Development, Security and Unending War E-Book

Mark Duffield

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 525

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

According to politicians, we now live in a radically interconnected world. Unless there is international stability – even in the most distant places – the West's way of life is threatened. In meeting this global danger, reducing poverty and developing the unstable regions of the world are now imperative. In what has become a truism of the post-Cold War period, security without development is questionable, while development without security is impossible.

In this accessible and path-breaking book, Mark Duffield questions this conventional wisdom and lays bare development not as a way of bettering other people but of governing them. He offers a profound critique of the new wave of Western humanitarian and peace interventionism, arguing that rather than bridging the lifechance divide between development and underdevelopment, it maintains and polices it. As part of the defence of an insatiable mass consumer society, those living beyond its borders must be content with self-reliance.

With case studies drawn from Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, the book provides a critical and historically informed analysis of the NGO movement, humanitarian intervention, sustainable development, human security, coherence, fragile states, migration and the place of racism within development. It is a must-read for all students and scholars of development, humanitarian intervention and security studies as well as anyone concerned with our present predicament.

Leseprobe

Development, Security and Unending War

For Bob Drewery Comrade and friend

Development, Security and Unending War

Governing the World of Peoples

MARK DUFFIELD

polity

Copyright © Mark Duffield 2007

The right of Mark Duffield to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB21UR, UK.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5793-6

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Contents

Preface

List of abbreviations

1   Introduction: Development and Surplus Life

Foregrounding the liberal problematic of security

Linking biopolitics, liberalism and development

Surplus population and accumulation by dispossession

Slavery and excess freedom

Separating development and underdevelopment biopolitically

The divergence of insured and non-insured life

From internal war to global instability

Occupation and contingent sovereignty

Disturbing the boundaries of time and space

2   NGOs, Permanent Emergency and Decolonization

Total war and the paradox of biopolitics

NGOs and total war

The colonial inheritance

Expansion without imperial reconciliation

Emergency and the dilemma of development

Cold War liminality and non-state sovereignty

Sustainable development: knowledge makes free

The question of agency: being the right type

Postscript

3   The Emergence of Contingent Sovereignty

From modernization to sustainable development

Emergency and contingent sovereignty

Negotiated access and the humanitarian boom

Contingent sovereignty and the external frontier

4   Mozambique, Governmentalization and Non-material Development

The background to a ‘complex emergency’

The changing relationship with NGOs

War and the destruction of culture

The re-emergence of social cohesion

Opposing economic differentiation

Non-material development

Gender, natural economy and land

Concluding remarks

5   Human Security and Global Danger

Human security as a technology of governance

Internal war and the crisis of containment

Globalizing versus containing tendencies

Reinstating the state

Containing underdevelopment

Unending war, human security and NGOs

Concluding remarks

6.   Afghanistan, Coherence and Taliban Rule

From negotiation to coercion

The strategic framework for Afghanistan

Development and security in practice

Aid and peace-building in a failed state

The limits of principled engagement

The problematization of state-based politics

UNSMA and the critique of aid

Concluding remarks

7.   Fragile States and Native Administration

Fragility and global instability

Contingent sovereignty and non-material development

The governance state

The fragile state and liberal imperialism

Technologies of post-interventionary governance

Concluding remarks

8.   Racism, Circulation and Security

The collapse of the national–international dichotomy

From race war to racism

Liberalism, imperialism and culture

Decolonization and the new racism

Racism and anti-racism

Conjoining the internal and external frontiers

Migration and the European state of exception

The changing regime of internal development

Concluding remarks

9.   Conclusion: From Containment to Solidarity

The biopolitics of insured and non-insured life

Development and emergency

Governmentalizing petty sovereignty

The biopolitics of unending war

Is there an alternative development?

The solidarity of the governed

References

Index

Preface

For some years I have been aware that development and security interconnect. It is only now, however, after completing this book, that I fully realize how enduring and essential this relationship is. Usually experienced as a benign and practical act of helping others, development is a technology of security that is central to liberal forms of power and government. The benevolence with which development cloaks itself – its constant invocation of rights, freedom and the people – conceals a stubborn will to manage and contain disorder rather than resolve it. Development seeks to control and ameliorate the unintended consequences of progress such as destitution, environmental collapse or humanitarian disasters. Given the constant making and remaking of societies demanded by progress, development is particularly concerned with those groups and communities that, through the contingencies of poverty, gender or lack of voice, regularly find themselves superfluous, redundant or short of the requirements to live an acceptable life. Development exerts a moral and educative trusteeship over this surplus life. Through coaching in the prudent arts of freedom, it is made complete, useful and governable. As a technology of security, development traces its genealogy in the constant need to reconcile the demand for order with the contingencies of progress. As such, it provides a liberal alternative to extermination or eugenics: modernity’s other solutions to the problem of surplus population. Development has consequently always existed in relation to a state of emergency or exception. Today, for example, Afghanistan is being pacified militarily so that aid agencies can operate and secure civilian loyalties. This is not a random connection; development has always been linked with what we now understand as counterinsurgency.

The book’s most important departure for me relates to the application of the Foucaldian concept of biopolitics. While the idea of geopolitics is familiar, biopolitics is less so. If geopolitics suggests a combination of states, territories and alliances, territories also come with people or population. Since the nineteenth century effective states have made the support and optimization of the collective life of the nation a central aim of government. While it appears self-evident that development, with its emphasis on promoting life through remedial and educative interventions, is a form of biopolitics, Foucault did not write about development. Using this concept consequently involves extrapolation and extension. Initially I had thought that development involved a universalizing of the technologies that Foucault had outlined in relation to Europe, a sort of internationally scaled-up biopolitics that acts on a ‘global’ population. The answer, however, now seems as obvious as it is simple; rather than a universalizing biopolitics, development is the opposite. It is a means of dividing humankind against itself in the generic form of developed and underdeveloped species-life. Development is thus central to the new or culturally coded racism that emerged with decolonization. Developed life is supported and compensated through a range of social and private insurance-based benefits and bureaucracies covering birth, sickness, education, employment and pensions. In contrast, the underdeveloped or ‘non-insured’ life existing beyond these welfare technologies is expected to be self-reliant. Surplus non-insured life is the subject of development, while the stasis of basic needs and self-reliance is its biopolitical object. Rather than development being concerned with reducing the economic gap between rich and poor countries, or extending to the latter the levels of social protection existing in the former, as a technology of security it functions to contain and manage underdevelopment’s destabilizing effects, especially its circulatory epiphenomena such as undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, transborder shadow economies or criminal networks. Since decolonization, the biopolitical division of the world of peoples into developed and underdeveloped species-life has been deepening. Today it shapes a terrain of unending war.

The origins of this book lie in a series of postgraduate lectures taught between 2002 and 2005 on ‘Development, Security and Conflict’, first at the University of Leeds and then at Lancaster. I’d like to thank the students attending these lectures for giving me the opportunity and stimulus to rehearse many of the issues found on the following pages. I also profited from being a member of the research network ‘From inequality to insecurity? The place of crime and violence in development thinking and practice’, organized by Finn Stepputat and colleagues at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen (2003–5). Participation in the network workshops was an enriching experience. Debts to others are extensive, and I am conscious that in mentioning a few many are missed. For their encouragement and helpful comments on the draft my thanks to David Keen, Vanessa Pupavac, Matt Merefield, Colleen Bell, Vernon Hewitt and Brad Evans. Conversations and exchanges with Mick Dillon, Louis Lobo-Guerrero, Stuart Elden, April Biccum and Nicholas Waddell were invaluable in helping me sort things out or, at least, try to. I’d also like to thank Ray Bush for his comradeship and example. Finally, I must acknowledge the contribution of the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol. Without the time and support that my colleagues have afforded me, this book would never have been finished.

Chapter 5 draws on an ESRC research project completed with Nicholas Waddell in 2004, ‘Human Security: The Public Management of Private Agency’ (RES-223-25-0035). Chapter 6 utilizes my contribution to a consultancy report written together with Patricia Gossman and Nicholas Leader entitled ‘A Review of the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan’ (Islamabad: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, 2003). I’d like to thank all those involved with these projects for their support, inspiration and company.

Mark Duffield Sedgley

Abbreviations

BDDCA

British Development Division for Central Africa

CAO

Civilian Affairs Officer

CAU

Civilian Affairs Unit

DAC

Development Assistance Committee

DFID

Department for International Development (UK)

DPA

Department of Political Affairs (UN)

EPSAM

Participatory Extension and Household Food Security Project

ERA

Eritrea Relief Association

ERD

Emergency Relief Desk

EU

European Union

FCO

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

ICISS

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

IFI

International Financial Institutions

IMF

International Monetary Fund

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGO

non-governmental organization

ODA

Overseas Development Administration (UK)

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OPEC

Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

P.E.A.C.E.

Poverty Eradication and Community Empowerment

RC/HC

Resident Coordinator/Humanitarian Coordinator

REST

Relief Society of Tigray

SCF

Save the Children Fund

SRSG

Special Representative of the Secretary-General

UNAMA

United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan

UNCO

UN Coordination Office

UNDP

UN Development Programme

UNHCR

(Office of the) UN High Commissioner for Refugees

UNHCHR

(Office of the) UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

UNICEF

UN Children’s Fund

UNOCHA

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

UNOCHAA

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan

USAID

United States Agency for International Development

WFP

World Food Programme

ZADP

Zambezia Development Programme

1

Introduction: Development and Surplus Life

Since the end of the Cold War, the claim that development requires security, and without security you cannot have development, has been repeated to the point of monotony in countless government reports, policy statements, UN documents, briefings by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academic works and so on (DAC 1997; Solana 2003; DFID 2005b). Such has been the widespread acceptance of this circular complementarity that it now qualifies as an accepted truth of our time. Since coming into office in 1997, for example, Britain’s New Labour government has consciously placed the mutual conditioning of development and security at the heart of its international development policy (DFID 1997). Reflecting and orchestrating the international policy consensus, numerous speeches and policy documents have argued that globalization, besides bringing great benefits and opportunities, has also brought into existence a shrinking and radically interconnected world in which distant and hence nationally unimportant problems no longer exist (for overview see Abrahamson 2005). The ripple effects of poverty, environmental collapse, civil conflict or health crises require international management, since they do not respect geographical boundaries. Otherwise, they will inundate and destabilize Western society. While building on earlier precepts (OECD 1998; Collier 2000), the moral of al-Qaida in Afghanistan has not been lost on policy makers. That is, ignoring ineffective states and vulnerable peoples opens them to the risk of colonization by criminal interests and groups politically hostile to the democratic world (DAC 2003). Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of writing, sums up this worldview as follows.

We understand that it is not just morally and ethically right that developing countries move from poverty to prosperity, but that it is a political imperative – central to our long-term national security and peace – to tackle the poverty that leads to civil wars, failed states and safe havens for terrorists. (Quoted in Christian Aid 2004: 2)

While it is accepted that poverty does not cause terrorism, it is argued that it fosters exclusion and alienation, which terrorist organizations can exploit to garner support, if not recruits. The consequent policy demand has been that development interventions should better focus on such risks and, especially, take failed and fragile states more seriously (DFID 2005a). This includes the search for new policy instruments to strengthen state capacity, provide order and, at the same time, deliver basic economic and welfare services to the peoples involved (Leader and Colenso 2005). This book, however, is not so much concerned with development as a series of techniques and interventions for improving or bettering others; it is more interested in examining the role and function of these technologies in securing the Western way of life.

Foregrounding the liberal problematic of security

As reflected in the above quote, guiding current thinking is the assumption that not only is it the moral duty of effective states to protect and better the lives of people living within ineffective ones, but such help also strengthens international security. This enlightened self-interest can also be seen, for example, in the remarks made by Tony Blair, the then UK Prime Minister, on the launch of the Africa Commission’s development report in March 2005. British national interest, it is argued, is interconnected with events and conditions in other countries and continents. Famines and instability ‘thousands of miles away lead to conflict, despair, mass migration and fanaticism that can affect us all. So for reasons of self-interest as well as morality, we can no longer turn our back on Africa’ (Blair 2005). That Africa is currently not high on the list of terrorism-exporting continents does not invalidate this position. Rather, it suggests that the moral logic linking development and security is an expansive and universalizing one. Because development reduces poverty and hence the risk of future instability, . In justifying the post-Cold War phase of renewed Western interventionism, there are many examples of a claimed enlightened complementarity linking development and security (Solana 2003; Bush 2002). Indeed, such claims constitute the ethical canon of today’s international activism (Douzinas 2003).