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1 Introduction
How are economic spaces that are important for the global economy secured in areas of limited statehood? Are there similar patterns in how security is produced, for whom, and with what consequences in such areas in the postcolonial world? And if so, why? These are important questions, given that multinational companies (MNCs) are important non-state ‘governors’ (Avant et al. 2010), particularly in areas of limited statehood in the postcolony.
Since the end of the Cold War, the extractive industries alone have expanded enormously into areas of limited statehood (UNCTAD 2007). In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 50 per cent of foreign direct investment goes into this sector. This book examines everyday security practices around the sites of some of these multinational mining companies in Africa to illustrate a much broader and highly relevant phenomenon: hybrid transnational security governance. Such hybridity characterises external security practices in many other arenas of intervention in our postcolonial world.
The book uses the term ‘areas of limited statehood’ to describe political spaces in which the ability of governments to implement and enforce rules and to control the use of violence is restricted along territorial, social and/or sectoral dimensions (Draude 2007; Risse 2011; Müller 2012). As opposed to other notions, such as weak and fragile states, this flexible concept highlights that such areas are not a unique feature of states in Africa, Latin America and Asia. They have also existed, and exist today, in Europe, North America and Australia. However, this book examines in particular how in a liberal world order, transnationalised business spaces are secured in such areas in the ‘postcolony’ (Mbembe 2001). The postcolony typically refers to ‘nation states, including those from the former USSR, once governed by, for, and from elsewhere; nation states in which representative government and the rule of law, in their conventional Euro-modernist sense, were previously “underdeveloped”’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 2–3). Instead of being exceptional cases, these areas in fact represent ‘most of the world’ (Chatterjee 2004: 8). Until today, this major part of the world has been the privileged destination for Western interventions designated as missions of ‘improvement’ (Li 2007), and the activities of MNCs in Africa are embedded in and need to be understood in this context. The notion of a postcolonial world emphasises in this regard that (post)colonial interventions are ‘an essentially transnational and transcultural “global” process’ (Hall 1996: 247) that builds on, and is productive of, asymmetric representations. This holds for societies with a history as colonising or as colonised and even plays out in cases where there is no history of direct colonisation, such as Afghanistan (Hönke and Müller 2012: 3–4). Investigating the security practices in key sites of the liberal economy – the sites of MNCs – in African areas of limited statehood thus paradigmatically reveals what Wendy Brown has referred to as the ‘impure’ and ‘hybrid’ elements with which liberal order is striated (Brown 2006: 23).
The activities of MNCs in Africa and elsewhere have been an important subject of public and academic debates from the 1990s onwards. These debates have tended to be polarised. Some analysts portray these companies as powerful actors who make areas less secure, because they force people off their land, bring in security forces that increase the level of violence experienced in a locality, and cooperate with incumbent authorities against critics. Others see them as potential providers of collective goods and norm entrepreneurs who seek to improve local security governance and enhance development through soft power, training and social spending.
Multinationals have come under critical scrutiny following a variety of scandals about their involvement in repression and violence. Economist journalist Madeleine Drohan (2004) collected evidence of how companies used force to attain their goals, such as in the now well-known case of Shell and the Ogoni resistance in the Niger Delta in the 1990s, and the implication of the oil company Talisman in ethnic cleansing in Southern Sudan. It is not by coincidence that both examples refer to extractive industries. Being the most important and most long-term investors in Africa and many other parts of the postcolonial world, they are paradigmatic for extended regimes of private security governance.
Besides the extreme examples of open violence mentioned by Drohan, there are frequent reports of exclusionary practices and the use of violence by security personnel working for extractive industries in countries such as Indonesia, Columbia, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).1 Part of this sombre reality of company security governance is the fortress-like appearance of company sites in these countries. Industrial mining sites in Africa sometimes look like spaceships – alien and closed off from the poor environment in which they have ‘landed’. Gold and diamond mining companies in Angola, South Africa or the DRC fence off sites with barbed wire and closely survey the surrounding area with human patrols and infrared cameras. However, these enclaves that source raw material for industrial production or luxury consumption in the metropolises of the world are not isolated from the social and political dynamics of the peripheries in which they are increasingly located. They are defended against local people’s interests: security agents chase after what they refer to as ‘illegal’ miners within and around industrial mining sites, and encounters between these two groups are often violent. In August 2010, at least four ‘illegal miners’ were shot to death underground by the private security agents of a gold mining company in Gauteng, South Africa.2 In Southern Katanga in the DRC, security staff and private security companies (PSCs) employed by industrial mining companies and the state police repeatedly clash with artisanal miners. Struggles over access to resources are also visible in police violence against protesters. In the poor Limpopo province of South Africa, tensions between Anglo Platinum (AP) and communities over land, compensation and resettlement issues have escalated since 2006, when the police opened fire on protesters who were demonstrating against the resumption of mining activities at Modikwa platinum mine, and injured 10 people.3
Yet many MNCs are also involved in local security governance by other means. Companies present their local community policies as a commitment to norms of corporate social responsibility (CSR), but they are often also part of businesses’ security management. For example, companies may build schools, restore marketplaces or support some economic development projects in selected neighbouring villages. Mining company representatives in the DRC, for instance, complain about the extent to which they had ‘to take on more and more social services’ at production sites.4 Around Rustenburg, the hub of the booming platinum mining region in South Africa, large mining companies participate in the drawing up of integrated development plans (IDPs) for the municipalities in which they operate and fund social projects through company trusts (Hamann 2004). During the fieldwork for this book, I attended seminars on CSR and public–private partnerships (PPPs) near Pretoria, South Africa, and in the Congolese capital Kinshasa.5 Even though different issues were discussed at these seminars, what was most striking was how much people seemed to follow the same script, repeating the same phrases and following the same logic despite huge differences in the challenges they faced in each country. In both cases, the government, rather than the private sector, was identified as the source of problems. According to the dominant narrative in these seminars, governments did not have enough capacity and lacked the right expertise to deliver collective services properly, whereas business was presented as potentially lending a helping hand, supporting and complementing governance by the state with resources and expertise.
These observations illustrate a broader phenomenon. Transnational companies represent themselves as promoting social and human rights in the ‘weak governance zones’ (OECD 2006) and conflict-ridden areas in which they operate. They also show that Western governments, donor agencies and international organisations (IOs) call on multinationals as potential providers of these collective goods, and therefore view them as agents to improve local security. As such, companies are assigned tasks such as teaching host states about the virtues of anti-corruption and preventing human rights abuses.6 Private business is thus given an important role in improving local security and transferring ‘good governance’ to Africa, Latin America and Asia. This vision and these practices are in line with liberal assumptions on the role of business in international relations, as trade is seen as essentially contributing to peace and stability. However, from this account of businesses’ role in (security) governance, the violence that Madelein Drohan documents is eliminated.
Empirical evidence suggests a third group of security practices that does not show up in the previous account – security through institutionalised arrangements of clientelist exchange between firms and local power holders. Pauline von Hellerman (2010) describes, for instance, the indirect rule arrangements with local politicians and customary authorities that Belgian company Socfinco undertook in order to manage the security of its rubber and palm oil plantation in Southern Nigeria. In her anthropology of corporate CSR in Indonesia, Marianna Welker (2009) observes how US company Newmont supported the rule of conservative customary authorities in order to have them calm down local critiques and ensure security for the company’s mining operation.
This book investigates these excursive observations of hybrid corporate security practices in the postcolonial world in a systematic way. The notion of hybridity is used to highlight the plurality of transnational meaning systems that produce these heterogeneous local security practices. I show in this book that such hybridity – with all its problematic effects on security as a public good – is more than just an exception to the rule based on anecdotal evidence. Corporate security governance in postcolonial contexts has remained hybrid and controversial – despite CSR, and even in the case of CSR-abiding firms – and is likely to remain so in the future.
Transnational business and local (security) governance – the literature
The notion that sovereignty is exclusively tied to the territorial state has been questioned by many leading scholars (Ruggie 1993; Sassen 2006; Agnew 2009). The role of non-state actors in this context remains little understood, however, especially that of resourceful MNCs that operate in areas of limited statehood in the postcolony. In particular, most of the literature on MNCs does not capture or adequately explain the hybrid security practices illustrated above. This refers in particular to the governance and private authority literature in political science and international relations, as well as to the literature on business and politics in Africa.
As the above observations show, the role of companies in local governance is much more heterogeneous than acknowledged in research on business and governance in international relations (IR), which mainly focuses on positive norms and good governance contributions. There is an empirical and a theoretical gap in that literature. Empirically, governance research in political science and IR has mainly addressed the role of business as an issue of private authority and self-regulation. This research has focused on forms of public–private co-regulation and private self-regulation in industrialised countries and on policy formulation at the transnational level (Cutler et al. 1999; Haufler 2001; Pattberg 2007; Flohr et al. 2010; Prakash and Potoski 2006). Most studies have dealt with environmental, health and social issues. Few examine companies’ security behaviour. Those who do so focus on the question of how companies may positively contribute to security as a collective good, for instance through conflict prevention (Wenger and Möckli 2003; Banfield and Champain 2004; Deitelhoff and Wolf 2010). However, Deitelhoff and Wolf (2010) do not find many direct company contributions to security governance. Yet their narrow focus on positive governance contributions prevents a systematic analysis of the broader company practices prevailing in business spaces and how these affect local security and political order.
Theoretically, the puzzling similarities in hybrid corporate security practices illustrated above also challenge the argument in the governance literature that how companies engage in local (security) governance depends on the capacity of the state to cast ‘a shadow of hierarchy’, that is to threaten with government intervention (see Börzel 2010; Börzel and Risse 2010). The same argument is implied in the state failure and statebuilding literature, according to which governance outcomes depend on the strength of state institutions (Rotberg 2004; Fukuyama 2004). However, despite variations in state capacity, there are many similarities in security governance – and therefore state variables do not help us to explain much here. Constructivist arguments of norm diffusion and world society would suggest that transnational norm diffusion should explain why there are such similarities across cases, in spite of the domestic differences (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999; Drori et al. 2006). However, these approaches cannot account for the plurality of corporate security practices in Africa, where companies do not systematically comply with liberal global norms on human rights.
This literature on private authority and business in governance is therefore limited in two ways. First, it suffers from a bias towards ‘positive’ liberal norms and governance contributions (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001) that remain isolated from other business practices. Second, most authors start from observing (transnational) policy formulation and then study commitment to such norms. As mentioned above, there are studies that deal with the diffusion of commitments to particular voluntary programmes and standards. However, we still do not know much about the actual outcome and impact of these new regulatory forms on the ground (Vogel 2008: 275; Börzel and Hönke 2011), particularly in relation to areas of limited statehood. This literature also lacks a broader understanding of companies’ roles in local security governance and the competing discourses and routine practices that structure it. Therefore, questions of non-compliance, competing norms and discourses, and the complex interplay between governance by companies and local politics have largely remained out of focus.
The study of transnational business and African politics has not had a prominent place either in political science or in African studies. One of the best reviews of the political and historical literature on the topic is still one written in the 1970s (Hopkins 1976a, 1976b). The contemporary literature is dominated by macro-economic and macro-political studies interested in the conditions under which business may contribute to economic growth (Taylor 2007; Evans 1987; Handley 2008). In one of the few recent publications on business and politics in Sub-Saharan Africa, Antoinette Handley (2008) focuses on state–business relations at the macro-level of government and national business associations and how the nature of this relationship affects development. She remains silent, though, about companies’ practices in local arenas and how they affect local development. More importantly, she excludes external factors from her analysis, yet these are important factors to consider when trying to understand business and politics in Africa.
The rentier state and political economy literature is important in this respect, but has focused more on the Middle East than Sub-Saharan Africa. It points to the structural limitations of implementing transnational voluntary codes of conduct at the local level by underlining the complicit relationship between oil and mining firms and state elites. It argues that companies sustain the revenue basis of a regime through resource and geopolitical rents and thereby support illiberal regimes. In return, host governments deploy their coercive capacities in order to protect oil and mining installations (Beblawi and Luciani 1987). Such transnational clientelism has led to a proliferation of rentier polities at the national (Moore 2004: 304; for the argument on Africa, see Clapham 1996; Reno 2001a) and subnational levels (Kühn 2008). This is why Soares de Oliveira (2007) talks of ‘successfully failed states’ in the case of the oil-rich states in the Gulf of Guinea: the governments of these states are successful in maintaining political power and in extracting resource rents, and MNCs have built successful relationships with these governments to secure extraction (see also Reno 2001a). These arguments have been largely ignored by the global governance and business literature mentioned above.
There are only a few political science studies of MNCs’ security practices in contexts of limited statehood. Recent exceptions from an international relations perspective include (mostly unpublished) work by Deborah Avant and Virginia Haufler. They have begun to explore the organisational practices of companies based on secondary literature, placing these questions in debates about transnational private regulation and global governance. Yet they stick to an actor-centred perspective that is mostly interested in company contributions to (good) governance (Avant et al. 2010; Haufler 2006, 2010; Avant 2007). Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams (2010) provide an analysis of the privatisation of global security services by looking at commercial security actors in Africa. In two of their case studies, they delve into how security is organised by PSCs at sites of resource extraction. Applying a Bourdieusian perspective, their focus is on the field of security professionals and how the interaction of commercial security providers with state actors shapes authority and power in the ‘global security assemblage’. However, they do not cover the complex network of other actors that has evolved around the sites of MNCs in order to govern the security of these operations – comprising NGOs, local customary authorities, donor agencies and other actors. Their study provides fascinating insights into the workings of the field of security professionals on the ground. This book builds on some of their insights into the workings of this field and uses them for understanding how it shapes the hybrid regime of security practices in business spaces in the postcolony – alongside other transnational meaning systems.
In addition, research inspired by political geography highlights the new role for MNCs in local politics as this is reflected in processes of de-/reterritorialisation of rule in Africa (Callaghy et al. 2001; Engel and Nugent 2010; Hönke 2010). In addition, political geography, area studies, anthropology and history provide us with empirically grounded single case studies of this role and the specific security practices and conflicts at particular extraction sites (Stoler 1985; von Hellerman 2010; Zalik 2004; Watts 2005). Looking at governance by companies from the ‘bottom-up’ perspective, these studies show that company behaviour is largely decoupled from the transnational codes of conduct (Frynas 2000). They show instead how transnational blueprints for participatory development at company sites give rise to new forms of exclusion and sometimes simply maintain old hierarchies that are aimed at achieving stability (Zalik 2006; Welker 2009). They are mostly interpretive studies and have not been linked to the study of business and governance in political science and security studies. However, they have very much inspired the argument presented in this book.
This book’s inquiry into the hybrid security practices of MNCs relates to other debates about external governance in the postcolonial world. If hybridity refers to the fact that a particular identity or political practice contains different influences, then hybridity is so ubiquitous (Amselle 2001) that one might argue that it does not need to be even mentioned. However, in the field of global (security) governan...
