The Changing Contours of Africa's Security Governance

Review of African Political Economy No.118:539-553 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2008 Public/Private, Global/Local: The Changing Contours of Africa’s Security Governance Rita Abrahamsen & Michael C. Williams From conflict zones to shopping malls, from resource extraction sites to luxury tourist enclaves, private security has become a ubiquitous feature of modern life. While the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’ continues to be one of the defining features of state sovereignty, and one of the most powerful elements of the modern political imagination, the realities of security today increasingly transcend its confines, and include a wide range of private actors. At its most controversial, private security is represented by the combat active soldier, heavily armed and actively involved in warfare. At its most mundane, it involves the unarmed guard at a hotel entrance, or a neighbourhood watch of concerned citizens mobilising local energies in the pursuit of safety and security. Africa is, of course, no stranger to these various forms of private security, although it is fair to say that to date, the military dimension has dominated discussion. The infamous activities of mercenaries such as Bob Denard and ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the more distant exploits of Cecil Rhodes and the privately-financed armies of his commercial empire, mean that Africa easily lends itself to portrayal as the natural environment for rapacious and ruthless forms of entrepreneurship and control in which private gain is intimately and directly linked to the ability to wield private violence. More recent spectacular actions, such as Executive Outcomes’ (EO) intervention in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and Simon Mann’s aborted coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in 2004 only reinforce this image of Africa as the chosen playground of the world’s soldiers of fortune. It would be both foolish and wrong to deny the impact of mercenaries on the recent, as well as the distant, history and political economy of Africa. However, care is needed lest the power of this legacy and the important lessons that it holds are allowed to obscure a clear understanding of contemporary realities. Africa remains a continent replete with private security actors, yet as in much of the rest of the world, the nature and dynamics of security privatisation have undergone profound changes in recent years. Accordingly, analyses rooted in the by now decade-old activities of companies like EO may be ill-suited to a full appreciation of the political and economic impacts of today’s more pervasive forms of security privatisation and changing private military activities. Instead, new forms of security privatisation demand new conceptual tools and a certain reorientation in empirical analysis. The goal of this Special Issue is to contribute to a wider understanding of the privatisation of security in Africa, starting from the assumption that political critique requires an appreciation of the ISSN 0305-6244 Print, 1740-1720 Online/08/040539-15 DOI: 10.1080/03056240802569219 540 Review of African Political Economy dynamics and structures driving and underpinning the processes of privatisation. We deliberately cast the net wide, and seek to provide empirical and analytical illustrations of the depth and diversity of security privatisation. As such, we include rural non-state security actors, urban vigilantes, global private security companies, private military companies, as well as private prisons, arguing that these various forms of security privatisation are in important ways linked to the same processes of transformation. By surveying the breadth of private security activity on the continent, and the varied political and economic factors driving its growth, the Special Issue seeks to broaden debate over the sources, impacts, and implications of these important, yet often under-appreciated, developments. In this introduction, we situate security privatisation within contemporary debates in political economy. In particular, we draw attention to the constructed character of the public/private distinction, and argue that in the same way that the original emergence of this distinction was central to the development of capitalism and the rise of national bourgeoisies, we are currently witnessing a redrawing of this division which is in turn crucial to the understanding of contemporary global capitalism, and to the emergence of (global) private security. The manner in which the public/private, as well as the global/local, distinction is currently being re- articulated reflects important transformations in power and authority, and is central to an appreciation of the political impact of the various forms of private security on the African continent. The Re-emergence of Private Security Although the realms of political economy and security are often treated in isolation, the two have a long and intimate history in the evolution of liberal capitalism. The constitution of a ‘private’ economic sphere was in important ways made possible by the removal of the control of violence and coercion – what we today call ‘security’ – from private hands into the ‘public’ or political domain. This transition was a key feature of the move from feudalism to absolutism, in the consolidation of the modern state, and in the shift of social power from a landed aristocracy that wielded violence as part of its socio-economic position and dominance towards the rising commercial classes, whose position and property was underpinned by liberal conceptions of rights and an increasingly formalised and centralised monopoly of state violence that could enforce and secure them. Similarly, the subsequent development of nineteenth century liberal capitalism was linked to the construction of individuals whose economic liberty was part and parcel of their freedom from violent coercion by other private individuals, and the corresponding location of these individuals within new forms of market discipline and coercion. In short, the existence of a public sphere of security in principle applying uniformly to all subjects was, as both Max Weber (Gerth & Wright Mills, 1946) and Karl Polanyi (1944) stressed, a key element in the evolution of liberal capitalism and its specific articulation of the relationship between the economy and society (see also Anderson, 1974 & Wood, 1981). These developments were of course neither simple nor uniform, historically or geographically. Private violence continued in many forms. Globally, the imperial commercial activities of the Chartered Companies involved the use of extensive private force throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; by 1782, for example, the English East India Company’s armed force outnumbered that of the British army at the time, consisting of over 100,000 British, German, Swiss and Editorial: Public/Private, Global/Local: The Changing Contours of Africa’s Security Governance 541 Indian soldiers. Similarly, privateering or piracy was an integral element of early- modern commercial, as well as military, competition. At more individual levels, private violence continued to be seen as legitimate in even some of the most advanced industrial countries until at least the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, duelling as a matter of honour between gentlemen – a relic of feudal class hierarchies expressed through the right to engage in private violence – continued. In 1804, for example, the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, killed former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel, while in Germany the practice continued up to the First World War. The use of a wide variety of private force for the ‘public’ task of policing was also widespread in Europe until the later decades of the nineteenth century. The same was true in the United States, where the activities of one of the most famous – and in some eyes infamous – commercial private security firms, Pinkerton’s, provided investigative and arrest capacities on railways across the country, engaged in often violent suppression of labour disputes, and even for a time policed substantial parts of the city of Chicago. In the colonies, of course, private force was even more prevalent and the connections between private and public force equally complex. Policing was a key part of strategies of imperial domination, and the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes had its own paramilitary, mounted infantry force. Similarly, the first recognisable police force in Kenya was private, in the sense that it was set up by the East Africa Trading Company (later the Imperial East Africa Trading Company) in 1896. The company had an armed security force, recruited predominantly among the Indian police and watchmen, and the force was governed by Indian police statutes (see Clayton and Killingray, 1989). During the colonial period, commercial companies often maintained private forces; for example, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, a subsidiary of De Beers, employed a private police force of 35 armed men to protect its diamond concession in the Kono area. Colonial rule also relied extensively on chiefs and more or less invented ‘traditional’ structures for a variety of policing and security tasks, whereby chiefs acted as a form of local extension of colonial rule. Private force was thus far from absent during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as Janice Thomson (1994) has usefully remarked, historically the state’s monopoly of violence is the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, there

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