Development, Security and Unending War

Governing the World of Peoples

Mark Duffield

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745635804, 9780745635798
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

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, it also improves our own security. 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).

The complementarity between development and security is usually described as signalling a post-Cold War widening of the meaning of security. From a concern with the security of states, international dangers associated with societal breakdown, unsustainable population growth, environmental stress or endemic poverty are seen as widening the scope of security beyond its traditional focus on military threats. Often described as prioritizing the security of people rather than states, the broadening of security to embrace society informs current views on ‘human security’ (UNDP 1994a). Since the risks to human security are largely associated with underdevelopment, broadening the scope of security to include the protection and betterment of the world’s poor and marginalized peoples establishes its complementarity with development. This widening of security is usually seen by politicians, policy makers and academics as a new departure. At the same time, the complementarity between development and security is accepted as unproblematic, indeed, as marking a progressive turn (King and Murray 2001; CHS 2003; HSC 2005). If explained at all, it is presented as reflecting the humanistic advances that international society has made, compared with the restrictions of the Cold War (Mack 2002). According to this position, given a lack of political will regarding underdevelopment, calling for enlightened self-interest staked on the West’s own future and security is an important way of mobilizing public interest and commitment.

There are, however, many commentators that are uncomfortable with the increasing invocation of security as the primary means of improving the human condition and strengthening international society. The ‘Copenhagen School’ of International Relations theory, for example, has drawn attention to the increasing recourse, especially since the end of the Cold War, by politicians, policy makers and security professionals to a process or strategy of ‘securitization’ (Waever et al. 1993;Buzan et al. 1997;Huysmans 2000). That is, there is a tendency for such groups to describe an ever widening range of social trends, conditions and practices through a lens of security. Security from this perspective is often less an objective condition and more the way in which professional groups compete for visibility, influence and scarce resources. An important question that securitization raises is not that of more or less security, but whether many of the conditions so described should be treated as security issues at all. Securitization draws attention to the dangers and unforeseen political and normative consequences of a too ready willingness on the part of professionals and gatekeepers to invoke security for reasons of institutional or group advantage. In relation to Africa, for example, it has been argued that the securitization of underdevelopment is both undesirable and an inadequate response to the situation (Abrahamson 2005: 61, 70). It not only fosters fear and unease, it tends to divide the continent from the rest of the world, favours policies of containment and is encouraging the militarization of the continent.

While such concerns are of great importance, central to this book is the argument that the relationship between development and security also has a long genealogy. Rather than being a new departure, its current prominence is connected with the return to the political foreground of a liberal problematic of security (Agamben 2005). This fore-grounding 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. Such an understanding is central to this book. While a liberal problematic of security is well represented in the contemporary idea of human security, since the beginnings of modernity a liberal rationality of government has always been based on the protection and betterment of the essential processes of life associated with population, economy and society. A liberal problematic of security is concerned with people and all the multiform processes, conditions and contingencies that either promote or retard life and well-being. It is concerned with securing these biological and social processes in the name of people, rights and freedom. Although largely ‘non-political’ in nature, being located within populations, communities and the economy, these processes are nevertheless the foundations of good government. Liberalism embodies the idea of ‘government of the population and the imperatives that are derived from such an idea’ (Dean 1999: 113). Securitization raises important concerns over the dangers of a too ready willingness by the state and professional groups to invoke the exceptionalism of security in relation to a widening range of life and society processes. This book poses an additional set of questions: why does a liberal problematic of security now dominate the political foreground? and how does it operate within the architecture of post-Cold War humanitarian, development and peace interventionism?

Linking biopolitics, liberalism and development

In addressing these concerns, liberalism is considered as a technology of government involving a specific design or means of strategizing power. A defining characteristic of liberalism is that it takes people and their life and freedom as its essential reference point (Mehta 1999). In understanding liberalism as power, it is useful to introduce Foucault’s conception of ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault [1975–6], [1976], [1978]). While liberalism and biopolitics are not same, as Mitchell Dean argues, biopolitics is ‘a necessary condition of liberalism’ (Dean 1999: 113). Biopolitics is a form of politics that entails the administration of the processes of life at the aggregate level of population. While the more familiar term ‘geopolitics’ interconnects and interrogates states, territories and alliances, territories come with populations, livelihood systems and life processes. Besides military readiness and the diplomacy of political alliance, since the nineteenth century effective states have also progressively expanded their knowledge and ability to support life and help populations realize their optimal productive and reproductive potential. The nature and implications of this biopolitical relationship between states, territories and population has been neglected by mainstream international relations and development studies alike (Jahn 2005; Biccum 2005). Yet, as will be argued below, since the beginning of the twentieth century, how groups, communities and peoples are acted upon in order to support and promote collective life has shaped and deepened a biopolitical distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ species-life – a distinction that is now integral to racial discourse, global insurgency and unending war.

Biopolitics marks the passage from the classical age to the modern one. Compared with the ancient right of the sovereign to take life or let live, biopolitics marks a new power: ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault [1976]: 138). Beginning in the seventeenth century, this new power over life evolved in two basic forms. The first was a disciplinary and individualizing power, focusing on the human-as-machine and associated with the emergence of the great institutions such as medicine, education, punishment or the military (see Foucault [1975]). From the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a complementary but different power over life emerges. This newer form does not discipline the human-as-machine, it is an aggregating or massifying power concerned with regulating the human-asspecies. It is a regulatory power that operates at the collective level of population (Foucault [1975–6]: 243). This regulatory biopolitics functions differently from the more localized, individualizing and institutionally based disciplinary power. Achieving massified outcomes also requires more complex systems of coordination and centralization associated with the state.

Regulatory biopolitics emerged out of the statistical, demographic, economic and epidemiological knowledge through which life was being discovered in its modern societal form, that is, as a series of interconnected natural, social and economic processes operating in and through population. The multiple factors that are aggregated within a population appear at the level of the individual as chance, unpredictable and contingent events. Rather than acting on the individual per se, a regulatory biopolitics seeks to intervene at the level of the collective, where apparently random events reveal themselves as population trends, social variables and probabilities. The discovery of the dynamics of population ‘established the paradoxical position of life both as an autonomous domain and as an object and objective of systems of administration’ (Dean 1999: 99). Biopolitics attempts to rationalize the problem of governing groups of humans represented in the form of population. Such problems are manifest in a variety of locations, including the family, health, housing, education and longevity; they connect with rates of economic growth, working conditions, standards of living, nutrition and the environment; they also relate to race, ethnicity, migration and social cohesion; today, problems of population even appear at the level of the genetic make-up of life itself. Biopolitics acts in the interests of collective or aggregate life through knowledge of the ‘processes that sustain or retard the optimization of the life of a population’ (ibid.: 99).

Liberalism is a technology of government that supports freedom while governing people through the interconnected natural, social and economic processes that together sustain life. Foucault used the emergence of biopolitics as the terrain on which to situate the classical liberal problematic of how much to govern. Too much government – in the form of state planning, for example – and the dynamism and creative potential of the life processes on which freedom depends are destroyed. Governing too little, however, risks failing ‘to establish the conditions of civility, order, productivity and national well-being which make limited government possible’ (Rose 2000: 70). Since liberalism is not the same as biopolitics it can, importantly, be critical of the excessive disciplining and regulation of population. At the same time, however, it is dependent on such interventions being effective as a condition of order and liberal government. From this perspective, liberalism is not an historical period, the product of specific groups or a substantive doctrine; it is an ethos of government that attempts to govern life through its freedom. At the same time, however, it is conscious of the disorder that excess freedom can bring. As a design of power, there is no essential relationship between liberalism, the rule of law or representative democracy. A democracy is not necessarily liberal, nor is liberalism of itself democratic; liberalism simply embodies a timeless ‘search for a liberal technology of government’ (Foucault quoted by Dean 1999: 120).

As a technology of governing life through its freedom, the absence of an essential relationship between liberalism and democracy helps to explain the enduring paradox of liberalism. During the nineteenth century, liberalism typically supported the rule of law and democratic reform at home. At the same time, however, it also accepted the necessity of non-representative and despotic forms of imperial rule overseas (Jahn 2005; Pitts 2003). The idea of ‘development’ is one way of resolving this apparent paradox. Just as biopolitics and liberalism are not the same, development is likewise different. As with liberalism, however, biopolitics is also a necessary condition of development; biopolitics, liberalism and development are different but intimately interconnected. If biopolitics uncovers the dynamics of life at the level of population, and liberalism seeks to govern life through its freedom, then development provides a solution to the problem of governing too much or too little. 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). The importance of moral trusteeship to liberalism as an art of government explains its frequent criticism of imperial violence and excess. However, it was also able to accept colonial rule when the responsibility of trusteeship was deemed to be humanely and hence effectively discharged (Morel 1920). A developmental trusteeship is a liberal framework of government that allows the powers of freedom to be learned and safely applied.

Once thought to be no longer applicable in a decolonized world, a liberal conception of trusteeship has once again entered the political foreground following the renewed wave of Western humanitarian and peace interventionism in the post-Cold War period. There has been a revival of interest in liberal imperialism – indeed, an attempt to rehabilitate its self-proclaimed role of protecting and bettering the world (Ferguson 2003; Cooper 2002; Coker 2003). With the exception of Iraq, where mismanagement and horrendous violence have damaged hopes of effective trusteeship, liberal opinion has widely supported the West’s renewed interventionism (Furedi 1994). Michael Ignatieff’s (2003) book Empire Lite, for example, captures today’s acceptance of the necessity of a period of illiberal rule abroad. Awakened by the threat of world disorder and led by avowed anti-imperialists, today’s interventionism constitutes 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’ (ibid.: 19). This new empire is being implemented by novel institutional arrangements and divisions of labour linking donor governments, UN agencies, militaries and NGOs. It promises self-rule, not in some distant future but quickly and within an agreed framework. In dealing with elites, many of whom are the products of modern nationalism, the intention is that they should be empowered to succeed. Today’s Empire Lite is only legitimate if it results in the betterment of people and their early self-management. It is imperialism ‘in a hurry, to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to locals and get out’ (ibid.). For Ignatieff, if there is a problem with this new interventionism, it is that it does not practise the partnership and empowerment that it preaches and is dogged by short-termism and promises betrayed.

There is also another and broader conception of trusteeship. Although connected, it lacks the spectacle and immediacy of Ignatieff’s territorial ‘laboratories’ of post-interventionary society (ibid.: 20). Since it is more pervasive and subtle, however, it is arguably more significant. While also having a liberal genealogy, it is about securing freedom by supporting households and community organizations, based on the small-scale ownership of land or property, in their search for economic autonomy and the possibilities for political existence that this affords. It is a trusteeship that encourages local level 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 behaviour of those subject to such development (Pupavac 2005). Although a relation of governance, it nonetheless speaks in terms of empowerment and partnership (Cooke and Kothari 2001). While Western politicians currently argue that enlightened self-interest interconnects development and security, for those insecure humans living within ineffective states the reality of this virtuous circle is, once again, an educative trusteeship that aims to change behaviour and social organization according to a curriculum decided elsewhere.

Surplus population and accumulation by dispossession

In examining development as a liberal problematic of security, the way in which political economy has defined the object of development is first considered. Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that development doctrine emerged with the turbulent rise and unsettling spread of industrial capitalism. Traced through the work of Malthus, Saint-Simon and Comte, development provides a solution to the disorder that progress unavoidably brings: the disruption and redundancy of established livelihoods and trades, the erosion of traditional rights and responsibilities, unemployment and pauperization. Development, they argue, emerged in the politically seething world of early-nineteenth-century Europe where, to paraphrase the young Marx, everything that was solid dissolved into air. Progress, however, also brought undoubted social benefits and new possibilities; while many positions and trades were certainly ruined, the lives and livelihoods of others were improved. Apart from the constant volatility, from a liberal perspective the problem with capitalism was that the disrupted and marginalized groups were more numerous than those from which capitalism could gain and, in so doing, improve. In other words, there was a problematic and transient ‘surplus’ population that required remedial attention, not only for themselves but for the stability of society as well.

Anticipated in Malthus, the unending search for progress constantly invokes a surplus population – that is, a population whose skills, status or even existence are in excess of prevailing conditions and requirements. Hannah Arendt has called this by-product, produced at each successive crisis of capitalism, its ‘human debris’ (Arendt [1951]: 150). This phenomenon was well known and feared during the nineteenth century and fuelled the European settlement of Canada, Australia and the United States. In a contemporary treatment, it is what Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman 2004) has called ‘waste-life’. It is a condition of existence that, but for the changes, adaptations or opportunities that progress either demands or pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Development and Surplus Life
• 2 NGOs, Permanent Emergency and Decolonization
• 3 The Emergence of Contingent Sovereignty
• 4 Mozambique, Governmentalization and Non-material Development
• 5 Human Security and Global Danger
• 6. Afghanistan, Coherence and Taliban Rule
• 7. Fragile States and Native Administration
• 8. Racism, Circulation and Security
• 9. Conclusion: From Containment to Solidarity
• References
• Index