there has been a growing focus on the relationship between times of crisis and the law as an object of critical study. In these discussions, Agamben’s (2005) work on ‘states of exception’—that is, the normalization of situations of danger or threats to the state that legally justify the suspension of individual rights and the democratic rule of law—has taken on a particular prominence. Impelled by earlier work on the emergency measures introduced during World War I and World War II, Agamben has argued that the state of exception has progressively become the “dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (ibid.: 2). Responding to, but also increasingly independent from, refugee flows, asylum seekers, environmental collapse, civil conflict, health crises, poverty, and global terrorism, the invocation of a state of emergency by politicians and policy makers has become a normal part of government, especially so after 9/11. Linked to Agamben’s work on the increasing normalization of states of exception, other authors (see, e.g., Duffield 2007) have added analyses of biopolitics, securitization, and development as operational mechanisms from which this liberal project draws its ‘exceptional’ legitimacy and regulatory power. As Duffield (2007) has succinctly captured in his thesis on ‘unending war’, since the collapse of the Cold War, it has become an increasingly common claim of politicians that, in an interconnected world, even the most distant places can

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threaten the West’s way of life and that efforts to reduce both instability and poverty have thus become imperative. As a result, steps have been taken to design international policy and development interventions that focus better on the risks (DFID 2005a, 2005b) and instruments that strengthen state capacity, provide order, and, at the same time, deliver basic economic and welfare services (Leader and Colenso 2005). The product of these agreements is “a new form of ostensibly humanitarian empire—in which Western powers, led by the United States, band together to rebuild state order and reconstruct war-torn societies for the sake of global stability and security” (Ignatieff 2003: 19). However, in this global regime, the complementarity between development and security is largely accepted as unproblematic, allowing for a situation in which Western humanitarian and peace interventionism fails to acknowledge the life-chance divide (i.e., differing social and economic limitations and opportunities) between development and underdevelopment and recasts development as a component of wider counterinsurgency efforts (cf. Stepputat, this volume).

States of Exception = States of Emergency Although foreign incursions in Latin America stretch back to the Spanish conquest, this region has been marked since the nineteenth century with long periods of foreign intervention and developmental politics that appear very similar to the contemporary linkages being made between the agendas of development (particularly energy and resource development) and security. Indeed, the numerous states of emergency (estados de emergencia) called in the course of modern republican and military state history in Latin America appear very similar to the contexts in which Agamben’s thesis of states of exception is now being applied (cf. Lentin

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2008). Recognizing this, it is argued here that much of the refinement of current techniques of exception took place and persists in this American history. In their most brutal form, relevant cases in point include the involvement of US and European powers in wars that were started as a result of what, at the time, was argued to be their crucial contribution to national and regional development and security, and when the securing of natural resources was seen as essential.4 The implementation of states of exception can also be seen in other key events, including the wave of military-led coups d’état that took place throughout the region between the 1960s and the 1980s.5 These so-called dirty wars, which resulted in the deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands of Latin Americans, depended on the introduction of states of emergency in which the military repeatedly referred to the need to step in and suspend the democratic rule of law in the interest of stability, development, and moral purity. In line with the state of exception and recent studies of biopower, the dirty wars also involved ‘thanatopolitics’, a politics of death (Rabinow and Rose 2006) expressed through techniques of counterinsurgency, including assassination, torture, kidnapping, and the formation of paramilitary communities. These paramilitary forces were sanctioned and received training at a US regional logistics center, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a facility of the US Department of Defense.6 These brutal actions were paired with more subtle, liberal biopolitical and developmental actions. In particular, mention should be made of the Alliance for Progress program. Initiated in 1961 by US President John F. Kennedy, the Alliance for Progress was designed to counter the perceived emerging communist threat through the establishment of development and economic cooperation between North American and South American governments. Established

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in the same year by President Kennedy, the US Peace Corps, a volunteer overseas program, was created both as a means to counter the negative image of the US promoted by anti-imperialists and as an institution capable of implementing the health and literacy programs supported by the Alliance for Progress. Although officially canceled a year after its foundation, due to international academic public outcry, another well-publicized effort at merging the development and security agendas in Latin America was the launch in 1964 of Project Camelot—a social science research project of the US Army that aimed to assess the causes of violent social rebellion and to identify the actions that a government could take to prevent its own overthrow. Repeated connections have furthermore been made between the US intelligence services, development funding, and the operations of North American–based missionary organizations in Latin America, in particular, the work of the Wycliffe Bible translators in the Petén jungle area of Central America in the 1980s (Stoll 1982) and the work of the New Tribes Mission in South America.

Biopolitics and Resource Wars Broadly speaking, democracy returned to Latin America in the course of the 1980s. The death toll and economic instability of the military governments in the region became insupportable as the international community increasingly adhered to the discourses of human rights and the free market. However, while military oppression and state control now had to take a back seat, structural violence and ever new varieties of ‘exceptionalism’ remained the norm in the new era of neo-liberalism (Ong 2006). The linkages between biopolitics and the interventionist politics of security and development also continued.

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In Bolivia, elements of these new expressions and technologies of ‘exceptionalism’ have had a particular impact. The most evident of these has been the ‘war on drugs’, waged by the US with the backing of both local and European governments since the late 1980s. The war on drugs linked security and development tightly together in Bolivia. Until a recent decertification,7 USAID development assistance had been premised explicitly on the Bolivian government’s willingness to join the militarized fight against drugs, including the acceptance of US military trainers, logistics, and intelligence work and the criminalization not only of cocaine processing but of all unregulated coca production. These conditions involved the burning of fields, the suppression of the coca growers’ movement, and the forced imposition of alternative ‘cash crops’. The period of the 1990s witnessed the introduction of internationally backed governmental reforms that were aimed at securing development through the pacification of Bolivia’s largely poor and indigenous ‘surplus’ population (Harvey 2003). Structural changes to state management and resource ownership were also implemented. Experiencing a period of hyperinflation in the 1980s, the Bolivian government, along with other Latin American states, embarked over the next decade on a process of radical restructuring and opened its economy to the free market. By 2000, Bolivia was hailed by the World Bank and others in the international community as a ‘good practice’ paradigm of economic and democratic reform. In its restructuring process, state bureaucracies were reduced, industries were nationalized, and natural resources (including oil, water, forests, and minerals) and their management were sold off to foreign investors based in the North. To sweeten the bitter pill of these reforms (which, while stabilizing the national economy, also resulted in the rapid rise of urbanization, unemployment rates, and poverty

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levels), the Bolivian government introduced a parallel reform package aimed at decentralizing development planning and assistance. The laws of popular participation and administrative decentralization created new political acceptance for pre-existing local and traditional organizational structures and granted an unprecedented level of financing and planning control to local governments at the municipal level. However, a corresponding system of strict checks and balances on local government spending and participatory development planning was recognized by local communities as contradictory. In a turn of events that was unforeseen by the Bolivian government and its foreign backers, the reforms did not produce political passivity or acceptance of local government restructuring. Instead, they provided new spaces in which resistance movements were able to organize and grow. In the highlands and the lowlands of the country, the popular participation reforms stimulated new forms of political representation that were different from the trade union structures that had played such an important role in local mobilizations and government since the 1952 nationalist revolution. Evo Morales (today Bolivia’s president) and his cocalero movement (a loose coalition of coca growers) were among the first to take advantage of the new political possibilities, which they utilized to construct a national campaign. Morales’s party, Movement for Socialism, helped to organize a series of spectacular mass protests between 2003 and 2005 that aimed to stop the government’s liberalization and sale of Bolivia’s key natural resources. In these protests—which came to be known both locally and in the international media as the Water and Gas Wars—the joining of a broad spectrum of social sectors and political organizations created the sufficient critical mass that was needed to topple the governments of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (August

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2002–October 2003) and Carlos Mesa (October 2003–June 2005). With the proponents of neo-liberal government ousted, the path was cleared for the election of Morales to the presidency on a political platform that aimed at ending the social marginalization of the country’s majority Amerindian population and renationalizing its natural resources (McNeish 2008). The reforms of the Morales government have directly challenged the power and wealth of the country’s business elites, centered in the four lowland departments of the media luna (half-moon)—Trinidad, Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, and Tarija—home to the country’s wealthiest and whitest population. Reflecting elite interests, the residents in these lowland states, where the country’s modern agribusiness and hydrocarbon reserves are located, have been increasingly militant in response to what they see as the removal of their historic property rights and economic freedoms. Joining forces with conservative business interests in La Paz, the media luna have formed a regional campaign against the constitutional proposals to redesign the identity and nature of the state and against nationalization and land redistribution. In their campaign, they demand control over two-thirds of the revenue generated by their regional economies, combined with increased political and fiscal autonomy. Bolivian natural gas, all of which is located in the country’s eastern lowlands, generates millions of dollars of annual revenue that is now disputed in a tug of war between national, regional, and local governments (Dangl 2007).

Exceptions of Race and ‘Political’ Culture With so much at stake, tensions in the departments of the media luna escalated, and expressions of racism and

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political loyalties became ever more extreme. The selfproclaimed ‘Camba Nation’ of lowland Bolivia threatened to secede from the Andean portion of the country, utilizing the rhetoric of historical disadvantage, multi-culturalism, ethnic difference, and cultural self-determination to defend regional interests that have benefited from the exploitation of local hydrocarbon resources and a resultant booming economy (Lowrey 2006). Extremist voices have grown in strength and are becoming increasing intolerant of ethnic difference, especially when opposing political loyalties are expressed. These intolerances were made evident in the public statements of local authorities8 and in violent actions against government supporters. The number of extreme acts of political violence increased over the course of 2008–2009, including armed protests, the bombing of gas pipelines, and the kidnapping, torture, public humiliation, and killing of peasant and pro-government supporters in Sucre and Pando. Aimed at destroying or taking control of government institutions in the media luna departments by force, these efforts were viewed in the country as an attempted ‘civic coup’. While it is widely known that the lowland elite movement Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (Cruceñist Youth Union) was directly responsible for these acts, there is some evidence to suggest that it was receiving external financing and support. Indeed, a series of visits and meetings have taken place in recent years between the leaders of the Bolivian opposition, US government officials, and members of the US Republican Party. These meetings with separatist leaders have circumvented the usual formalities of state visits and meetings with elected government officials. In late 2007, photographs of the US ambassador were published, showing him in meetings in Santa Cruz with leading businessmen who back the autonomy movement.

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A prominent Colombian drug trafficker, known to command right-wing paramilitary organizations, was also in attendance. In January 2008, the US embassy was caught giving aid to a special intelligence unit of the Bolivian police force, and in February it was revealed in the Bolivian national press that US Peace Corps volunteers were being pressured to keep tabs on Venezuelans and Cubans in the country. On 25 August 2008, shortly before a week of government opposition violence broke out in Pando, the US ambassador flew to Santa Cruz to meet with Ruben Costas, the leader of the Santa Cruz separatist movement.9 Evidence of plans for further violent destabilization were uncovered following the Bolivian police’s 2009 apprehension of a group of foreign mercenaries preparing to fight for autonomy in Santa Cruz.10 Investigations into all of these reported actions have provided the Bolivian government with sufficient evidence to suspect the US of further conspiracy through financial support. Its collusion with separatist elements is seen as a strategy to secure support from groups that are more favorable to US interests in terms of providing access to hydrocarbon and other mineral resources. As mentioned at the outset, the US has denied the existence of any conspiracy, although the details described above would make such an intervention less than surprising. Leaving these so far unsubstantiated charges to one side, what is clear is the way in which the US and others opposed to the changes in Bolivia continue to utilize and merge international discourses on both development and security as further ‘exceptional’ means to discredit and isolate the country from investment and development support. The discourses of failed, fragile, populist, socialist, and non-democratic states are utilized by the US and its allies to discredit—and thus exclude from international acceptance and development

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support—countries that are undergoing regime change and reform that is unfavorable to their own interests of resource capture (Tedesco 2007). In Latin America, accusations of failed and fragile states continue to be used by the political right to discredit what they have intentionally interpreted oversimplistically as a dangerous wave of rejuvenated socialism sweeping across the region.11 The Bush administration and Republican senators publicly described the Bolivian government’s nationalization of resources as proof that the country belongs to the ‘axis of evil’ (Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran). In October 2008, President Bush suspended the Andean Trade Preference Act, disregarding the declaration of support for the Morales government made by the Union of South American Nations after the violence in Pando.12 The expected result of this was that an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Bolivian workers would lose their jobs and more than $70 million in exports would be priced out of the US market. While relations between the US and Bolivia have improved since Barak Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009, the US has declined to restore trade benefits under the Andean Trade Preference Act to Bolivia. In a more subtle form, media reports and international policy documents13 describe Bolivia’s ‘exceptional’ nature as flawed, fragile (DFID 2005b; World Bank 2006), or “at the limit” (Tedesco 2007: 2) of acceptable stability. International policy mechanisms, highly influenced by US and European interests, are used to further single out Bolivia and countries like it as pariah states. Indexes of governance, stability, and transparency, created with democratic and developmental intent, are manipulated in practice by controlling powers to highlight the weaknesses of ‘rogue’ states, although they commonly remove themselves from evaluation under the same criteria.

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Conclusions The expulsion of US actors from Bolivia is not simply an expression of isolated actions or internal incidents; rather, it must be interpreted in light of the historical and persistent confrontation between local interests and global capitalist forces. Crucially, it must also be seen in terms of the linkages that exist between development assistance and security politics. The case of Bolivia and the long history of interventionism in Latin America make it clear that this interrelationship is not new. They also suggest that the emerging security-development nexus is influenced not only by the fear of terrorism and the perceived need for population control, but also by the ongoing efforts of Northern powers to access and control the vital resources in the South, in particular, hydrocarbons. In this battle for control and access, constant innovation of new states of exception—ranging from counterinsurgency, developmental biopolitics, policy shifts, and political discourses—are used. The case of Bolivia, however, also illustrates that hegemony is elusive at best, and in this it finds commonality with other ‘exceptional’ states, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian West Bank. With every effort of these states to regain control, alternative interpretations and meanings of resources are expressed, political spaces are identified, and resistances are mounted.

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Notes 1. Bolivia is Latin America’s third most impoverished country. It also has a significant wealth of natural resources, including the region’s largest reserves of natural gas. 2. See Patrick J. McDonnell, “Bolivia Orders U.S. Envoy’s Expulsion,” LA Times, 11 September 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/ printedition/asection/la-fg-bolivia11-2008sep11,0,5229255.story. 3. See Jeremy McDermott, “US Condemns Bolivia and Venezuela Ambassador Expulsions as ‘Grave Error,’” Telegraph, 12 September 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ southamerica/bolivia/2825927/US-condemns-Bolivia-andVenuzuela-ambassador-expulsions-as-grave-error.html. 4. While far from a comprehensive record, these military actions include the 1855 US intervention in Nicaragua, the 1898 Spanish-American War, the 1912 US invasion of Nicaragua, the 1932 UK and US intervention in the Chaco War, the 1954 US intervention in Guatemala, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1981 Contra campaign, and the 1983 invasion of Grenada. 5. These coups d’état include those that brought to power the infamous and bloody regimes of Samosa (Nicaragua), Pinochet (Chile), Banzer (Bolivia), Efraín Ríos Montt (Guatemala), and the Argentinean junta. 6. The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation was previously known as the School of the Americas. 7. The decertification took place on 15 September 2009. 8. In its 19 December 2007 issue, Brazil’s left-of-center newsweekly, CartaCapital, quotes the mayor of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Percy Fernández, as saying, “From the look of things, we’ll have to paint our faces and use feathered arrows to be able to exist in this country” (quoted in McNeish 2008: 75). 9. See Roger Burbach, “Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia,” Counterpunch, 18 November 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/ burbach11182008.html. 10. See Nora Veiras, “Los ex carapintadas en el golpismo contra Evo,” Página 12, 12 May 2009, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/ diario/elpais/1-124770-2009-05-12.html 11. A series of statements made by the US, by European governments, and by leading Latin American academics and politicians have raised these concerns. See, for example, Mario

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Vargas Llosa’s comments about the protests in the Ecuadorian daily newspaper El Universo, 11 November 2003. These comments were reproduced in the editorial and debate columns of many Latin American national papers. See http://www. latinoamerica-online.info/soc03/indigeni33.03.html. 12. Bush further asserted that “Bolivia has failed to cooperate with the US on important efforts to fight drug trafficking.” See http:// www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid= aTiSz8BW.wyo&refer=latin_america. 13. See the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2008 Country Profile of Bolivia, http://www.eiu.com/.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dangl, Benjamin. 2007. The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia. Oakland, CA: AK Press. DFID (Department for International Development, UK). 2005a. Fighting Poverty to Build a Safer World: A Strategy for Security and Development. London: DFID. ______. 2005b. Why We Need to Work More Effectively in Fragile States. London: DFID Duffield, Mark. 2007. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. London: Vintage. Leader, Nicholas, and Peter Colenso. 2005. “Aid Instruments in Fragile States.” PRDE Working Paper No. 5. London: Poverty Reduction in Difficult Environments Team, DFID. Lentin, Ronit, ed. 2008. Thinking Palestine. London: Zed Books. Lowrey, Kathleen. 2006. ‘Bolivia multiétnico y pluricultural, Ten Years Later: White Separatism in the Bolivian Lowlands.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1: 63–84. McNeish, John-Andrew. 2008. “Constitutionalism in an Insurgent State: Rethinking Legal Empowerment of the Poor in a Divided

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Bolivia.” Pp. 69–96 in Rights and Legal Empowerment in Eradicating Poverty, ed. Dan Banik. London: Ashgate. Ong, Aiwha. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. “Biopower Today.” Biosocieties 1: 195–217. Stoll, David. 1982. Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Tedesco, Laura. 2007. “The Latin American State: Failed or Evolving?” FRIDE Working Paper Series No. 37. Madrid: FRIDE. World Bank. 2006. Engaging with Fragile States: An IEG Review of World Bank Support to Low-Income Countries Under Stress. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Securitization of the Social and State Transformation from Iraq to Mozambique

P Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Although war and post-war contexts across the nonwealthy South reveal a great range of governance arrangements that have arisen out of specific historical trajectories, the transformations of the state represent a dominant contemporary trend (Hardt and Negri 2005; Joxe 2002). Arguably, in the domain of security and development such statal transformation is violently tangible. In examining illustrative instances, including the recently formed institution of ‘community police’ in post-war Mozambique and the controversial use of so-called Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, this essay will argue that a pervasive trend in state transformation is the securitization of the social. In the case of HTTs, the essay claims that their creation exemplifies the intent of an imperial force to penetrate, transform, and ultimately control all social fields that it deems unruly. I furthermore contend that the Iraqi case exhibits a global tendency wherein the very structures and dominant understandings of the state are transformed in relation to security and development. This argument is

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supported by the case of community policing in Mozambique, which is the result of a largely donor-driven quest for state decentralization involving the ‘empowerment’ of local communities and sub-state-level entities. Arguably, this process complicates the already multifaceted landscape of practices, logics, and figures of sovereignty and governance at the local level (Bertelsen 2009a; Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009b). Although differing in form and practice—with HTTs penetrating and controlling the social from the outside, while community police are enlisted from within the social—both security apparatuses demonstrate how a securitization of the social is intimately related to the re-formation of the state. This trend exists despite the fact that the two principal contexts discussed here—the de facto occupied and war-torn Iraq and post-war Mozambique—are dissimilar in almost all facets of institutional arrangements, trajectories of state formation, political dynamics, and social organization. I argue that these contexts are linked together by what this essay will refer to as the ‘securitization of the social’, which entails the gradual expansion of control over and transformation of the social.1 Here, linkages with this global process will be shown in respect to territorial and judicial dimensions.

The Penetration and Reordering of the Human Terrain in Iraq and Afghanistan Since 2007, the US Army has deployed at least 21 HTTs as part of the Human Terrain System (HTS)2 in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan (Weinberger 2008: 583). HTTs consist of five members made up of both conventional military personnel and ‘academic embeds’, which include anthropologists or other social scientists. In the words of

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Col. Martin Schweitzer,3 the HTS constitutes “a capability to assist Commanders and Soldiers to better understand the ‘human terrain’ they are surrounded by and discern ‘soft power’ means of achieving desired effects.” But Schweitzer goes further, saying that “HTTs do not merely serve as embedded cultural advisors … but they assist Commanders at every level to maneuver formations within tribal communities in such a manner that reduces the threat to all involved parties.”4 In a maelstrom of political spin and an American media discourse desperate for novel tales from its war zones, the official rhetoric of soft power and imagery of the cultured soldier-intellectual are regularly reproduced (e.g., see Motlagh 2010; Rohde 2007). There is, of course, every reason to doubt the accuracy of these media-disseminated claims of a great reduction in casualties due to HTTs. In addition, there are important topics that merit discussion, including the arming of anthropology, the discipline’s dangerous and ill-advised collusion with the intelligence community (Price 2004), and whether the HTT should be viewed in terms of former military intelligence projects. An example is the Vietnam War’s Phoenix Program, in which social scientists served intelligence-gathering counterinsurgency purposes (González 2007). In many ways, the HTT is a strategic form of social engineering that, by reordering and segmenting war-torn societies, merges development with the wider aim of military occupation in order to ensure the creation and operation of innovative and productive economies, both indigenous and foreign-controlled. The HTT may therefore be seen as a significant new socio-military weapon of the imperial North, to be deployed where the state’s regular apparatus of war cannot sufficiently penetrate the social or effectively crush, curb, or contain the enemy. Such an objective is reflected in the US Army’s overview of the HTS: “The local civilian population in the area

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of conflict—the human terrain—must be considered as a distinct and critical element of the environment.”5 Such targeting of the civilian population by military-cum-social science personnel subordinates the social world to logics of conquest and control (Robben 2010). Moreover, it entails an engulfing of, and feeding on, the social in order to gain imperial control and to win military victories and propaganda battles in the North’s metropolitan press. Practically, such encompassment transforms dynamics of trust, kinship networks, and longue durée reciprocal systems of material or immaterial exchange—all characteristic of the social.6 The rise in the use of HTTs is a disturbing turn in military and development strategy, as it undermines the local legitimacy and security of civilian agents of development by blurring distinctions between military/armed security personnel and civilian representatives—a trend enshrouded in rhetorics of soft power, development, and protection, as is evident in Col. Schweitzer’s words above on the HTS strategy. However, strategy, as Burke (2007: 197) rightly points out in a radical critique of realist conceptualizations, is “not merely an ‘instrument’ of policy but engenders an image of the world in which everything it touches becomes an instrument, including humans. In the ‘strategic’ vision of the earth, human beings are less living things than things that happen to be living, and are therefore useful.” Burke’s stark vision is informed by his elaborate analysis of security as a formation of power, sovereignty, and violence that seeks to transcend the somewhat confining images of ‘the camp’ as the ultimate trope of modern power formations, with the law being a necessary starting point for understanding the violence of these formations or the capability of the motley multitude to shape and articulate a politics of resistance to imperial formations. Rather, Burke conceives of strategy in Heideggerian terms, seeing humankind as trapped within the logics of the machine. Applied to Iraq,

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“[t]echnological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource: matter to be mined, ordered, enhanced, driven, destroyed” (ibid.: 202). In simple terms, the social, living world of human beings is co-opted by the logics of an all-embracing strategy nested within a broader logic of security. This machine-like logic and vision of ‘technological man’ conforms well with militarist understandings of the human terrain, in which the complexities of the local population are reduced to form ‘a critical element’ of the environment’. Within the logic and apparatus of security, HTTs are logical extensions of a rationale that sees the social as ‘matter to be mined’ and, ultimately, securitized.

Decentralizing Security within the Terrain of Mozambique In Mozambique, a kindred imperial force, made up of the World Bank and a multitude of Western donors, has in recent years pushed for decentralization. This has produced significant structural changes, accomplished not least through direct, multi-level budget support. However, decentralization needs to be understood within a wider political-economic context. Acknowledging that the country emerged only in 1992 from a long-lasting and devastating civil war, Cramer (2007: 266) sees Mozambique’s recent decentralization in terms of the previous post-war military demobilization paralleling an economic demobilization of the state. For instance, Mozambique suffered “the largest privatisation programme in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s” (ibid.), a process involving corrupt accumulation and rampant asset stripping. This economic and military demobilization went hand in hand with the

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1980s rhetoric of the Washington Consensus, as well as practical attacks on the state—a global trend that critics have called “the production of a weak state” (Santos 2006: 43). Starting in the mid-1990s, donors became reoriented to decentralization, and an approach that links protection, security, and development is currently prevalent in policy-making discourses and ‘developmentalia’ literature in southern Africa (Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat 2007) and beyond (Duffield 2007). Among other developments, in Mozambique this reorientation has meant the formation of security entities known as community police (polícia comunitária). Beyond decentralization reforms, an important backdrop for these communally organized policing institutions is the low standing and violent practices of the regular police (Seleti 2000). Also, the establishment of these community police forces coincides with a dramatic increase in popular lynchings, as well as the emergence of police-led death squads (Bertelsen 2009a, 2009b). Since 1998, I have conducted fieldwork in Chimoio, a city in central Mozambique with a population of about 200,000. To the dismay of donors, in the peri-urban bairros encircling the city center, many residents express the view that police-led death squads and popular lynchings of alleged criminals are effective instruments of justice, in terms of providing peace and personal security. In the bairros, there exists a range of institutions, authority figures, and procedures that one may resort to in the face of crime and insecurity, from community police to national police, from party secretaries to community leaders. Hailed as locally organized and socially embedded figures of authority and justice, the community police, in practice, consist of a few machete-wielding youths who make the rounds at night ‘to protect people’. Unpaid and lacking uniforms or IDs, which would make them distinguishable

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as ‘police’ or ‘security’, these young men are known to be both corrupt and corruptible, running extortion rackets or organizing muggings, burglaries, and beatings. In other words, they contribute to situations that the policy makers thought they would prevent.7 In Mozambique, the community police may be seen as further complicating already opaque structures of power and violence within their domains of operation. Community police, the national police, a range of state and nonstate authority figures, and significant criminal networks (see Chachiua 2000)—all constitute what Comaroff and Comaroff (2006: 35) term “partial sovereignties.” Arguably, community police, lynchings, and death squads—which feed on and are inserted into the social—exemplify how the dismantling of the post-colonial state has forcibly fragmented legal authority in terms of both occluding formal authority structures and creating novel forms of justice.

Transformation of State, Security, and Development Our objective cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population. — General Stanley A. McChrystal, 30 August 20098

This redefinition of military objectives, announced by the then commander of the US-led ISAF forces in Afghanistan, is evident in two indicators of altered relations between state, security, and development in the Afghan and Iraqi war theaters. Firstly, the theaters point to a shift from exercising regular military control to waging a battle for hearts and minds—a development mirrored rhetorically in the ‘coalition of the willing’, which is seemingly replacing

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the armies of the territorially bound, twentieth-century nation-state.9 Secondly, the theaters indicate a change in military practice, in which the human terrain is increasingly targeted for reterritorialization. This is a shift from larger national and international collectives of uniform governance apparatuses to radically more complex assemblages within ‘the security-development nexus’ (Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat 2007). As the examples of the HTTs and the community police demonstrate, it is evident that standing armies and regular police forces are being replaced by an infinite variety of security personnel. In governance terms, this means that distinctions between development projects and capitalist venture economies of extraction are becoming increasingly opaque. In such settings, national, multinational, or local security bodies often function merely as an encompassing structure for securing and facilitating such interests (see also Ifeka 2009). Thus, capitalist interests or development are embedded in self-serving logics of security—features of what I have elsewhere referred to as a ‘corporate state’ (Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009b). This rise of the corporate state signifies a modification of the Hobbesian vision that considers the state to be bound by a social contract with its citizens. In this modification, the mediating societyproducing relation between the state and its population is replaced with control, surveillance, and security functions. Again, Iraq exemplifies such a transformation, wherein the corporate takeover of vital state functions is integral to the rise of private military and security services (Schreier and Caparini 2005).10 Further, the conduct, practices, and existence of large-scale private military firms in Iraq, such as Blackwater (Scahill 2007), constitute an exteriorization of corporate state violence. Not surprisingly, in the violent neo-liberal re-formation of the Iraqi state, the punishments exacted by military contractors and police

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against people who violate or threaten those interests are coated in rhetorics of security and development.11 This transformation of state should not, however, be seen as a necessarily transient phenomenon. Despite President Barack Obama’s pronouncements in August 2010 about the US military ending its ‘combat mission’ in Iraq (with some 50,000 troops staying on until the end of 2011), no firm plans were announced for the withdrawal from Iraq of the vast number of private security personnel in tandem with the scheduled military withdrawal.12 Moreover, such a withdrawal of private security personnel is unlikely, for as Avant (2006: 330) has shown, the ratio of military personnel to private contractors in recent war theaters has shifted spectacularly. The change from a modest 1:58 in the First Gulf War to 1:15 in Bosnia to 1:6 in Iraq signals a dramatic privatization of warfare, security, and development, in many senses of these terms. Despite obvious and important differences, the Iraq situation reflects aspects of the Mozambican case. As was noted above, the national Mozambican police force no longer— even formally—commands or controls its national space. Rather, the formation of decentralized, self-governed, and locally organized units of security (e.g., community police) resonates with what Baker (2008) has described, with regard to Africa, as ‘multi-choice policing’. Thus, the potential realization of a sovereign state’s monopoly of violence as such is precluded. The privatization of justice and security practices in Mozambique is taking place in tandem with the gradual erosion of the state’s control over development schemes, which are being pursued by neo-liberally inclined national, foreign, and multinational interests. In this sense, Mozambique has lost its national sovereignty to donors (Jones 2005). In addition, the transformations involving the domains of security and development have resulted in the proliferation of partial sovereignties within Mozambique’s territory.

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This situation has formal similarities to that of Iraq. Despite being granted sovereignty in 2004, as of August 2010, the fiscal, administrative, and political control of Iraq rests largely with a US-led occupation. This control prevents the effectuation of any sovereign state foundation in the form of a nation-state (Diamond 2005: 16) and heralds the further entrenchment and rise of the corporate state, undergirded by security and development rhetorics.

Conclusion The lynchings, death squads, and community police in Mozambique and the dramatic transfiguration of a military apparatus into a Trojan horse of social intrusion and control in Iraq (and Afghanistan) underline significant transformations of security and development, some theoretical and some empirical. I will conclude with two of them. Firstly, in Iraq and Mozambique, the state’s conventional territorial control has been suspended, with the result that the sole, omnipotent Leviathan has multiplied into several, non-omnipotent leviathans. This not only points to new formations or assemblages of state or statelike forms (Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009a), but also entails radically changed orientations for those enduring these deterritorialized worlds, understood in both an empirical and a theoretical sense. In these changed settings, plural logics of control and security may be adversely positioned, mobility may become problematic, and the partial sovereignties composing the corporate state may no longer be subordinated to full sovereign state control or oversight. Secondly, in terms of justice, it is clear that development in any conceivable sense of the word is second to or co-opted by security. In Mozambique, this is evident in the fact that the state, if not withdrawing (Sassen 1995;

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Strange 2005), is being transformed, dissipating its legal and absolute powers into local realities (Bertelsen 2009b). In Iraq, the HTTs are concerned with justice in terms of heading off potential local conflicts in order to prevent violent occurrences that might destabilize effective occupation and development. This variety of conflict resolution is informed not by local interests but rather by ideologies of security at the imperial center. The eclipsing of development by security in Iraq is apparent in the fact that development is increasingly integral to military strategies at the governance level and on the ground: the figure of the soldier/private contractor/warrior is becoming indistinct from the aid worker/humanitarian/medical doctor. The HTTs in Iraq (as an explosive potential of entry and cannibalization of the social) and the death squads, lynchings, and community police in Mozambique (as particular appropriations of popular and procedural justice) both bespeak novel configurations of state and security. The contours of a post-Westphalian state order—attuned to cater to, be integral to, or be made up of corporate interests and economies—are visible in the cases of both Iraq and Mozambique. This is particularly so in terms of altered ideals of security and development, whereby these are understood as privatized, multiple, and decoupled from concepts of social contracts reminiscent of outmoded nation-state ideologies. In this reconfiguration, ideologies of the redistribution of material goods, communal solutions, societal prosperity, etc., are subsumed and commanded by a multitude of both local and metropolitan long-term and short-term military and security aims that are more integral to economies of production and extraction than to notions of social justice and development.

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Acknowledgments My interest in HTTs comes largely from conversations with Bård Kårtveit, to whom I am also thankful for comments. In addition, I have received valuable and thoughtful input from Berit Angelskår, Sissel Rosland, Anne Mette Teigen, and this volume’s editors. I wish to express thanks to all of them.

Notes 1. As should be clear, my usage of the term ‘securitization’ deviates from how the so-called Copenhagen School of security studies defines ‘securitization’, with its focus on speech acts, inter­ subjective meaning, etc. (see Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde 1998). 2. The HTS program was initiated in late 2003. For the rationale behind what the US Army refers to as a “proof-of-concept” program, see its HTS Web site, http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/ (accessed 20 August 2010). 3. Statement made in 2008 by Col. Martin Schweitzer, Commander, 4/82 Airborne Brigade Combat Team, United States Army, before the House Armed Services Committee, Terrorism and Unconventional Threats Sub-Committee and the Research and Education Sub-Committee of the Science and Technology Committee in Washington, DC. 4. Ibid. 5. See the overview of the HTS program, http://humanterrainsystem. army.mil/overview.html (accessed 20 August 2010). 6. For an analysis of such intimate relations between information and warfare during the First Gulf War, see Virilio ([1998] 2005). 7. There are also indications that community police are involved in political conflicts between the dominant Frelimo Party and Renamo, the major opposition party. See, for example, the case of alleged attacks on Frelimo members in the city of Beira by community police members. “Na Beira: Polícia comunitária acusada de agredir membros de Frelimo,” Notícias de Moçambique (Maputo), 16 November 2005. 8. Gen. McChrystal, at the time commander of the US Army and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in

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Afghanistan, submitted this report, titled Commander’s Initial Assessments, to US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. The unclassified report is available at the following site: http://media. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_ Redacted_092109.pdf (accessed 20 August 2010). 9. In analyzing the merger of venture capitalism and militarization, some argue that the ‘coalition of the willing’ should rather be called the ‘coalition of the billing’ (Singer 2005), due to the inherent tendency toward fragmentation and the soaring costs of these alliances. 10. The increasingly important privatized military firms (PMFs) are expected to have a turnover of $202 billion in 2010 (Schreier and Caparini 2005: 2). These estimates were made prior to the Iraq War, which has swelled the number of PMFs considerably. Schreier and Caparini (2005) approximate the number of corporate warriors in Iraq as being between 20,000 and 45,000 in 2005, while Merle (2006) puts the figure at 100,000 in 2006. An estimate from 2009 calculates the number of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan combined to be around 240,000 (Avant and Sigelman 2010: 233). 11. Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2002: 29) was central to the inclusion of the private sector in military matters, famously stating a need to transform both the armed forces and the Department of Defense: “We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be ‘validated’ but rather anticipates them before they appear and develops new capabilities to dissuade and deter them.” 12. I owe this point to Bård Kårtveit, who indicated that this aspect is largely absent in the US debate.

References Avant, Deborah D. 2006. “The Privatization of Security: Lessons from Iraq.” Orbis 50, no. 2: 327–342. Avant, Deborah D., and Lee Sigelman. 2010. “Private Security and Democracy: Lessons from the US in Iraq.” Security Studies 19, no. 2: 230–265.

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Baker, Bruce. 2008. Multi-Choice Policing in Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2009a. “Sorcery and Death Squads: Transformations of State, Sovereignty, and Violence in Postcolonial Mozambique.” Pp. 210–240 in Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009a. ______. 2009b. “Multiple Sovereignties and Summary Justice in Mozambique: A Critique of Some Legal Anthropological Terms.” Social Analysis 53, no. 33: 123–147. Burke, Anthony. 2007. Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other. London: Routledge. Buur, Lars, Steffen Jensen, and Finn Stepputat, eds. 2007. The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty in Southern Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Chachiua, Martinho. 2000. “Internal Security in Mozambique: Concerns versus Policies.” African Security Review 9, no. 1. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2006. “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction.” Pp. 1–56 in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cramer, Christopher. 2007. Violence in Developing Countries: War, Memory, Progress. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Diamond, Larry. 2005. “Lessons from Iraq.” Journal of Democracy 16, no. 1: 9–23. Duffield, Mark. 2007. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. Cambridge: Polity Press. González, Roberto. 2007. “Phoenix Reborn? The Rise of the ‘Human Terrain System.’” Anthropology Today 23, no. 6: 21–22. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ifeka, Caroline. 2009. “Market Forces, Political Violence, and War: The End of Nation-States, the Rise of Ethnic and Global Sovereignties?” Pp. 83–94 in Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009a. Jones, Branwen Gruffydd. 2005. “Globalisations, Violences and Resistances in Mozambique: The Struggles Continue.” Pp. 53–73 in Critical Theories, International Relations and ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’: The Politics of Global Resistance, ed. Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca. London: Routledge. Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

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Kapferer, Bruce, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, eds. 2009a. Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York: Berghahn Books. ______. 2009b. “Introduction: The Crisis of Power and Reformations of the State in Globalizing Realities.” Pp. 1–26 in Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009a. Merle, Renae. 2006. “Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq.” Washington Post, 5 December. Motlagh, Jason. 2010. “Should Anthropologists Help Contain the Taliban?” Time, 1 July. Price, David H. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robben, Antonius C. G. M. 2010. “Chaos, Mimesis and Dehumanisation in Iraq: American Counterinsurgency in the Global War on Terror.” Social Anthropology 18, no. 2: 138–154. Rohde, David. 2007. “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones.” New York Times, 5 October. Rumsfeld, Donald. 2002. “Transforming the Military.” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 3: 20–32. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2006. “The Heterogeneous State and Legal Pluralism in Mozambique.” Law and Society 40, no. 1: 39–77. Sassen, Saskia. 1995. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Scahill, Jeremy. 2007. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. New York: Nation Books. Schreier, Fred, and Marina Caparini. 2005. Privatising Security: Law, Practice and Governance of Private Military and Security Companies. Geneva: Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces. Seleti, Yonah. 2000. “The Public in the Exorcism of the Police in Mozambique: Challenges of Institutional Democratization.” Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 2: 349–364. Singer, P. W. 2005. “Outsourcing War.” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 2: 119–135. Strange, Susan. 2004. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Virilio, Paul. [1998] 2005. The Information Bomb. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Weinberger, Sharon. 2008. “The Pentagon’s Culture Wars.” Nature 455: 583–585.

(In)Security in a Space of Exception The Destruction of the Nahr el-Bared Refugee Camp

P Are Knudsen

On 20 May 2007, heavy fighting broke out in Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli in North Lebanon. The initial clash between the Lebanese Army and a new militia group, Fatah al-Islam (Conquest of Islam), killed 20 militants and 21 soldiers and soon turned the camp into a war zone.1 After 15 weeks of intense bombardment and gunfire, the camp was reduced to rubble, and the death toll had reached almost 500, including around 220 militants and 168 army troops. At least 47 Palestinian civilians were also killed in the bloody standoff, which forced the camp’s 30,000 residents to flee, most of them to the Beddawi refugee camp located 10 kilometers to the south. This was the most violent incident to take place since the end of Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). The army’s hard-won victory was praised by all parties, but the battle added significantly to the country’s political turmoil and sectarian tensions. The bombing of Nahr al-Bared came after a period in which relations between Lebanese authorities and Palestinians, which had been deadlocked since the early 1990s (Knudsen 2009), had begun to thaw. The Nahr al-Bared crisis

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put political dialogue on hold, entrenched conflict over the matter of settling refugees in Lebanon (colloquially referred to as ‘implantation’, Ar. tawteen), and politicized the refugee camps as a security threat that must be contained. Since the 1950s, Lebanon has handled the Palestinian ‘refugee file’ as a security issue. This means that refugees have been considered a security threat and have been kept under strict control by the army’s intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau. After a brief interlude of political freedom following the Cairo Agreement of 1969,2 the securitization of the refugee file was resumed after the civil war ended. Cordoned off with barbed wire, the southern refugee camps were controlled by checkpoints manned by the military (Knudsen 2009). The refugee camps now became highly politicized spaces, with frequent armed conflict between rival Palestinian factions. Lebanon hosts about 250,000 refugees but studiously ignores the international conventions applicable to a country hosting refugees (Amnesty International 2007). Having neither acceded to these conventions nor observed their provisions, the country cannot be held accountable. Faced with chronic insecurity, this has made the camp-based refugees the poorest and most marginalized communities in Lebanon, and those fleeing Nahr al-Bared even more so. Some of the most penetrating analysis of refugee conditions has come from Michel Agier (2002: 320), who argues that refugee camps are spaces created for the “‘humanitarian’ management of the most unthinkable and undesirable populations of the planet.” Agier’s critique takes its theoretical cue from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005), whose works have generated new insights into the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the plight of displaced Palestinians. In the collection Thinking Palestine (Lentin 2008), the contributors explore Agamben’s key concepts, such as ‘state of exception’, ‘bare life’

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(homo sacer), and ‘sovereign power’, in analyzing the Israeli occupation of Palestine. One of the contributors to the volume, Sari Hanafi (2008: 93), argues that Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon “have become ‘sacred space’ or space sacer in the sense of spaces that can be ‘eliminated’ by anyone without being punished.” In this essay, I argue that, as a ‘space of exception’, the Nahr al-Bared camp was destroyed to protect the nation from its ‘others’: only in a refugee camp could the army exert its full powers, only in a refugee camp could the refugees’ existence be reduced to ‘bare life’, and only in a refugee camp would a humanitarian disaster be hailed as a victory.

Attacking Refugees When the civil war ended, the Lebanese Army went through a period of restructuring and expansion (Barak 2009). However, during this period, the army has been held back by the lack of a national consensus on its role and by the absence of a national defense strategy. This has meant that the defense of the country—in particular along Lebanon’s southern border—has been left to Hezbollah’s militia, which numbers about 2,000. In the post–civil war conflicts with Israel, most recently the 2006 July War (also known as the 33-Day War), the Lebanese Army played a purely defensive role and did not engage the Israeli forces. Instead, the active defense of the nation was left to Hezbollah, which claimed a ‘divine victory’ over Israel and made its leader, Syeed Hassan Nasrallah, an icon of the popular masses throughout Lebanon and the Middle East. The humiliation of the army and Hezbollah’s triumph of the previous year can be seen as a further explanation of the army’s determination to prove its military prowess during the 2007 siege of Nahr al-Bared.3

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The Lebanese Army numbers more than 60,000 servicemen (Gaub 2007), yet in most internal and civil conflicts, the army stands back and lets the militias and factions battle it out on the streets. Weary of being drawn into these clashes, the army carefully protects its neutrality and impartiality. The main reason why the army does not intervene is not due to a lack of capability; rather, it is because doing so would be construed as taking sides in, and becoming party to, sectarian conflicts.4 This would expose the army to accusations of partisanship and undermine its neutrality, the army’s most valued asset in a divided society (Barak 2009). In the case of Nahr al-Bared, however, the army could set all such reservations aside. This conflict took place within the confines of a refugee camp, a marginal area that in local parlance is referred to as a ‘security risk area’ and a ‘zone of outlaw’ (Ar. juzur amniyya). Most of the residents were refugees, a marginal group by every standard, and were considered by many Lebanese to be part of a ‘fifth column’ that had been responsible for igniting the civil war. Finally, the enemy hiding inside this ‘zone of outlaw’ was a small band of Islamic militants with links to Syria. Considered a Syrian proxy force, Fatah alIslam was seen as a threat both to the government, which accused Syria of fomenting conflict to regain its hegemony over Lebanon, and to the nation. The Lebanese government therefore authorized a full-blown military offensive to eliminate this threat. As such, this state of exception was a “response to a condition or superior danger to the continuing existence of the state” (Lentin 2008: 4). The political crisis facing Lebanon since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005 magnified the threat of Fatah al-Islam and the need to confront it. Cautious of being drawn into an urban street fight in the narrow alleys of the camp, the army resorted to mortar fire and aerial bombardment.5 The sustained bombing

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accounted for the enormous physical destruction of the two sections of Nahr al-Bared: the New Camp was ravaged, while the Old Camp was reduced to rubble. In total, almost 6,000 residential and commercial units were damaged or destroyed (Government of Lebanon 2007). The army’s siege trapped civilians inside the camp, and calls for a truce by humanitarian groups were ignored. The last civilians were evacuated from the camp in late August 2007, more than two months after the battle had begun. By then, about 47 refugees had been killed in the crossfire, and all of the camp’s residents had been displaced. This conflict is typical of the new type of ‘small wars’ and ‘complex political emergencies’ in which civilians become victims of armed conflict (Goodhand and Hulme 1999). On 2 September 2007, after three months of intense shelling, the army declared victory over Fatah al-Islam, and about 250 alleged militia members were taken into custody, although their leader, Shaker al-Absi, was nowhere to be found.6 The battle had inflicted heavy losses on the army, with more than 150 soldiers killed. Most of them were from the poverty-stricken region around Tripoli, where army service is one of the few career options available for young men (Volk 2009). The army’s heroic victory was eulogized in an advertising campaign, “The Nation in Our Hearts,” which used billboards and television spots to praise the army for saving the nation and the martyred troops for their sacrifice.7 The victory also strengthened the candidacy of the head of the army, General Michel Suleiman, for the presidency, a post he eventually assumed in May 2008. However, in the months following the battle, the army was to pay a heavy price for its victory over Fatah al-Islam. In December 2007, General Francois al-Haj, the commander in charge of the siege of Nahr al-Bared, was killed by a remote-controlled car bomb. It has been speculated that he was murdered by surviving members of Fatah al-Islam

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seeking to avenge the assault on the camp. In 2008, army vehicles in Tripoli were twice targeted by bombs that killed young servicemen. Fatah al-Islam has been blamed for both attacks. These incidents show that the Nahr al-Bared crisis exposed the army to a new form of insecurity: the military as a political target. The attempt at ‘creating security’ by bombing the Nahr al-Bared camp instead created greater insecurity for the refugees and the army personnel alike. The bombardment also undermined the army’s role as the protector of the nation and a symbol of national unity that transcends sectarianism (Gaub 2007: 15).

From Home to Hyperghetto The demolition of Nahr al-Bared is one of the most critical events to have taken place in post–civil war Lebanon. The destruction of the camp, the first during peacetime, marked a turning point in the state’s relation with Palestinian refugees. The refugees’ fears of being permanently displaced were unleashed, and the host country was able to confirm long-held claims that the refugee camps are a security threat and that they shelter militant groups operating under foreign command. The siege of Nahr al-Bared opened a void between the government and the displaced refugees. For the former, rebuilding the camp is a challenge to the official policy of preventing the permanent settlement of refugees in Lebanon. For the latter, there are fears that the camp will not be rebuilt and, if rebuilt, will be put under stringent military control. The residents strongly oppose the government’s plan to build two military bases (an army and a naval base) adjacent to the camp,8 seeing this plan as proof of the strict security regime to be enforced in the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared. In official parlance, the Nahr al-Bared master plan is referred to as a ‘model’ that could later be expanded to

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include other camps (Khalidi and Riskedahl 2007) and is viewed as a blueprint for securitizing the camp.9 It has been difficult to raise funds for rebuilding the camp, and the agency responsible for humanitarian assistance to the refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is struggling to provide adequate aid to the displaced refugees.10 Rebuilding the camp and its infrastructure is a massive undertaking, comparable to constructing a mid-sized town. The reconstruction of the camp is estimated to cost at least $250 million and more than $450 million if the reconstruction includes surrounding communities. There is currently a huge shortfall in funding, but if financed, Nahr al-Bared will be the largest reconstruction project in Lebanon and one of UNRWA’s largest humanitarian projects (IRIN 2007). During previous refugee disasters, the destroyed camps were not restored,11 and the Nahr al-Bared refugees fear that this camp, too, will not be rebuilt, due to lack of money and political will. The government’s assurances to the contrary are viewed with deep-seated suspicion, and the fact that construction has not yet begun is seen as proof that the planned reconstruction of the camp is a hoax— part of a secret plan to disperse and later settle the refugees in Lebanon.12 For those refugees who have been allowed to return to Nahr al-Bared, the lingering uncertainty is made worse by being subjected to a security regime that is more stringent than that applied in the unruly camps in the south. Living in the ruined camp is so difficult that residents despair. In the words of one: “Why are they treating us like terrorists? Why, why?”13 The Nahr al-Bared incident mainstreamed the image of refugees as the country’s ‘enemy within’ and made them complicit in the carnage wreaked by Fatah al-Islam. Victimhood and despair have for a long time been central to the refugees’ presentation of self and are a crucial part of their national narrative of

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loss and misfortune (Sayigh 1994). The destruction of Nahr al-Bared strengthened the feeling of estrangement. As one distraught refugee displaced from Nahr al-Bared put it: “People hate us. They are constantly suspicious of us.”14 By 2008, about 1,500 of the about 5,500 displaced families had been able to return to their old homes, mainly in the New Camp section of Nahr al-Bared. Roughly 4,000 families were still homeless, living in makeshift shelters or shared and rented rooms. Many of them have been forced to go into debt to repair their homes or to rent temporary housing. Those worst off are languishing in ‘temporary accommodation’: 18 square meter ‘metal housing units’ without air conditioning, stacked on the edge of the ruined camp and appropriately nicknamed ‘Guantanamo 2’. The sorry remains of the camp are under strict surveillance by the army, which patrols the perimeters. The camp can be entered only through designated checkpoints: the IDs of all visitors and residents are routinely checked, and all goods brought into the camp are scrutinized. Additionally, the destroyed Old Camp is cordoned off and controlled by army units.15 Formerly the most open, peaceful, and prosperous camp in the country, enjoying close relations with neighboring communities through its role as a central marketplace (Tiltnes 2007), Nahr al-Bared is now Lebanon’s most segregated, monitored, and securitized camp. As such, the ruined camp can be considered a “hyperghetto” (Loïc Wacquant, quoted in Hanafi 2008: 89), its residents being suspended in a liminal existence that resembles Agamben’s (1998) concept of ‘bare life’. The displaced refugees are certain that the government’s target was not Fatah al-Islam. Rather, the military was out to ‘get’ the refugees themselves, who were believed to be complicit in hiding, supporting, and abetting the militants. Flattening the camp was a collective punishment perpetrated against its residents, not a military tactic dictated by

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the need to confront the threat posed by Fatah al-Islam. According to eyewitness accounts, the army looted several of the destroyed houses and apartments, and in some instances soldiers scribbled anti-Palestinian graffiti on the crumbling walls. One instance of graffiti that read “Thank you, Shaker al-Absi!” was widely understood as a mocking tribute to the Fatah al-Islam leader for providing the army with a pretext to destroy the camp (Knudsen, Suleiman, and Zeidan 2010).16 Several of the apartments with a Hezbollah flag displayed inside were looted and vandalized, presumably to punish those supporting Hezbollah and to equate them with supporters of Fatah al-Islam.17 In this context, it should be remembered that house demolitions are the most common form of collective punishment of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Dudai 2006). Destroying a house is the most damaging reprisal imaginable because doing so removes security, well-being, shelter, and ‘home’, all captured in the Arabic term al-Beit (Sayigh 2005). For the first-generation Palestinian refugees who lost their homes and property in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, commonly referred to as the ‘disaster’ (Ar. al-Nakba), the loss is even greater. The Nahr al-Bared destruction is interpreted as a second catastrophe befalling them. Many of the first- and second-generation refugees living in Nahr al-Bared have experienced repeated war and displacement. The attack on Nahr al-Bared brought back painful memories of the destruction of and flight from the Tell al-Zatar refugee camp (1976), the massacres in Sabra and Shatila (1982), and the brutal War of the Camps (1985–1987). The bombardment of the Nahr al-Bared camp is thus seen as a continuation of the attack on Palestinians in Lebanon, who have suffered through decades of legal discrimination and marginalization. This process of alienation reached its apogee with refugees fleeing Nahr al-Bared and becoming internally displaced persons faced with chronic insecurity.

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Conclusion In 2007, the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp was destroyed and its Palestinian populace displaced in the largest battle in post–civil war Lebanon. The Lebanese Army’s victory was achieved at very high human costs and at the expense of the displaced refugees. Whereas the 2006 July War that led to Hezbollah’s ‘Divine Victory’ had belittled the army, the Nahr al-Bared crisis offered the military an opportunity to prove its valor. To achieve this, the localized security threat posed by Fatah al-Islam was magnified by placing it within the larger security and governance crisis facing the nation. In this essay, I have argued that the destruction was made possible by identifying the Nahr al-Bared camp as a space of exception and the army’s siege as necessary to defeat an existential threat to the nation or Volk, to use Agamben’s terminology (see Lentin 2008: 5). This strategy legitimized the use of unrestrained force to defeat the enemy, flatten the camp, and displace the refugee population. More specifically, I have argued that, living in a space of exception, the Nahr al-Bared refugees were viewed by the government as a marginal and isolated minority that lacked political protection and hence were disposable. The destruction of the camp was hailed as a victory, and the destitute refugees were left suspended in constant insecurity. The ruined Nahr al-Bared camp is now a hyperghetto, where the residents are subject to strict surveillance and segregation in what could be seen as a permanent state of emergency. The current plans for rebuilding Nahr al-Bared seek to extend this state of emergency by expanding the military’s role in controlling the camp and its populace in what could be described as “outdoor imprisonment” (Michel Foucault, quoted in Agier 2007: viii). The resident ‘refugees’ can therefore more appropriately be considered ‘detainees’, whose existence is reduced to ‘bare life’.

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Acknowledgments This essay was written under the Research Council of Norway Grant No. 171546/V10. I would like to thank Mahmoud Zeidan for organizing field visits to Nahr al-Bared and Beddawi refugee camps in September 2008. I am grateful to Jaber Suleiman for organizing interviews with Lebanese and Palestinian officials during 2006–2009. Finally, I owe special thanks to Sari Hanafi for introducing me to the works of Giorgio Agamben. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes 1. Fatah al-Islam, now purportedly numbering about 200 men, the majority of them Arabs, can be described as a militant Islamist movement that draws inspiration from al-Qaeda. In the weeks leading up to the outbreak of the crisis in Nahr al-Bared, Fatah al-Islam had been involved in armed clashes with rival factions in the refugee camp and stood accused of being involved in bomb attacks on civilians (“Army Trades Deadly Blows with Militants,” Daily Star, 21 May 2007). The battle in May began when the army accidentally uncovered a Fatah al-Islam ‘cell’ in Tripoli. The fighting later shifted to the camp itself, where Fatah al-Islam had established its headquarters. 2. The Cairo Agreement provided administrative autonomy to the camps, lifted the ban on employment, and, for the first time, authorized Palestinian attacks on Israel from Lebanese soil. The agreement was abrogated in 1987, but the camps have remained de facto autonomous. 3. The Hezbollah leader warned against attacking the camp but did not intervene in the army’s siege. 4. During the May 2008 riots in Beirut, 65 people were killed and 200 wounded. Still, the army neither intervened nor attempted to disarm the militiamen who flooded the streets. 5. Additionally, the army avoided entering the camp due to the Cairo Agreement, which vests internal governance and security of the camps with the Palestinian political factions.

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6. A Palestinian refugee born in Jericho in 1955, al-Absi first joined the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1982, he left the PLO to become a member of the breakaway faction Fatah Intifada. In early 2006, al-Absi founded Fatah al-Islam. It is believed that he was killed or arrested by Syrian security forces in December 2008. See http://english.aljazeera. net/news/middleeast/2008/12/20081210174029633363.html. 7. “Ad Campaign Salutes Military’s Sacrifices in Bloody Battle with Fatah al-Islam,” Daily Star, 25 June 2007. 8. The residents’ objections were sent in an open letter to Lebanon’s prime minister. Titled “Letter from the Residents of Nahr el Bared to His Excellency Prime Minister Fouad el Siniora,” the communication was dated 23 January 2009. 9. The Nahr al-Bared master plan specifies the size and layout of housing units, apartment blocks, and roads. To the displaced refugees, the housing plan resembles military barracks separated by wide streets designed to facilitate surveillance and policing. The preliminary master plan was approved by UNRWA in February 2008. The finalized master plan for the reconstruction is awaiting approval by the Council of Ministers. See http://www.lpdc.gov.lb/Sections/STopics. aspx?id=21&displang=en-us&Type=4. 10. Due to lack of funds, UNRWA is reducing the food and housing subsidy to displaced refugees, which in 2009 was about $300 per month. The subsidy can offset neither the hardships of displacement nor the loss of home and income. According to the author’s interview with an official of UNRWA in Beirut on 25 March 2009, only 2 percent of the displaced refugees can subsist without economic support. 11. During the civil war, three refugee camps (Nabatieh, Dikwaneh, and Jisr el-Basha) were destroyed by Israeli forces and were not rebuilt by the government. 12. Officially, the government of Lebanon rejects the settlement of refugees in the country. However, there is widespread belief that Lebanon would do so as part of a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. 13. Interview conducted by author with Nahr al-Bared refugee, 12 September 2008. 14. “Nahr al-Bared Crisis Takes Toll on Most Vulnerable,” Daily Star, 29 May 2007.

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15. Security has also been tightened in the nearby Beddawi camp, where most of the internally displaced Nahr al-Bared refugees initially sought refuge. 16. In this and other instances, the graffiti had been partially covered with paint to make it illegible (Knudsen, Suleiman, and Zeidan 2010). Incidents of looting, abuse, and racist graffiti in Nahr al-Bared have been documented by a-films (http://a-films. blogspot.com/), an anarchist film collective. 17. The army also stands charged with the physical abuse and torture of refugees accused of being supporters and members of Fatah al-Islam (Human Rights Watch 2007). Pictures and videos recorded by mobile phones that document these abuses are widely circulated in the country.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ______. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Agier, Michel. 2002. “Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps.” Ethnography 3, no. 3: 317–341. ______. 2007. On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Amnesty International. 2007. “Exiled and Suffering: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon.” MDE 18/010/2007, 17 October. http:// www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE18/010/2007 (accessed 4 February 2010). Barak, Oren. 2009. The Lebanese Army. New York: State University of New York. Dudai, Ron. 2006. “Through No Fault of Their Own: Punitive House Demolitions during the al-Aqsa Intifada.” Human Rights Quarterly 28 no. 3: 783–795. Gaub, Florence. 2007. “Multi-Ethnic Armies in the Aftermath of Civil War: Lessons Learned from Lebanon.” Defence Studies 7, no. 1: 5–20.

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Goodhand, Jonathan, and David Hulme. 1999. “From Wars to Complex Political Emergencies: Understanding Conflict and PeaceBuilding in the New World Disorder.” Third World Quarterly 20, no. 1: 13–26. Government of Lebanon. 2007. “Nahr el Bared Crisis Appeal: PostConflict Relief, Recovery and Reconstruction.” Beirut: Lebanese Republic, Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Reconstruction and Recovery Program Technical Note. Hanafi, Sari. 2008. “Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: Laboratories of State-in-the-Making, Discipline and Islamist Radicalism.” Pp. 82–100 in Lentin 2008. Human Rights Watch. 2007. “Lebanon: End Abuse of Palestinians Fleeing Refugee Camp.” Human Rights Watch, 12 June. http:// hrw.org/english/docs/2007/06/13/lebano16154.htm (accessed 2 February 2010). IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks). 2007. “Lebanon: Rebuilding Camp Will be UNRWA’s ‘Largest Humanitarian Project,’” 14 November. http://www.irinnews.org/Report. aspx?ReportId=75296 (accessed 4 January 2010). Khalidi, Muhammad A., and Diane Riskedahl. 2007. “The Road to Nahr al-Barid: Lebanese Political Discourse and Palestinian Civil Rights.” Middle East Report 244 (Fall). http://www.merip.org/ mer/mer244/khalidi_riskedahl.html. Knudsen, Are. 2009. “Widening the Protection Gap: The ‘Politics of Citizenship’ for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon, 1948–2008.” Journal of Refugee Studies 22, no. 1: 1–20. Knudsen, Are, Jaber Suleiman, and Mahmoud Zeidan, dirs. 2010. Nahr El-Bared Talks Back. Beirut: Documentary film, 40 minutes. Lentin, Ronit, ed. 2008. Thinking Palestine. London: Zed Books. Sayigh, Rosemary. 1994. Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon. London: Zed Books. ______. 2005. “A House Is Not a Home: Permanent Impermanence of Habitat for Palestinian Expellees in Lebanon.” Holy Land Studies 4, no. 5: 17–39. Tiltnes, Åge A. 2007. “A Socio-economic Profile of the Nahr El-Bared and Beddawi Refugee Camps of Lebanon.” FAFO Paper No. 2007:16. Oslo: FAFO. http://www.fafo.no/pub/ rapp/10036/10036.pdf (accessed 2 February 2010). Volk, Lucy. 2009. “Martyrs at the Margins: The Politics of Neglect in Lebanon’s Borderlands.” Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 2: 263–282.

The Strength of Weak Ideas? Human Security, Policy History, and Climate Change in Bangladesh

P David Lewis

The problem of climate change has rapidly come to preoccupy development researchers and policy makers. This essay discusses recent international attention being paid to Bangladesh as a result of this growing concern and considers the implications of this issue for human security. It asks whether lessons are being learned from the past about how coherent policy responses to long-standing environmental and developmental problems can be developed, questions the ‘crisis narrative’ approach to climate change, and draws a historical comparison with a major donor-led flood control initiative that took place two decades ago in Bangladesh. Comparing the contemporary challenges of climate change with earlier policy responses to HIV/AIDS, Dyson (2005) highlights a key difficulty: our frequent inability to take in the ‘big picture’. What tends to happen is that ‘experts’ in the field massively underestimate the social side of such problems, since they are mainly preoccupied with narrow technical specializations. And as Mosse (2005) reminds us, policy is as much a social phenomenon as it is a technical one.

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The concept of human security, while far from new, has recently gained more prominence in development circles. Human security refers to the idea that development policy, rather than focusing simply on narrower notions about national security, should also secure people’s well-being. Security is therefore not just a matter of external threats to countries, but should also encompass internal threats, such as malnutrition, crime, and environmental degradation. Bangladesh, a country located within a low-lying river delta that has long been highly vulnerable to regular, devastating floods and cyclones, contains citizens who are forced to live in one of the least environmentally secure countries in the world. Here, in the four decades since Bangladesh’s birth in 1971, international development donors have long exercised a high degree of influence and power through the transfer of large-scale financial resources and in the ways that they have shaped ideas, understandings, and agendas for action in relation to the country’s many problems (Wood 1994). Discussing human security and development, Green (2008: 288) argues that we need a combination of “public pressure and far-sighted leadership,” if vulnerable people are to be equipped with the means to cope with increasingly high levels of risk, and if the capacity of governments to give their people appropriate support is to be strengthened. Meeting such a challenge will also depend on policy makers being able to operate in ways that recognize more effectively the social dimensions of policy. In particular, there is a reluctance among development agencies to engage with one crucially important aspect of the social dimensions of policy—policy history. In Bangladesh, as elsewhere, it is striking how the histories of previous policies are only poorly remembered, or even sometimes entirely forgotten, within the ‘perpetual present’ of policy-making discourses (Lewis 2009).

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This essay explores a potential problem of ‘policy amnesia’ in relation to the 1989–1993 Flood Action Plan (FAP). Just as today the climate change issue has begun to loom very large over contemporary development efforts in Bangladesh, bringing together international donors, government agencies, engineers, natural and social scientists, activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and local communities within a crisis narrative of environmental catastrophe, it is nevertheless important and useful to remember that in some significant ways we have actually been here at least once before. It is therefore surprising that reference to the FAP experience appears to be completely absent from today’s climate change policy debates in Bangladesh. The essay argues that it might be fruitful to reopen this chapter in Bangladesh’s recent past to renewed scrutiny.

Bangladesh and Climate Change There is now a consensus that climate change is real and is presently with us. The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that, by the end of the current century, the average global temperature may rise by around 3 degrees Celsius and that sea levels could rise by 59 centimeters. More frequent periods of heat waves and heavy rainfall are also predicted (see Huq and Satterthwaite 2008). The lack of international progress on negotiating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions has increased the need for urban and rural communities to take measures that will help them adapt to the risks of increased storms, floods, and landslides that are likely to impact negatively on their livelihoods and well-being. The United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCC) specifies that developed countries are

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committed to helping “particularly vulnerable” countries meet the costs of climate change adaptation. Four funds have been created by the UNFCC for this purpose: (1) the Adaptation Fund, which sits under the Kyoto Protocol and is financed through a levy on carbon trading transactions between developed and developing countries; (2) the Special Climate Change Fund, which supports adaptation measures along with other strategies, such as economic diversification, technology transfer, and mitigation; (3) the Least Developed Countries Fund, which supports National Adaptation Programmes of Action in the most disadvantaged countries; and (4) the Global Environment Facility’s Strategic Priority on Adaptation program, which pilots ‘operational approaches’ to adaptation. The last three funds are replenished through voluntary pledges and contributions from donors and are additional to Official Development Assistance. Many Western donors have now also begun to allocate funding within their development assistance programs for a range of adaptation activities. These include both stand-alone projects and what has become known as the ‘climate proofing’ of existing programs and projects (Huq and Satterthwaite 2008). In Bangladesh, both rural and urban communities are at risk from climate change. The capital city of Dhaka has a long history of vulnerability to monsoon flooding, which has brought about enormous human suffering and economic losses. With 40 percent of Dhaka’s communities living in slums and squatter settlements, and with inadequate city drainage resulting from poor infrastructure and management, floods regularly affect half the area of the city. Climate change is predicted to affect Dhaka through the twin problems of floods (worsened by increased rainfall and the melting of Himalayan snow and glaciers) and increased heat stress (the city’s temperatures being slightly higher than those of the surrounding areas) (Alam 2008).

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Within the donor community, the current trend is one of “mainstreaming climate change into development and national planning” (Huq and Ayers 2008). In the words of one staff member of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), climate change has now moved from the periphery “to the center” of all DFID activities in Bangladesh. In November 2007, the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) announced that it would incorporate the impacts of climate change into all its development activities and accordingly revised its interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. The GoB has since adopted recommendations from the World Bank regarding climate change impacts into a new 25-year water sector plan, its coastal zone management programs, and its disaster-preparedness plans. A joint DFID-GoB meeting was held in London in September 2008, in preparation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen in 2009. The result was a pledge made by the UK for £75 million in additional funding over the next five years to help fight climate change through adaptation, technology transfer, and mitigation and through international resource mobilization to assist Bangladesh’s efforts. The GoB also announced that it would add $45 million of its own resources during 2009 and outlined its plans for a Multi-Donor Trust Fund, a ‘basket funding’ mechanism for adaptation resources. In August 2009, the Ministry of Environment and Forests produced the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan 2009,1 a comprehensive document that, while perhaps short on implementation detail, appeared to signal that the GoB was itself taking the lead on the issue. Media discourse on Bangladesh and climate change has also become more intense and increasingly draws on a crisis narrative.2 In an article on the work of an NGO, Plan

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International, in Bangladesh (Guardian, 26 April 2008), Raekha Prasad writes, “One of Bangladesh’s greatest potential problems is the creation of climate change refugees: people who can no longer farm on drowning coastal and river areas are forced inland to the country’s already crammed cities.” Less cautiously, in a Reuters news agency article dated 14 April 2008, the headline screamed “Bangladesh Faces Climate Refugee Nightmare.”3 The term ‘climate refugee’ is particularly jarring for long-term observers of poverty and livelihoods issues in Bangladesh, because it implies a break with past behaviors as a result of recent climate trends, rather than a continuation and intensification of long-term livelihood strategies. It obscures the fact that, for many people, moving around as a result of Bangladesh’s unstable river and coastal ecology is not a qualitatively new phenomenon but has long been part of life—an outcome of people’s fragile livelihoods. Rivers regularly change course, and coastal areas are constantly undergoing erosion. A range of long-term development initiatives, including income generation, community organization, land rights strengthening, and infrastructure building, have long been engaging with such problems. A report by Johann Hari (Independent, 20 June 2008), titled “Bangladesh Is Set to Disappear under the Waves by the End of the Century,” is particularly detailed.4 In Dhaka, Hari interviewed Bangladeshi climate scientist Atiq Rahman, who provides basic facts that inform current diagnoses of Bangladesh’s situation: as sea levels rise, land is lost from the coastal areas, and as rivers flowing down into the delta from the melting Himalayan glaciers accelerates, more land is lost through more rapid soil erosion. The article points out that extreme weather events such as the devastating Cyclone Sidr of 2007 are increasing in frequency.5 Hari recounts stories told by coastal villagers about problems of salinity in drinking water, farmland that has

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become too damaged to grow crops, and coastal seas that are now too treacherous for fishing. On one island near Cox’s Bazar, he finds two-thirds of the land gone and a population that, over 20 years, has shrunk from 30,000 to 18,000. Hari also draws attention to the fears that growing pressures on resources brought about by climate change could fuel civil disorder and religious intolerance.6 Linking Bangladesh’s crisis with the need for the world’s wealthy countries to take action on the causes of climate change, he concludes that “if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame.”

The Flood Action Plan (1989–1993) In Bangladesh’s policy history, concerns about environment and human security in relation to flood control have from time to time attracted large-scale attention from the development community. The British colonial authorities, for example, commissioned a number of studies and public works in the struggle to manage rivers and embankments (Iqbal 2007). In the late 1980s, after many years of relative neglect,7 international donors suddenly became interested in flood control once again after the disastrous and wellpublicized 1987 and 1988 floods. Many environmentalists at that time had begun to link the recent floods to growing levels of soil erosion, which were believed to be the consequence of increasing Himalayan deforestation upstream in the mountains of Nepal. The country’s long-standing ‘flood problem’ suddenly became a donor priority and a high-profile international cause. In 1989–1990, during what was to be the final year of the authoritarian government of General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, a major multi-donor project known as the Flood Action Plan (FAP) began to take shape. The impetus for addressing, once and

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for all, a comprehensive solution to Bangladesh’s flood problem was given an extra fillip by reports that Madame Mitterrand, the wife of the French president, who had been visiting Dhaka, had been alarmed to find water coming under her door (Boyce 1990). A communiqué from the G7 summit held in July 1989 stated: “Bangladesh … is periodically devastated by catastrophic floods … [There was] … need for effective, coordinated action by the international community, in support of the Government of Bangladesh, in order to find solutions to this major problem which are technically, financially, economically and environmentally sound” (World Bank, quoted in Adnan 1991: 8). Approved formally in May 1990, the proposed FAP included a total of 26 studies and pilot schemes: 11 main components and 15 supportive components. The aim was to construct tall embankments along both sides of Bangladesh’s three main rivers at an estimated cost of $5 billion to $10 billion. This mega-project was to be one of the largest development projects ever undertaken. France joined with Japan, the United Nations Development Programme, and USAID to engage a wide range of foreign experts, including engineers and later social scientists, to devise flood prevention and control schemes. However, the FAP became controversial for four main sets of reasons. First, the top-down manner in which the plan took shape in London under World Bank leadership raised important questions about accountability, consultation, and participation. The donors had not considered lessons learned from earlier flood control measures before the plan was finalized, nor was there any public consultation (Adnan 1991). When the Ershad government fell in late 1990, a new interim government, led by Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed, took power in a ‘caretaker’ role. A government task force on the FAP in February 1991 reported a

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range of concerns, particularly about the fact that the plan had not been opened to public debate (Custers 1993). Second, the FAP’s primarily technical emphasis on engineering solutions to problems of floods, based mainly on the construction of embankments and sluice gates, paid little attention to the potential of ‘softer’, people-centered solutions that draw on past traditions of community management of floods and build upon generations of local experience in dealing with the problem.8 The FAP seemed blind to the political and administrative complexity of how such infrastructure could be effectively operated and equitably managed. Conflicts of interest quickly appeared within government and donor bureaucracies and foreign consultancy teams. International opposition began to mobilize; for example, the US International Rivers Network argued that intervening in a powerful regional river system would actually worsen the flooding (Custers 1993). This view echoed far older—and largely forgotten—experiences from the British colonial period, when it was found that building river embankments seriously threatened local agricultural productivity and contributed to the deterioration of rivers (Iqbal 2007). As early as 1927, a Calcutta professor, Prasanta C. Mahalanobis, had produced a study of the North Bengal floods of 1922, which had argued that constructing embankments simply worsened floods in the long term, because they had the effect of raising river beds (Adnan 2000). Third, the project relied predominantly on donor country expertise gained from dissimilar contexts such as lowland water management in the Netherlands and flood control in the US Mississippi, both of which were potentially out of step with Bangladesh’s own distinctive ecology and society. Even at a technical level (leaving aside history, politics, and society), problems quickly became apparent.

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Fourth, the establishment of the FAP quickly began to dominate development activities in Bangladesh. Hundreds of preliminary studies were commissioned to consider a wide range of water-related issues around the country, engaging large numbers of local and expatriate researchers, consultants, and administrators and drawing them away from work on other equally important issues. Development in Bangladesh, it seemed, had now become subordinated to the focus on flood control. As a result of these problems, by 1993 the plan had started to fade from view. The Dhaka embankment and another one built in Tangail, along with hundreds of wordprocessed studies cluttering the shelves of agencies and consultants’ offices, were the only tangible results of what was to have been a showcase mega-project. Contestation from local communities, such as that in Beel Dakatia, had also contributed to international mobilization against the plan (Adnan 2000). A report in the UK weekly New Scientist by Pearce and Tickell (1993) explained that the very donors that had launched the FAP initiative four years earlier had finally lost confidence in the project. As Wood (1999) pointed out in a later overview, the FAP had been a contestation over water resources in which ordinary people had had very little voice in either the diagnosis of the problem or the design of policy solutions. A key lesson, therefore, was that privileging the ‘expert knowledge’ of engineers, bureaucrats, and developmentalists was a poor substitute for engaging with local communities and their institutions.

Policy History, Lesson Learning, and Development Learning from the past is not a strong point when it comes to the record of mainstream development agencies, which

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usually give more attention to the promised delivery of changes in the future than on an analysis of the history and fortunes of past development efforts, with the result that they live in a form of perpetual present (Lewis 2009). This is a condition characterized by an abundance of frequently changing jargon, constant excitement about a set of new approaches that promise better chances of success than those currently in place, and a strong, and in many ways understandable, pressure to look to the future rather than dwelling on the past. A key reason for this has been the infusion of ideologies of managerialism into the organized worlds of development (Roberts, Jones, and Frohling 2005). Through its relentless emphasis on novelty and change, managerialism discourages contemplating the very ideas of past and present. In so doing, the world of development practice is further decontextualized, as Cornwall and Brock (2005) demonstrate in their analysis of the ways in which development “buzzwords,” such as empowerment, participation, and poverty reduction, serve to maintain what they argue is a strongly “imagined narrative” of development. This narrative relies on consensus rather than issues of politics and power, and on neologisms that remove present-day development from deeper historical references. Not only do the more familiar planning tools such as ‘logical frameworks’ form part of this process, but also the new types of ‘progressive’ language serve to indicate that development policy is ‘moving forward’. For example, while the large numbers of people who live on Bangladesh’s shifting silt islands (known as ‘chars’) have learned to cope with the frequent movements and migrations necessary to maintain a livelihood in what has long been an insecure and inhospitable environment, it is only during the last few years, with the onset of climate change discourse, that such people have come to be labeled ‘climate

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change refugees’ by donors and NGOs. There is a danger that the crisis discourse of climate change is beginning to obscure other deep-rooted causes of insecurity and the policy efforts being made to address these problems, which include flooding in vulnerable areas due to poor water management policies, or the growth of salinity, which is caused primarily by the expansion of commercial shrimp farming (cf. Deb 1998). The FAP was part of an earlier chapter of policy history, and the circumstances at the time were in important respects different from the unfolding of today’s climate change and development agendas in Bangladesh. For example, there is now perhaps more participation of NGOs in planning discussions and a far greater emphasis on community-based adaptation. The government is situating itself more centrally in relation to international donors than it did in the years of the FAP, and it is becoming more active in building a wider range of international linkages and relationships. Yet there are also continuities. A tendency toward generalized assumptions, technocratic solutions, and an essentialized crisis narrative is strongly reminiscent of the FAP period. At the same time, an emerging critique of the recent DFIDGoB climate change initiative, in which local and international civil society actors criticize what they see as an overly top-down approach and an unbalanced emphasis on infrastructure development, has striking parallels with earlier critiques of the FAP.9

Conclusion My argument is not to suggest that current concerns about climate change are unimportant for people, policy makers, or development agencies in Bangladesh. Instead, the

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purpose of this essay is to question the ways that climate change issues are being ‘mainstreamed’ within development processes and activities. The security and well-being of Bangladesh’s people are likely to be better served by approaches to tackling problems associated with climate change that are more fully rooted in a critical interrogation of recent development policy history and of lessons to be learned from it. Of course, learning lessons from history is not, as MacMillan (2009) argues, a straightforward matter, since such ‘lessons’ are highly vulnerable to acts of manipulation and distortion by those with power. MacMillan concludes that “if the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism, and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful” (ibid.: 169). In the context of climate change and development in Bangladesh, we need to reflect further on three interlinked issues. The first is the dangerous oversimplification implied by the crisis narratives of climate change that are gaining ground in the media, both locally and internationally. As Barnett (2009) warns, there is a danger that what he terms ‘security institutions’ (which arguably include development agencies) may appropriate climate change discourses in order to further their own institutional agendas. The second is the need to engage better with the knowledge that has been built up over generations among the people who live within Bangladesh’s rivers and deltas and with the long-term policy experiences of officials who have worked alongside these people over the years. Doing this will imply a greater recognition of the diversity of local community responses to climate change in different cultural, environmental, and institutional contexts (ibid.). The third is to recognize and to begin to address the tendency of development agencies to confine themselves to the realm of the perpetual present, in which development

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policy history and institutional memory are largely ignored in favor of future-oriented discourse and action. The interplay between these three issues contributes to the risk of an overwhelming urge to demonstrate action in ways that may create new policy ‘disjunctures’ (cf. Lewis and Mosse 2006), which unhelpfully break with the trajectories of longer-term development efforts and experiences. There is a play on words in the title of this essay, referring to Mark Granovetter’s influential idea of the ‘strength of weak ties’—that is, the argument that, in some contexts, weak connections may offer people better opportunities for economic advancement than strong ones. Using this analogy in the present argument, my intention is to suggest that policy requires only simple stories. Ideas that have not been systematically thought out or subjected to historical scrutiny become attractive to policy actors—in this case donors, governments, and NGOs—precisely because they carry an immediate power within the perpetual present of a policy context. There are many vital challenges that face us in relation to climate change, particularly in the context of the impoverished society and fragile ecology of a country such as Bangladesh. Here, “Giddens’s paradox”—the idea that since climate change effects remain largely invisible and intangible, no action is likely to be taken until it is too late (Giddens 2009: 2)—seems most open to question and therefore where this paradox may be most effectively challenged. There will be a better chance of making progress with this task if we reflect more fully on the histories of international donor and government involvement in issues such as floods, people, and insecurity in Bangladesh. Far-sighted leadership within development policy communities will surely require a stronger understanding of this history, rather than simply a reliance on the novel power of weak ahistorical ideas.

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank Jessica Ayers (London School of Economics), Martin Prowse (Overseas Development Institute), Simon Batterbury (University of Melbourne), and the editors of this volume for very useful comments on an earlier draft. Any errors remain my own.

Notes 1. See http://europa.eu/epc/pdf/bangladesh_en.pdf. 2. I am grateful to Jessica Ayers for pointing this out. 3. See http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/DHA234479. htm (accessed 10 November 2008). 4. For more, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/ bangladesh-is-set-to-disappear-under-the-waves-by-the-end-ofthe-century--a-special-report-by-johann-hari-850938.html. 5. Although Sidr is believed to have been one of the severest cyclones on record, due to improved warning and shelter facilities, the resulting loss of life (around 5,000–10,000) was only a fraction of the 190,000 lives lost in 1991 to a similar event. 6. Hari (Independent, 20 June 2008) quotes US academic Philip Jenkins’s discussion on the connection between climate change and religious violence. Jenkins points out that during the Little Ice Age, which affected the northern hemisphere between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, Jews and witches became the “scapegoats” for the cooling, to be punished by the Church. Hari ponders, “Will jihadism swell with the rising seas?” 7. Prior to the 1980s, the last major activity had been the East Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority Master Plan of 1964 (when Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan) after serious flooding occurred during 1954–1956. The plan was funded by USAID and the World Bank (Adnan 2000). 8. Boyce (1990) illustrated this point with the observation that, unlike in English, Bengali distinguishes between normal, positive flooding, which rejuvenates the land each year (barsha), and abnormal or harmful floods, which cause distress (bonna). 9. See http://www.equitybd.org/feedback/feedback.htm#2.

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References Adnan, Shapan. 1991. Floods, People and the Environment: Institutional Aspects of Flood Protection Programmes in Bangladesh, 1990. Dhaka: Research and Advisory Services. ______. 2000. “Explaining the Retreat from Flood Control in the Granges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta of Bangladesh.” Unpublished paper, South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. Alam, Mozaharul. 2008. “Floods in Dhaka.” id21 insights 71 (January). http://www.eldis.org/go/topics/insights/2008/climatechange-and-cities/floods-in-dhaka. Barnett, Jon. 2009. “The Prize of Peace (Is Eternal Vigilance): A Cautionary Editorial Essay on Climate Geopolitics.” Climatic Change 96, nos. 1–2: 1–6. Boyce, James K. 1990. “Birth of a Mega-project: Political Economy of Flood Control in Bangladesh.” Environmental Management 14, no. 4: 419–428. Cornwall, Andrea, and Karen Brock. 2005. “What Do Buzzwords Do for Development Policy? A Critical Look at ‘Participation’, ‘Empowerment’ and ‘Poverty Reduction.’” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 7: 1043–1060. Custers, Peter. 1993. “Bangladesh’s Flood Action Plan: A Critique.” Economic and Political Weekly 28, 29/30 (17–24 July): 1501–1503. Deb, Apurba Krishna. 1998. “Fake Blue Revolution: Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts of Shrimp Culture in the Coastal Areas of Bangladesh.” Ocean and Coastal Management 41: 63–88. Dyson, Tim. 2005. “On Development, Demography and Climate Change: The End of the World as We Know It.” Population and Environment 27, no. 2: 117–149. Giddens, Anthony. 2009. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Green, Duncan. 2008. From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World. Oxford: Oxfam. Huq, Saleemul, and Jessica Ayers. 2008. “Climate Change Impacts and Responses in Bangladesh.” Brussels: European Parliament, DG Internal Policies, Economic and Scientific Policy (January). http://www.europarl.europa.eu/activities/committees/studies/ download.do?file=19195.

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Huq, Saleemul, and David Satterthwaite. 2008. “Editorial: Climate Change and Cities.” id21 insights 71 (January). http://www.eldis. org/go/topics/insights/2008/climate-change-and-cities/editorial. Iqbal, Iftekhar. 2007. “The Railways and the Water Regime of the Eastern Bengal Delta, c. 1845–1943.” Internationales Asienforum 38, nos. 3–4: 329–352. Lewis, David. 2009. “International Development and the ‘Perpetual Present’: Anthropological Approaches to the Rehistoricisation of Policy.” European Journal of Development Research 21, no. 1: 32–46. Lewis, David, and David Mosse. 2006. “Encountering Order and Disjuncture: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on the Organisation of Development.” Oxford Development Studies 34, no. 1: 1–14. MacMillan, Margaret. 2009. The Uses and Abuses of History. London: Profile Books. Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto Press. Pearce, Fred, and Oliver Tickell. 1993. “West Sinks Bangladesh Flood Plan.” New Scientist, 21 August. Roberts, Susan M., John P. Jones III, and Oliver Frohling. 2005. “NGOs and the Globalization of Managerialism.” World Development 33, no. 11: 1845–1864. Wood, Geoffrey D. 1994. Whose Ideas, Whose Interests? Dhaka: University Press. ______. 1999. “Contesting Water in Bangladesh: Knowledge, Rights and Governance.” Journal of International Development 11, no. 5: 731–754.

Seduced by Security The Politics of (In)Security on Lombok, Indonesia

P Kari Telle

Returning to the Indonesian island of Lombok in 2001, I was struck by the bewildering range of civilian patrol and security groups that had sprung up since the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998, when the country embarked on a rocky process of democratization and decentralization. These groups have put their mark on the landscape in the form of hundreds of guard posts and occasional fortress-like watchtowers, strategically placed along major traffic routes. Driving through Central and East Lombok, my companions easily identified the group to which a guard post belonged from its emblematic colors and insignia. Most of these posts had been put up by Amphibi, a security-cum-vigilante group originating in East Lombok, which in 1999 boasted of having more than 200,000 registered members. Although this figure may well have been deliberately inflated, the existence of such sprawling formations—whose members patrol neighborhoods at night and track down, discipline, and sometimes kill alleged criminals—is bound to alter the social terrain. Seeing the lush landscape dotted with guard posts, I could not help but feel that it was being transformed by fear.

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Security concerns and measures continue to infiltrate the fabric of everyday life in Indonesia, giving rise to new organizational forms and ways of imagining self and society. Today, more than ten years after the authoritarian New Order regime proved to be vulnerable and Indonesians began ‘identifying with freedom’ (Day 2007b), the country is awash with popular initiatives, whose purported mission is to combat ‘crime’ and enhance security.1 If under the New Order the state had a near monopoly on the ‘securitization’ (Wæver 1995) of society, in recent years the role of all kinds of private organizations in providing physical protection has become more prominent. What is taking place is not simply “the privatisation of the public order” (Dijk 2001) but a parallel trend characterized by an ‘informalization’ of security arrangements. Marked by improvisation, flux, and short-term alliances, the latter trend is particularly apparent in poor neighborhoods and in rural communities with long-standing traditions of selfhelp and a deep-seated distrust of official authorities. My aim here is not to produce a systematic account and analysis of the different institutions and arrangements for the provision of security and of the relationships between the various actors involved. While such an exercise might be useful, it could all too easily give an appearance of ‘order’. My concern is rather to describe how the postSuharto landscape of privatized and informal security arrangements generates ambiguity and a heightened sense of insecurity. Moving into the realm of subjectivity, I will explore the mental climate that emerges when fear becomes habitual and saturates daily routines. Simply put, my contention is that the increasingly blurred boundary between state and non-state security providers creates its own dynamic of insecurity, contributing to a political culture that is rife with suspicion and conspiratorial machinations. In such a culture, conspiracy becomes a pervasive

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and legitimate form of political rationale, what Bubandt (2008: 809) calls “sensible paranoia.”

From Statist Security to Moral Militias Civilian involvement in policing and security management is nothing new in Indonesia. Long before the role of security became all-encompassing in the post-9/11 world, the Suharto regime turned its statist version of security into a fundamental societal discourse. Presenting itself as the guarantor of ‘safety and order’ (keamanan dan ketertiban), the armed forces had the dual function of defending the nation against foreign enemies and of maintaining regime stability by ‘guiding’ the development of society. The myth propagated by the regime was that the nation had fallen prey to disorder but was rescued by Suharto, the ‘Father of Development’ (Bapak Pembangunan), who provided security and put the country on the road toward modernization. What remained unspeakable was the violence committed by the regime itself, especially the 1965–1966 massacres of hundreds of thousands of people charged with being communists (Zurbuchen 2005). Also unacknowledged was the fact that both the army and the police cultivated profitable associations with civilian proxies and gangs. This blending of crime and authority has led scholars to suggest that Suharto’s government operated like a criminal gang, normalizing violence and extortion as state practice (Lindsey 2001; Schulte Nordholt 2002). Cultivating a sense of paranoia, the regime routinely reminded citizens of the threat posed by internal enemies, be they political or criminal. Taking part in the state-sponsored system of neighborhood watches was portrayed as a patriotic, masculine duty and as a vibrant expression of an Indonesian culture

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based on mutual assistance, self-help, and cooperation.2 This system had, as Joshua Barker (2007: 89) points out, several advantages for the regime: it cost the government very little, it facilitated a degree of state control over local security structures, and it produced a vigilant citizenry that “thought and acted like police.” What has happened on Lombok in the Reformasi (reform) era is that everyone feels entitled to be a policeman. Joining a civilian security group is the poor (and not so poor) man’s chance to play cop. As John MacDougall (2003) observes: “The sad fact is that in this post-Suharto period, the largest ‘civilian’ organisation on the island is a Pam Swakarsa [civilian militia].”3 Despite the distinct imprint of New Order military culture, many Lombok politicians have welcomed such popular initiatives to combat lawlessness as “a new form of ‘people’s power’” (MacDougall 2007: 287) that embodies the ‘participatory’ spirit of Reformasi. With the shift from state-secured development to neo-liberal democracy, greater civilian involvement in security has become a priority for politicians, who extol the virtues of a vigilant citizenry. The assumption that security is a collective effort of all citizens has been fueled by two interrelated developments: first, the retraditionalization of politics and, second, the insertion of Indonesia within the new security-development nexus (Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat 2007).4 As the Asian financial crisis deepened in 1997, demands for political change, no less than total Reformasi, grew from resentment against the centralist and corrupt regime. For their part, multilateral donor and development organizations that were deeply involved in the restructuring of the country, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, subscribed to the neo-liberal doctrine that decentralization would benefit the economy and foster democracy (Hadiz and Robison 2003). The discourse of

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‘participation’ and ‘local ownership’ promoted by these organizations was embraced by many actors, including those who claimed that local traditions of governance (which had been emasculated under the New Order) embodied these principles.5 As these traditions did not rest on a rigid separation between state and society, new and old elites could claim that a ‘return to tradition’ was in line with the latest recommendations of the policy community for the revitalization of civil society through participatory governance (Bubandt 2005; McCarthy 2004). Key here was the governmental program of decentralization, due to which considerable administrative and budgetary authority has devolved onto district and municipal governments. As a result, political competition among local elites has grown more intense. Part of the development package included support for police reform, including community-oriented policing programs that were meant to inspire trust by fostering police-community ‘partnerships’ and to make the police more ‘accountable’ to local communities. Before such donor initiatives got underway, local people had formed a plethora of security groups, which proved to be remarkably successful in recruiting members (Telle 2010).6 Most of these groups began as localized neighborhood watches, but some in Central and East Lombok quickly evolved into supra-local crime-fighting militias controlled by religious leaders. Part of the attraction of these formations was that they were not confined to a localized community but spanned village, district, and regency boundaries. In the case of Amphibi, branches were also established in neighboring provinces. Combining pragmatic self-interest with the moral discourse of development, these groups adopted organizational structures mimicking state institutions, with separate departments for security, economy, welfare, law, and even public relations. An aura of masculine prowess

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surrounded the men who, donning uniforms and hand phones, signed up and paid hefty fees to ‘develop’ the island by wiping out crime. Today, some of this heroic aura has faded, and Lombok has acquired an unenviable reputation as one of several places in Indonesia where thug rule is rampant (Colombijn 2002; Wilson 2005). Since citizenship has been shaped by the double logic of democracy and security, albeit biased toward the latter, civilians effectively exercise a form of vigilante citizenship. As a result, citizens are less inclined to claim their political rights and more likely to seek protection from security groups with some political backing. An unfortunate by-product of this rationality centered on security is that it becomes difficult to voice real political grievances. Antagonism and conflicts of interest are reframed as ‘threats’ to be eradicated through intimidation and violence. If the Suharto regime was a ‘state of fear’ (Barker 1998), contemporary Lombok has become a ‘society of fear’, in which the need for protection is a paramount concern.

Reading the Surface: Suspicion and Ambiguity The proliferation of so-called security providers, all of whom may dispense violence, has produced a volatile relationship between certainty and uncertainty. This is partly because the unregulated landscape of privatized and informal security has created ample opportunities for deceit and for abusing the position for private ends. The New Order habit of ‘keeping up appearances’ (Vickers 2001) has become vernacularized. Such conditions engender a climate of pervasive distrust, suspicion, and ‘sensible paranoia’. The result is what Patricia Spyer (2006: 206) calls a “hyperhermeneutic … a compulsive need

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to interpret and mine just about everything for hidden meaning, to see any trivial occurrence as a sign or omen of what might come.” This compulsion to read the surface in order to uncover hidden meanings is reflected in the new genre of crime stories that were circulating during my fieldwork in 2005 and 2006. Issues of duplicity and deceit run as a glimmering thread through these tales, which center on the difficulty of discerning people’s intentions when identities have become ambiguous. Consider the following story that my Sasak friend Amri (pseudonym) told me in 2005 about a ‘hot’ case in Desa Mangong, the Central Lombok village of his in-laws: On the eve of Lebaran [the feast celebrated at the end of the month of Ramadan], a cow went missing. The next morning, a man who was out collecting grass found a cow hidden in a bamboo grove. Recognizing it as the stolen cow, he reports back to his neighbors, who are confident that the culprit is the head (ketua) of the local branch of Yatopa [a civilian security group based in the village of Bodak, Central Lombok]. Because the owner of the stolen cow is an Amphibi member, his Amphibi unit takes on the task of investigating the case.

Here Amri interrupted his narrative to clarify that the alleged thief had also joined Amphibi. As far as Amri knew, only lay members may join a number of security groups, whereas the head must be neutral and cannot carry several identification cards. Some days later, the local Yatopa leader is visited by an old acquaintance, and they strike up a pleasant conversation. “Good to see you, old brother. You look well.” Suspecting nothing, the man agrees to go for a walk. When they step outside, a group of Amphibi members appear and tie his

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hands. They haul him onto a truck that heads toward Aiq Buka [a forested recreation area]. Thrown to the ground, he is beaten with stones, pieces of wood, and machetes and is made to confess his partners in crime. Even though the beating goes on for some time, the skin is not pierced. Suspecting that the thief is invulnerable (kebal) to iron, they search his body for protective amulets (azimat). They find one hidden in a trouser pocket. Once the amulet is removed, the body bursts open. The corpse is left on the road. Some days later, several Amphibi members turn up at his brother’s house. They drag him out of the house and get ready to douse him with gasoline. Surprisingly, some policemen turn up and rescue the poor guy. They take him to Praya [the district capital]. He was kept overnight but then released because there was no evidence.

My knowledge of the case is admittedly patchy, but it appears that the police had not questioned village authorities, witnesses, or Amphibi members about the series of events. How are we to read the morality of stories like this? Is it that no one is to be trusted, least of all those who claim to provide security? This story is part of an emerging broader discourse on disguise and revelation, premised on the assumption that people are other than what they seem to be. Highlighting the ambiguity of identities, this story pivots around the discovery that the thief is the local head of a crime-fighting unit. The man has also joined a competing group and hence carries two sets of identity papers. Whereas IDs are meant to facilitate recognition, identity tokens serve instead to dupe and mislead. What follows is a violent unmasking, whereby the man is stripped of layers of false identities. Violence and the removal of the protective amulet are a means of ‘reading’ that discloses the man’s identity as a thief, impostor, and traitor to the large Amphibi family. Seeking to produce order and stable categories,

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these Amphibi members engage in a form of community building. ‘Knowing’ that the dead man’s brother is an accomplice, they drag him out of the house in broad daylight. Violence produces ‘dead certainty’, to borrow Appadurai’s (1998) chilling phrase. The trouble is that the certainty produced under these conditions tends to confirm the pervasive distrust that prompted the need to scrutinize things in the first place. In these circumstances, it becomes sensible to be paranoid, a state of mind that translates into a form of “anticipatory practice” (Spyer 2006: 206) that aims at undercutting unpredictability but is also likely to entail violence. Despite the brutality chronicled in this account, it would be wrong to portray Amphibi and similar groups as mere killing machines. My interviews with members of different crime-fighting groups reveal a common focus on providing moral guidance by making offenders understand their actions as immoral, anti-social, and inimical to development. The first stage in this transformational proc­ ess is to confess and show willingness to repent. Offenders are told that they will be put under surveillance and are warned that new offenses will be severely punished. Under these circumstances, many do repent, and the best proof of being earnest is to join in the fight against crime. Not infrequently, former gangsters and thieves become unit heads. Having intimate knowledge of criminal networks, such men are reputed to possess magical powers. They are also feared and admired for their cunning and bravery (Telle 2003). However, this common recruiting practice also generates ambiguity and doubt as to the nature of so-called security providers, who coalesce into a formidable force that operates beyond the law. Amphibi’s emblem depicts a ferocious crocodile placed underneath a pair of crossed daggers. Some members explained that the daggers signify

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Amphibi’s power to eradicate evil, and the crocodile symbolizes the group’s amphibious ability to operate in any element, thanks to its modern communications equipment. Others took the crocodile to represent Amphibi’s brutish force. These conflicting interpretations alert us to the fact that such formations are both protective and predatory. Regardless of where they are placed on a state/ non-state continuum, those who control the means of violence are inherently Janus-faced (Stepputat, Andersen, and Møller 2007).

Conclusion This essay illustrates a well-known paradox: when people undertake actions to overcome fear and produce a sense of safety, these very actions are likely to affirm the sense of danger that they were intended to prevent. To quote Anthony Burke (2002: 20): “The promise of security breaks down because ‘security’ is bound in a dependent relation with ‘insecurity’, it can never escape it: it must continue to produce images of ‘insecurity’ in order to retain its meaning.” At the local level, there are people who see through the seductive logic of security, which thrives on violence, exclusion, and fear. A respected village elder, Bapen Semu, warned in 2001 that the new security groups were feeding on people’s misfortunes, that they were no better than witches who “dance on the grave” (tari di atas kubur). What he saw emerging was a kind of “free-for-all sovereignty” (Day 2007b: 9), in which aspects of New Order militarism were being reinvented in a decentralized neoliberal landscape encompassing a range of quasi-corporate and informal constellations of power. Conducted behind a façade of respectability, the new vigilantism has become a lucrative intersection of criminal and political interests.

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Notes 1. The New Order (Orde Baru) regime under General Suharto (1967–1998) had violently replaced the Old Order (Orde Lama) government headed by Sukarno (1945–1967), the first president of the Republic of Indonesia. 2. For an account of neighborhood security under the New Order, see Barker (1999). 3. Pam Swakarsa, or voluntary, self-reliant security corps, became widely known in 1998 when military-backed civilians were recruited to ‘protect’ the extraordinary parliamentary session in Jakarta against students who demanded radical political reform. 4. As security has become integral to the new development paradigm, development has become radicalized, not least because underdevelopment is seen as a source of instability and danger (Buur, Jensen, and Stepputat 2007; Duffield 2002). 5. On the politics of tradition in relation to faith-based security groups on Lombok, see Telle (2009, 2010). On the revival of tradition in Indonesian politics, see Davidson and Henley (2007). 6. By 2001, Amphibi was one of 68 registered Pam Swakarsa groups in the Indonesian province of West Nusa Tenggara. The two largest islands in the province are Lombok and Sumbawa. It is safe to assume that many similar gangs prefer to operate entirely on their own.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization.” Public Culture 10, no. 2: 225–247. Barker, Joshua. 1998. “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order.” Indonesia 66 (October): 7–42. ______. 1999. “Surveillance and Territoriality in Bandung.” Pp. 95–127 in Figures of Criminality, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, ed. Vincente L. Rafael. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. ______. 2007. “Vigilantes and the State.” Pp. 87–95 in Day 2007a. Bubandt, Nils. 2005. “Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds.” Security Dialogue 36, no. 3: 275–296.

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______. 2008. “Rumours, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia.” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3: 789–817. Burke, Anthony. 2002. “Aporias of Security.” Alternatives 27, no. 1: 1–27. Buur, Lars, Steffen Jensen, and Finn Stepputat, eds. 2007. The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Colombijn, Freek. 2002. “Maling, Maling: The Lynching of Petty Criminals.” Pp. 299–329 in Colombijn and Lindblad 2002. Colombijn, Freek, and J. Thomas Lindblad, eds. 2002. Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective. Leiden: KITLV Press. Davidson, Jamie S., and David Henley, eds. 2007. The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism. London: Routledge. Day, Tony, ed. 2007a. Identifying with Freedom: Indonesia after Suharto. New York: Berghahn Books. ______. 2007b. “Introduction: Identifying with Freedom.” Pp. 1–18 in Day 2007a. Dijk, Kees van. 2001. “The Privatisation of the Public Order: Relying on the Satgas.” Pp. 152–167 in Violence in Indonesia, ed. Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhöfer. Hamburg: Abera. Duffield, Mark. 2002. “Social Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance.” Development and Change 33, no. 5: 1049–1071. Hadiz, Vedi R., and Richard Robison. 2003. “Neo-liberal Reforms and Illiberal Consolidations: The Indonesian Paradox.” Southeast Asia Research Centre, Working Paper Series 52. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. Lindsey, Tim. 2001. “The Criminal State: Premanisme and the New Indonesia.” Pp. 283–297 in Lloyd and Smith 2001. Lloyd, Grayson, and Shannon Smith, eds. 2001. Indonesia Today: Challenges of History. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. MacDougall, John M. 2003. “Self-reliant Militias: Homegrown Security Forces Wield Great Power on Lombok.” Inside Indonesia 73 (January–March). http://www.insideindonesia.org/edition-73/ self-reliant-militias. ______. 2007. “Criminality and the Political Economy of Security in Lombok.” Pp. 281–306 in Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt and Geert Arend van Klinken. Leiden: KITLV.

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McCarthy, John F. 2004. “Changing to Gray: Decentralization and the Emergence of Volatile Socio-Legal Configurations in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.” World Development 32, no. 7: 1199–1223. Schulte Nordholt, Henk. 2002. “A Genealogy of Violence.” Pp. 33–61 in Colombijn and Lindblad 2002. Spyer, Patricia. 2006. “Some Notes on Disorder in the Indonesian Postcolony.” Pp. 188–218 in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Stepputat, Finn, Louise Andersen, and Bjørn Møller. 2007. “Introduction: Security Arrangements in Fragile States.” Pp. 3–20 in Fragile States and Insecure People? Violence, Security, and Statehood in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Louise Andersen, Bjørn Møller, and Finn Stepputat. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Telle, Kari. 2003. “The Smell of Death: Theft, Disgust and Ritual Practice in Central Lombok, Indonesia.” Pp. 75–104 in Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, ed. Bruce Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books. ______. 2009. “Swearing Innocence: Performing Justice and ‘Reconciliation’ in Post–New Order Indonesia.” Pp. 57–76 in Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots Agency for Peace, ed. Birgit Bräuchler. London: Routledge. ______. 2010. “Dharma Power: Searching for Security in Post–New Order Indonesia.” Pp. 141–156 in Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation-State, ed. Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, and Annelin Eriksen. New York: Berghahn Books. Vickers, Adrian. 2001. “The New Order: Keeping up Appearances.” Pp. 72–84 in Lloyd and Smith 2001. Wæver, Ole. 1995. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” Pp. 46–86 in On Security, ed. R. Lipschutz. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Ian Douglas. 2005. “The Changing Contours of Organised Violence in Post–New Order Indonesia.” Working Paper No. 118. Perth: Murdoch University, Asia Research Centre. Zurbuchen, Mary S., ed. 2005. Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Singapore: Singapore University Press.

Plural Security Moral Order and Security in Cambodia

P Alexandra Kent

This essay uses an ethnographic example taken from the ongoing revitalization of Buddhism in Cambodia to challenge the proposition that understandings of security should be limited and unified by establishing criteria that are independent of specific worldviews (Alagappa 1998: 51). All discourses and practices of security are embedded in history and culture; they are therefore both inescapably plural and inextricably tied to power. The concepts of security that have until now enjoyed political and academic currency have come mainly from the field of security studies. I contend that these have been largely ethnocentric and insensitive to alternative ways of formulating and experiencing security. Today’s global security paradigm, from which the interest in intervening in societies all over the world derives, is based on the ‘liberal peace’ model. This assumes that democratization, human rights, liberal market economics, and the integration of societies into the global community bring peace and stability (MacMillan 1998). The neo-liberal endeavor inscribed in this is endorsed by cosmopolitan elites who stand to gain from it. Its seductive rhetoric—such as improved living standards and livelihood

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opportunities—may provide only a thin disguise for the raw exploitative interests of those who benefit from the perpetuation of global inequity (Whitman 2005). These groups may celebrate democracy rhetorically while at the same time turning a blind eye to the brutal exclusion of the poor practiced by power-holders, as long as this disciplining furthers the neo-liberal endeavor (Hughes 2003; Springer 2009). In other words, the contemporary global security endeavor can be seen in terms of securing a modern, Western world order at the expense of the security of the most vulnerable. In widely different settings, such as Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, empirical research has shown that interventions ostensibly designed to establish security can deepen or accommodate inequalities in the target society, giving rise to tensions (Duffield 2001; Keen 2005: 177; Kostic´ 2007; Springer 2009) and leaving a culture of impunity in their wake (Fatima Ayub and Kouvo 2008). It is, of course, politically expedient for interveners to locate the reasons for failure in the target society rather than in their own approach. Viewed through the epistemological and normative lens of today’s global security paradigm, reports maintaining that intervention exacerbates the insecurity of the intervened appear to be irrelevant anomalies. Although some scholars have begun to examine the relationship between culture and security (Azeem Ibrahim 2008; Bubandt 2005; Der Derian 1995; Weldes et al. 1999), the debate is still embryonic, and anthropology’s contribution has barely been tapped. This essay uses an anthropological approach to contend that indiscriminately imposing upon others an epistemological paradigm that benefits today’s cosmopolitan elites is a cultural conceit. I propose that this paradigm should instead be radically critiqued by subaltern experience.

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Insecurity in Cambodia and the Monastery as a Site of Security Hughes (2003) has examined the triple transition produced by international intervention in Cambodia since the early 1990s, that is, from the Cold War command economy to a free market economy, from war to peace, from authoritarian rule to democracy. Economic liberalization has resulted in the increasing internationalization of the privileged stratum and the monopolization of rural political economies by profit-hungry city dwellers and officials. Springer (2009) has shown that donor-imposed neo-liberal reforms have meant that order and stability are achieved not through democratic processes but through the exercise of discipline and violent repression from above. Some 40 percent of Cambodians continue to live below the poverty line with precarious access to food, health care, employment, education, and justice. The land-grabbing and violence exercised against the poor by the military and by government officials are ignored, if not condoned, by the powers that be. Springer argues that the donor community’s rhetorical appeals for greater security for Cambodia’s poor conceal a deeper international concern with global economic interests. International intervention has arguably replaced the direct violence of the 1970s and 1980s with the indirect or structural violence of predatory business interests of the present day. For centuries, Buddhism in rural Cambodia has been a source of various forms of security for the people. Throughout Buddhism’s history in Cambodia—from its permeation of rural life in the thirteenth century, during the time of the French protectorate (1863–1953), and, ultimately, in the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century—the pagoda has provided villagers with vital support. This has included education for their sons, a refuge for the elderly, and a system of wealth redistribution through lay pagoda

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committees (Aschmoneit et al. 1997). Other services have included agricultural guidance (Navuth Chay 2002), healing, and a center for community life (Brown 1999; Delvert 1961; Kent 2003; Watts 1999). The pagoda has traditionally provided not only material and cosmological security but also moral and political security. The area enclosed by the ritually demarcated boundary (sima)1 of the pagoda is theoretically beyond the control of secular power. It therefore represents a space of moral righteousness and autonomy. Perhaps as early as the fourteenth century, Buddhist works of moral instruction, known in Khmer as chbap, were written by monks (Harris 2005: 86–89). These contained moral instructions for the laity, including the political and aristocratic elites. The importance of Buddhism in tempering the authority of secular power-holders is also evident in the numerous rebellions that have been led by monks against unrighteous leaders throughout the history of the Buddhist world. The concept of the righteous king, or dhammaraja, was a fundament of the pre-modern Cambodian polity, and the ideal of the virtuous leader persists to this day in the notion of the dhammika leader (Heng Monychenda 2008). The role of such a leader is to protect and to patronize but also to demonstrate obedience to the religion. The logic of Cambodian security I wish to explore here is captured by the Khmer concept sok,2 meaning wellbeing or peace of mind. The term is derived from the Pali word sukha, which means contentment or happiness. In Buddhist thought, this state is achieved by transcending the passions and desire and by practicing virtue. The Khmer term sok, therefore, draws upon a system of meaning that goes beyond our notion of security and is linked to Buddhist understandings of virtue. Sok plou chet was an expression I often heard during my fieldwork. The phrase captures the achievement of

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well-being through the mind/heart. The Khmer word chet, derived from the Pali citta,3 refers to both the mind and the heart, and thus to both intellect and emotions. Many monks and nuns, but also laypeople, with whom I have spoken have told me that they seek sok plou chet in the pagoda, through meditation, studying Buddhist teachings, receiving blessings from monks, or giving donations to achieve merit. Sok plou chet brings emotional and intellectual equanimity.4 Among my informants, there was broad consensus at every level of Cambodian society that leaders should exemplify such disciplining of their own minds in order to ensure sok for those who are dependent on them; they should protect their subordinates from the dangerous world by providing the “shade of dhamma” (Hinton 2005: 111). The annihilation of Buddhism by the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) and the subsequent decade of constraints under the Vietnamese occupying regime meant that much of Cambodia’s religious heritage was lost. Cambodians today hope that by regenerating Buddhism they may be able both to exert some moral control over their leaders and to motivate their leaders to exercise moral constraint. However, the monastery also provides authorities with a further source of power and legitimacy. By performing righteous deeds (bon), such as donating to the pagoda or giving alms to monks, the powerful gain access to the force of transcendent virtue, known by the Buddhist technical term parami.5 Politicians are keen to patronize pagodas or spend time as monks, partly in order to access this power but also to brandish their religious credentials through the success of the pagodas they support (Guthrie 2002). The introduction of procedural democracy to Cambodia in the early 1990s meant that a new system of formal legitimization had arrived, based upon the numbers of votes. However, Cambodians are more than aware that votes can be won by the threat of force or the promise of rewards and

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are thus a poor reflection of the leaders’ moral legitimacy among the people (Hughes 2006). Since power and moral legitimacy in Cambodia are fashioned through Buddhism, it seems appropriate to highlight the cultural quality of Cambodian security as it pertains both to the leaders/state and to the people.

The Pagoda: Place of Power or Platform for Politics? Two factors have radically altered the dynamics of the religio-political realm in Cambodia today. The first of these is the political co-optation of the sangha (community of monks) through its leadership, as described below. The second is the subsuming of the supra-political role of the monks into the process of democratization. In 1979, when the Vietnamese ousted the Khmer Rouge from large parts of Cambodia, they reordained seven Khmer former monks in an attempt to earn some legitimacy among the people. The youngest of these, Venerable Tep Vong, was later appointed head of a unified sangha,6 but he was also given the political positions of vice president of the Khmer National Assembly and vice president of the Central Committee of the Khmer United Front for National Construction and Defence. The party that evolved under Vietnamese supervision and later came to power, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), has since continued to support Tep Vong. He remains the supreme patriarch of the sangha. In popular opinion, however, Tep Vong is thought to be poorly trained in Buddhism and is widely seen as a puppet of a mistrusted, Vietnamese-friendly government. Just prior to the elections in 2003, Tep Vong tried to forbid monks from casting votes on the grounds that voting would be a breach of their ascetic vows. This was

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supported by CPP stalwarts as a correct interpretation of the scriptures, but many Cambodians saw it simply as an expression of the patriarch’s alignment with the government’s protection racket. The government was afraid that most monks would vote for the opposition and perhaps influence their congregations to do likewise. The second important development came with the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, which enshrined the right of universal adult suffrage and thereby included monks in the Cambodian electorate for the first time ever. This action formalized divisions that were already emerging among exiled Khmer monks during the 1980s (Harris 2001) and gave them party colors. Monks are traditionally respected authority figures with strong grassroots anchorage and nationwide spread. Their absorption into the electorate alerted politicians to the need to control them in order to keep up appearances of electoral support, particularly if monks happened to be charismatic and had leadership qualities. Although many of today’s young monks in rural areas are from poor families and sometimes voice subversive ideas, their vulnerability makes them easy prey to co-optation or coercion by the powerful. At one rural pagoda I visited in Takeo province, the local people were complaining that the village chief was trying to force their head monk to invite the country’s prime minister to officiate at the consecration ceremony for a new building. The head monk and most of the villagers wanted to keep their pagoda free of politics, but they were afraid of ‘trouble’ and so gave in. A middle-aged woman villager explained that by persuading the monk, the village chief could earn favors from the powerful, but it would also give the CPP a chance to manipulate the villagers. When politicians become associated with a pagoda and give gifts to the villagers and their monks, their generosity includes an implied threat to withhold protection,

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if villagers do not repay with their loyalty (see Hughes 2006). This story, like so many others I have heard in Cambodia, describes the conceptual inversion of sok, the principle of Khmer security. The pagoda is portrayed here as becoming improperly a space occupied by—rather than moderating—political power. At another rural pagoda, which was planning its consecration ceremony, a local representative of the Ministry of Religion and Cults confided that he was trying to persuade the head monk to invite one of the CPP officials to preside at the ceremony for the following reasons: I think that we cannot avoid inviting Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng because he is a high-ranking CPP official … We could invite another official, but it must be from the CPP because the CPP is the biggest party, and it has many officials among the people that the other parties don’t have and plenty of networks in the villages throughout the country. I want to invite the high-ranking official from the CPP, but that doesn’t mean that I follow the CPP. I just want the pagoda to get support and protection from the CPP … all the village chiefs are CPP, almost all the commune chiefs are CPP, almost all the police and military police are CPP, all provincial governors are CPP … Since almost everything in the country is under the control of the CPP, we have to be flexible. If we don’t invite CPP officials to attend the ceremony, that means they will ignore us for ever.

Today, as the international community purports to be building security in Cambodia through investment in the reconstruction of secular institutions, Cambodians themselves are creating their own version of security by pouring resources into the reconstruction of their religion. However, the decimation of Cambodian Buddhism that took place in the latter half of the 1970s has left the integrative moral center vulnerable to the disintegrative

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power of a global market of goods and ideas. Cambodian elites now seek legitimacy and sustenance in a consumerdriven global arena at the same time as they have largely broken free of the moral constraints of a sangha that has popular anchorage. For centuries, the powerful in Cambodia patronized pagodas in order to acquire divine power and moral legitimacy. Today, in contrast, they seek political power and legitimacy in the context of a sangha that has been severely weakened (both morally and intellectually) and of a new political economy. This political economy extends from a global paradigm of security that is indeed radically transforming Cambodians’ indigenous system of security. Instead of moderating the power of the elite, Buddhism may only be able to consolidate it. Cambodians from all walks of life express distress about what they see as the continuing dissolution of a coherent Khmer world.

Conclusions—Whose Security? I have argued here against the promotion of a universally applicable concept of security. Attempting to do so has thus far privileged a powerful, cosmopolitan elite. I have presented the ethnographic material above in order to challenge the supremacy of today’s dominant international understandings of security and to highlight ways in which these discredit and even destroy subaltern worlds. Today, dominant discourses render security in politicoeconomic terms. If religion is considered at all, it is as a distinct, subordinate element (Hasenclever and Rittberger 2000; Laustsen and Wæver 2000). This global construal is imposed upon various worlds in the normative guise of the liberal peace model, which assumes that democratization and neo-liberal reform will ensure global security.

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There is already a rich body of literature that argues that interventions based upon these suppositions may instead exacerbate or accommodate those inequalities in the target society, thus giving rise to instability. Indeed, there is much to suggest that the global system of rewards for compliant national power-wielders erodes their moral legitimacy at home, ultimately reducing the sense of shared destiny and security of the citizens of weaker states. Consequently, the everyday insecurities experienced by people like rural Cambodians are often the direct result of intervention into their lives by aspiring elites. Claiming to be providing for the vulnerable, the powerful are in fact looking to regiment those less fortunate while securing their own position in the neo-liberal world order. The ways in which the intervened try to deal with such insecurity should prompt social scientists and policy makers alike to listen with an open, self-critical mind and strive for culturally sensitive understandings of security, well-being, and development. This requires a reflexive stance that relativizes cosmopolitan understandings of development and security and genuinely empowers local knowledge within a global epistemology. If the cosmopolitan worldview could be broadened to include a more balanced awareness of other people’s experience, this would at the very least limit its hegemony and, at most, perhaps provoke an epistemological revolution. I therefore urge that knowledge about the feelings and common sense of ordinary people and the nature of their relationships be given equal weight to the dazzling rhetoric that is minted within circles of esteem in the corridors of power.

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Notes 1. The transliteration system used in this essay is phonetic. 2. The Lemon Khmer-English Dictionary, Version 1.0 (developed by the Lemon Computer Company) cites some 40 Khmer words of which sok forms the root. The semantic domain that these words cover includes ‘tranquility’, ‘peace’, ‘happiness’, ‘health’, ‘security’, ‘comfort’, ‘well-being’, and ‘ease’. See http://lemonkhmer-english-dictionary.software.informer.com/. 3. In Pali, citta refers to the heart (psychologically), that is, the center and focus of humankind’s emotional nature, as well as thought, the intellectual element that inheres in and accompanies its manifestations. See the Pali Text Society’s online Pali-English Dictionary at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/pali/. 4. See Kamala Tiyavanich (1997) for descriptions of how Thai forest monks quelled the aggressions of tigers and snakes with their powers of mind. 5. The term parami literally designates the 10 perfections of the Buddha, virtues that are looked on as a means of purification. 6. Prior to the Democratic Kampuchea regime, founded when the communist Khmer Rouge forces took power in 1975, Cambodian Buddhism consisted of two orders or nikayas.

References Alagappa, Muthiah. 1998. Asian Security Practice: Material and Ideational Influences. Stanford, CA: Stanford California Press. Aschmoneit, Walter, Chan Sotheavy, Narak Sovann, Top That, Lean Kunlam, and Kao Kalyan. 1997. Pagoda Committees and Community Life in Kampong Thom Province Cambodia. Kampong Thom: GTZ. Azeem Ibrahim. 2008. “The Relationship between Culture and Security Has Changed.” Aspen Cultural Dialogue Group Inaugural Event, Keynote Address, Paris, 13 November. Brown, Ellie. 1999. The Meaning of Community in Cambodia: French Literature Review. Report for “The Meaning of Community in Cambodia Literature Reviews: Khmer, French and English

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Languages” conference, presented by the Working Group on Social Organization in Cambodia, Phnom Penh. Bubandt, Nils. 2005. “Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds.” Security Dialogue 36, no. 3: 275–296. Delvert, J. 1961. Le paysan cambodgien. Paris: Mouton. Der Derian, James. 1995. “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard.” Pp. 24–45 in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz. New York: Columbia University Press. Duffield, Mark. 2001. Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books. Fatima Ayub and Sari Kouvo. 2008. “Righting the Course? Humanitarian Intervention, the War on Terror and the Future of Afghanistan.” International Affairs 84, no. 4: 641–657. Guthrie, Elizabeth. 2002. “Buddhist Temples and Cambodian Politics.” Pp. 59–74 in People and the 1998 National Elections in Cambodia, ed. John Vijghen. Phnom Penh: Experts for Community Research. Harris, Ian. 2001. “Sangha Groupings in Cambodia.” Buddhist Studies Review 18, no. 1: 73–105. ______. 2005. Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hasenclever, Andreas, and Volker Rittberger. 2000. “Does Religion Make a Difference? Theoretical Approaches to the Impact of Faith on Political Conflict.” Millennium 29, no. 3: 641–674. Heng Monychenda. 2008. “In Search of the Dhammika Ruler.” Pp. 310–318 in People of Virtue: Reconfiguring Religion, Power and Moral Order in Cambodia Today, ed. Alexandra Kent and David Chandler. Copenhagen, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Hinton, Alexander L. 2005. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hughes, Caroline. 2003. The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition, 1991–2001. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ______. 2006. “The Politics of Gifts: Tradition and Regimentation in Contemporary Cambodia.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 3: 469–489. Kamala Tiyavanich. 1997. Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Keen, David. 2005. Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Kent, Alexandra. 2003. “Recovery of the ‘Collective Spirit’: The Role of the Revival of Buddhism in Cambodia.” The Legacy of War and Violence: Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Bosnia, ‘Palestine’ and Cambodia Research Programme, Working Paper No. 9. Goteborg: Goteborg University. Kostic´, Roland. 2007. “Ambivalent Peace: External Peacebuilding, Threatened Identity and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” PhD diss., Uppsala University, Department of Peace and Conflict Research. Laustsen, Carsten B. and Ole Wæver. 2000. “In Defence of Religion: Sacred Referent Objects of Secularization.” Millennium 29, no. 3: 705–739. MacMillan, John. 1998. On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War and International Order. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Navuth Chay. 2002. “Society and Culture in a Village in Central Cambodia: A Search for Sustainable Agricultural Development.” Masters diss., Waseda University, Graduate School of Asia and Pacific Study. Springer, Simon. 2009. “Violence, Democracy, and the Neoliberal ‘Order’: The Contestation of Public Space in Posttransitional Cambodia.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99, no. 1: 138–162. Watts, E. 1999. The Meaning of Community: English Literature Review. Report for “The Meaning of Community in Cambodia Literature Reviews: Khmer, French and English Languages” conference, presented by the Working Group on Social Organization in Cambodia, Phnom Penh. Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, eds. 1999. Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Whitman, Jim. 2005. “Humanitarian Intervention In an Era of Preemptive Self-Defence.” Security Dialogue 36, no. 3: 259–274.

Contributors

P Bjørn Enge Bertelsen recently defended his PhD thesis entitled “Violent Becomings: State Formation and the Traditional Field in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique” to the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, where he is currently a postdoctoral fellow. Since 1999, Bertelsen has conducted extensive fieldwork in and around Chimoio, Mozambique, on issues such as civil war, violence, state formation, and post-war reconstructive practices. Some of his recent publications include Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval (2009, co-edited with Bruce Kapferer) and “Multiple Sovereignties and Summary Justice in Mozambique: A Critique of Some Legal Anthropological Terms” (2009). Jeremy Gould is Professor of Development and International Cooperation at the University of Jyväskylä. His current research interests relate to post-colonial jurisprudence and the relationship between law and politics in post-colonial state formation. He also works on the participation of international aid agencies in the government of post-colonial African societies. He is the author, most recently, of Left Behind: Rural Zambia in the Third Republic (2010), and author/editor of The New Conditionality: The Politics of Poverty Reduction Strategies (2005), and of Ethnographies of Aid (2003, with H. Secher Marcussen).

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Alexandra Kent is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, currently based at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen. Her research fields cover religion, politics, and social healing in Malaysia and Cambodia. She is currently engaged in a study of gender and local constructions of security involving a Cambodian center run by Buddhist nuns. Her publications include Divinity and Diversity: A Hindu Revitalisation Movement in Malaysia (2005), “Reconfiguring Security: Buddhism and Moral Legitimacy in Cambodia” (2006), and “Purchasing Power and Pagodas: The Sima Monastic Boundary and Consumer Politics in Cambodia” (2007). Are Knudsen is a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and has conducted fieldwork in Lebanon, Pakistan, and Palestine. He has published on Islamism among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, political Islam in Palestine, and political violence in Lebanon. He is currently engaged in research on conflict and co-existence in post–civil war Lebanon, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and the democratic turn within Hamas. David Lewis is a Professor of Social Policy and Development in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, where he has specialized in research on development issues in South Asia, with a particular focus on Bangladesh. An anthropologist by background, he has published widely on development issues. He is co-author with Katy Gardner of Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge (1996), and his most recent publication is NonGovernmental Development Organisations and Development (2009, co-authored with Nazneen Kanji). He has worked as a consultant for several development agencies including Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Oxfam GB, and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.

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Jon Harald Sande Lie is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway, and a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His dissertation on developmentality deals with new forms of governance integral to the new aid architecture in the context of World Bank-Uganda relations, focusing on knowledge/power formations, discourse-agency relations, development trusteeship, and state formation. His PhD work is affiliated with the department-wide research program “Challenging the State: Transmutation of Power in Contemporary Global Realities.” His most recent publications include “Post-development and the Discourse-Agency Interface” (2007), “Post-development Theory and the Discourse-Agency Conundrum” (2008), and “Between Culture and Concept: The Protection of Civilians in Sudan” (2010, with Benjamin de Carvalho). John-Andrew McNeish is a social anthropologist and senior researcher based at Chr. Michelsens Institute in Norway. He currently leads a Norwegian Research Council–funded project titled “Contested Powers: Towards a Political Anthropology of Energy in Latin America.” An anthology based on other recent research and jointly edited by McNeish, titled Flammable Societies: Studies in the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas, will be published in 2011. McNeish continues to work on a series of other inter-related themes, including the politics of development, poverty, legal pluralism, and indigenous rights. Previous work and collaboration have resulted in the joint publication of several books, including Indigenous Peoples and Poverty: An International Perspective (2005). McNeish has also contributed chapters to books dealing with questions of international development and the politics of poverty and has published a number of articles in international regional studies journals. Finn Stepputat is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies with a background in economic geography and cultural sociology. He has published extensively in the fields of forced migration and conflict-related issues,

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mainly in Latin American contexts, and has recently moved toward the more general issues of state formation, sovereignty, and security from an ethnographic perspective. He is co-editor of a number of anthologies, including States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Post-colonial State (2001) and Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (2005), both with Thomas Blom Hansen; Fragile States and Insecure People: Violence, Security and Statehood in the Twenty-First Century (2007), with Louise Andersen and Bjørn Møller; and The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa (2007), with Lars Buur and Steffen Jensen. Kari Telle is a social anthropologist who works as a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, where she also coordinates the “Politics of Faith” research program. She is presently engaged in a three-year research project that explores the intersection between religious mobilization, vigilantism, security politics, and decentralization in Indonesia. Her recent publications include “Swearing Innocence: Performing Justice and ‘Reconciliation’ in Post–New Order Lombok” (2009), and Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation State (2010, co-edited, with Bruce Kapferer and Annelin Eriksen).