Engaging the ‘ungoverned’: The merging of diplomacy,defence and development

Introduction: Optimizing life in ‘ungoverned’ spaces

On 14 May 2008, the US Ambassador to Ethiopia, Donald Yamamoto, visited the village of Jeldessa where he met and greeted ‘the community members who gathered with their goats, sheep, cattle, donkeys and camels’ before assisting a team of veterinarians to vaccinate the animals. ¹ While a US ambassador’s visit to a remote African village is not a new phenomenon, the relationships, objectives and constitution of his delegation are revealing in interesting ways. To begin with, the ambassador’s visit to Jeldessa was part of a US military-led Veterinary Civil Action Project (VETCAP) where Ethiopian veterinarians and US military service members assigned to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) inoculated and treated animals in several villages surrounding the city of Dire Dawa. Among other things, the VETCAP project sought to provide pastoral care to the pastoralists through activities that improved animal health and ensured the general wellbeing of communities in need of development, technical support and capacity building. The project thus established civil–military partnerships – engaging ‘ungoverned’ communities, or people that could not ‘properly govern’ their lives, habitats and livestock – fostering their endangered livelihoods.

The militarization of diplomacy and development and diplomatization of the military in the VETCAP project are not unique to this event. In neighbouring Kenya, a similar concern with the lives and wellbeing of the community had been enacted in the August 2011 Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) in the villages of Mnazini and Assa in the rural Tana River district. ² Carried out by medical providers from the US and Kenyan Military working in conjunction with several non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the MEDCAP project can be read as an extension of US providence where African state power has not been in a position to effectively govern. These military–civic partnerships form part of an incipient diplomatic paradigm that employs new agents and networks. They follow – yet also depart in specific ways – from the more formal military diplomacy ‘of negotiations and other relations between nations, nations’ militaries, and nations’ citizens aimed at influencing the environment in which the military operates’ (Willard, 2006: 6–7). Through projects like the VETCAP and MEDCAP, the military expands its moral domain by exercising ‘soft power’ while experimenting with new diplomatic methods that extend the reach of its ‘hard power’ to domains that were hitherto unmilitarized.

Ultimately, this military-diplomatic apparatus presents something more than a state’s or empire’s attempt to ‘enhance its value’ at the periphery of the international system. By managing poverty and scarcity and supporting ‘good’ living conditions around the globe, the apparatus maintains old and extends new ‘relations of subjection’ and governance while creating new sites of diplomatic engagement that exceed the governmental domain (Mbembe, 2001: 24). Connecting domains of administration and negotiation, but also violence and multiple attempts to curtail it, the apparatus is part of a milieu in which governmental and diplomatic practices are synergized and instituted. Beyond its strategic concern with the optimization of lives and livelihoods, the entanglement of governmental and diplomatic conduct registers, we believe, an ontological shift from biopolitics to biodiplomacy.

Emerging from the liberal will to self-regulation and governance and specifically addressing the politics of life, biopolitics, Michel Foucault tells us, involves ‘control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live’ (Foucault, 2003: 245). Going beyond the juridical conception of sovereignty and law enforcement, biopolitics concentrates on the management of populations through the production of knowledge about life and ways of living, as well as the enhancement of methods of supporting and controlling them. Unlike juridical sovereignty, which was predominantly defined by the right of rulers to ‘take life and let live’, biopolitics follows a governmental logic of ‘making live and letting die’ (Foucault, 2003: 247). Whereas biopolitics has expanded its reach and deepened its governmental methods to multiple domains around the globe – not only enhancing conditions of living but also determining who is made to live and who is let to die – biodiplomacy underscores the continuous negotiation of life that accompanies this global expansion and that has brought shifts in strategies of control, discourses of legitimation and forms of co-optation and cohabitation beyond governance.

We have examined the theoretical and ethical ramifications of biodiplomacy in more detail in a separate article (Constantinou and Opondo, 2014). The focus on biodiplomacy provokes us to ask if there is something more going on beyond ‘liberal governance’, the ‘liberal way of war’ or the ‘merging of security with development’. Specifically it allows us to inquire how groups, like the Jeldessa villagers or other groups who are acted upon by the powerful, play out their agency and the forms of diplomacy that enable them to do so. Do they create new diplomacies as they enact their lives in the spaces and times where biopolitical regimes operate? Or is the biopolitical formation creating new forms of diplomatic subjects? Posing the question not only of biopolitics but of biodiplomacy makes it possible for us to seriously think how lives and worlds are not just ‘governed’ but ‘negotiated’, how certain lives and worlds become plausible, and others implausible, and this not through centralized command, control and exercise of power.

To be sure, biodiplomacy does not ensure symmetrical negotiation, particularly where the USA is involved. Over the last 10 years, the cultivation of outreach and the exploitation of new civilian partnerships have been keenly pursued through the US Transformational Diplomacy initiative, extending operations beyond the traditional centres of power and intergovernmental relationships. For instance, a plethora of projects have been promoted under the auspices of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in a manner that exemplifies both the biopolitical and biodiplomatic dimensions of the military-diplomatic apparatus. Such projects are sometimes frank and cynical about their goal. VETCAP, for example, currently operates in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania and Uganda and aims to ‘deliver veterinary programs in support of strategic military objectives’. ³ Although there is no public explanation as to what the specific strategic military objectives are in each country and how they are linked to the vaccination of livestock, the engagements are indicative of the new civilian partnerships that the US Defense and State Departments are developing worldwide as well as of what has been termed as the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (3D) – the ‘three pillars’ of US foreign policy in the post-9/11 era. In short, there is a clear policy reorientation towards supporting ‘foreign’ life that is openly admitted and promoted, but whose global implications and replications are yet to be fully understood.

To begin to grasp the significance of this ‘transformational diplomacy’, it will be useful to consider the forms of life and worlds that emerge when diplomats abandon their traditional spaces of encounter, ‘get their boots dirty’ and seek to bring real change where societal transformation is urgently ‘needed’. These attempts at diplomatic innovation have been presented as part of the 21^st Century Statecraft initiative in the USA, which tries to ‘leverage the networks, technologies, and demographics of our interconnected world’ to support diplomatic and developmental objectives and thus to ‘lead through civilian power’. ⁴ What we see here is not just the targeting of foreign audiences through public diplomacy of which a lot has been said and written (inter alia, Melissen, 2005; Nye, 2004; Ross, 2002), but also the strategic task of enhancing the lives and conditions of living of foreign publics, where possible in collaboration with national and international developmental and humanitarian agencies (Duffield, 2001, 2010). The US diplomatic and military resources are, thus, increasingly intertwined with the work of civilian agencies in a manner that often creates a zone of indistinction between cooperation and conflict, diplomacy and governance and the negotiation and negation of life. These integrated ventures enable both the state and civilian agencies to become more intensely involved in the politics of life through engagements in areas around the globe where there is perceived weak, problematic or total lack of governance. Diplomacy is, thus, not only concerned with making representations to and influencing foreign regimes and audiences; defence not just with surveying global threats and defeating foreign enemies; development not simply with capacity building and foreign aid. All three now engage in integrated global governance and integrated diplomacies as a way of managing and fostering life.

Thus transformed, the new partnerships create new enmities, inter-agency collaborations and civil action programmes. They take the diplomats out of their embassies and the military out of their barracks while bringing professional ‘strangers’ into the barracks, embassies and power centres in an attempt to further the course of humanity or respond to more complex threats posed by what are demarcated as ‘ungoverned spaces’. To deal with ‘ungoverned spaces’ (McNeill, 2011) or the ‘fluidity of governable spaces’ (Korf et al., 2010) and the peoples that occupy them, military strategists and tabloid realists like Thomas Barnett (2003) have come up with new cartographic imaginations predicated on the imperative of connectivity and command. In Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map, the world is ‘globalized’ and rendered ‘in a cartography of safety and danger’ based on whether a region is integrated to the globalized core or remains part of an unconnected, non-integrated gap (Barnett, 2003; Dalby, 2007: 296).

With the US military as its primary agent, and diplomacy and development as supporting partners, interventions arising from cartographies like Barnett’s seek to extend the territorial reach, the target populations and methods of engagement to areas traditionally not within the purview of US strategic operations. As we show below, the resultant interventions are at once geopolitical and biopolitical, strategic and ontological, governmental and diplomatic. Their non-recognition or revulsion for the forms of political organization existing in other places contributes to engagement with territories that were traditionally considered ungovernable and intensifies concern with the lives of foreign populations. Ironically, the integrated engagement with these new spaces goes beyond the logic of governance and produces a diplomatic apparatus that operationalizes the vision of a pluralized diplomacy concerned with more than a ‘dialogue between states’. While this pluralized diplomacy resonates with critical theories of diplomacy that have sought to go beyond the monological conception of diplomacy as statecraft or a set of norms and rituals peculiar to professional diplomats, it departs from the critical diplomatic project in fundamental ways (Adler-Nissen, 2011; Constantinou, 1996; Cornago, 2013; Der Derian, 1987; Sharp, 2009).

That is, like the critical diplomatic projects, 3D is characterized by an ‘increasing recognition of non-governmental organizations, civil society and people in general as diplomatic stakeholders’ (Constantinou and Der Derian, 2010: 6). Unlike them, however, 3D strategies often diminish the promise of diplomatic reflexivity (Constantinou, 2006 and 2013) by subjecting the pluralization/democratization of diplomacy to a reconfigured diplomatic-military apparatus that engages in negotiation while, where necessary, privileging command and use of force. Ultimately, we suggest, 3D efforts transform the plane of engagement with the lives of others. This has profound conceptual and ethical implications for the changing practice of contemporary diplomacy that is of concern for recent critical works (Bjola and Kornprobst, 2013; Pigman, 2010), for diplomacy’s relationship to colonial and postcolonial governance (Opondo, 2012) and, more broadly, the engagement with the lives of the ‘ungoverned’. Even though, primarily, this article constitutes a theoretical piece of work we have an empirical focus on AFRICOM’s biopolitical, diplomatic and developmental activities that illustrate the merging trend of the 3Ds. No doubt deeper and more focused empirical research is required on other US Military Commands as well as inter-agency collaborations and transnational partnerships by other actors, such as the European Union (EU) and the European External Action Service; that is to say, actors that have a global reach and concerned with the politics of life, and have a stake in the global governance of ‘unstable regions’.

Biopolitics and biodiplomacy in the postcolony

The global integration of forms of governance and diplomacy has been marked by considerable transformations in practices, subjects and conceptions of biopolitics. With the end of the Cold War, global biopolitics becomes a major means of legitimation, enactment as well as interruption of neoliberal ideology (Hardt and Negri, 2001: xii–xiii, 41–42, 413). Not only does biopolitics go beyond the policing and disciplinary functions of the modern state extensively analysed in the early work of Foucault, but also it is concerned with the regulatory mechanisms of government, such as statistical estimates, risk assessments, diagnoses, forecasts, resilience tests and contingency plans, and seeks ‘to intervene’ in society at a general level. With the ‘general population and its aleatory field’ as its focus, biopolitical mechanisms aim to ‘optimize a state of life’ by normalizing knowledge about living and what it means to be a modern well-governed subject (Foucault, 2003: 246).

In the process of optimizing a ‘state of life’, governmental regimes establish networks across territorial borders and populations, extended in ways beyond those initially theorized by Foucault but outlined by theorists that followed in his footsteps (Dillon and Reid, 2001; Duffield, 2001, 2010; Escobar, 1995; Sending and Neumann, 2006). These networks can affect conditions of not only national but also ‘global governance’, disseminating transnational knowledge over life and ways of living, thus going beyond the classical Hobbesian protection of citizens from enemies into concern with the change, adaptability and resilience of (foreign) populations.

Notwithstanding these developments, the generic sense of western governmentality needs to be distinguished from its global specificities, that is, its application may have ‘uneven consequences’ across and within different states, and to this extent ‘a different form of biopolitics’ should be entertained (Joseph, 2010: 243). Attentive to the specificities of the liberal way of rule and ‘the referential objects around which liberal regimes of power revolve’, Michael Dillon and Julian Reid note the existence of a ‘liberal way of war’ that ‘very much directly reflects the liberal way of rule’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 16). That is, when the liberal way of rule goes global with life species and the ‘biohuman’ as some of its key referents, ‘new forms of governmental regime emerge that attempt to make war in defense and promotion of the entire species as opposed to war in service of a supposedly limited interest of sovereigns’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 31). Based on the forms of life it privileges, liberal rule must be prepared to wage war ‘not so much for the human, but on the human’ and ‘for the purpose of making life live’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 20, 31).

In addition to grasping the ways in which liberalism’s commitment to ‘making life live’ is transformed into a commitment to ‘killing to make life live’, it is useful to acknowledge the ways in which ‘the moderation and minimization of violence’ is part of the logic and economy of violence through which violence is ‘calculated and managed’ today (Weizman, 2011: 4). While governmental regimes are sometimes moderated through a calculus of violence predicated on principles of proportionality, thresholds, trade-offs or the notion of ‘the least of all possible evils’, the encounter with a space, life or people that one cannot fully govern means that such encounters need to be negotiated. In short, recognizing the impossibility of total war or total governance, agents often turn to a limited diplomacy predicated on the possibility of negotiation and negation of life.

Acknowledging the governmental limits in and through which modern power reproduces ‘its own world of meanings’ is crucial for understanding biopolitics and diplomacy beyond the western model. That is, an acknowledgement of the limits of government is more than an acknowledgment of the limit power puts on itself for the sake of effective governance. At a minimum, it is the recognition of the everyday modes of play, tactics of conviviality and resistance deployed by the ‘governed’ or those that one desires to govern, which helps us account for new modes of engagement especially where some of the said foreign agents of governance have to relate with foreign populations (i.e. as the Jeldessa and Tana River projects illustrate). In other words, governance encounters heterogenous sites and may have to employ different methods. In these postcolonial (and neocolonial spaces), more than elsewhere, it cannot avoid passing on to some form of diplomatic encounter (albeit a violent one). As illustrated by the veterinary vaccinations for the welfare of animals and the communities within which they live, miniaturization and diversification of arts of governing often call for some form of negotiation of symbolic value. This means that even the most powerful engage in public diplomacy so as to influence and persuade foreign – and sometimes hostile – populations with regard to scientific knowledge, values and ideals or to increase the acceptability of their programmes and agents.

With the merging of US 3D initiatives in Africa and beyond, we witness a new, postcolonial and more insidious form of governmentalization. The problems of the 2Ds or the SD (i.e. ‘the merging of security and development’) have already been pointed out by Duffield, who extensively and persuasively argued that the blurring of distinctions of people, army and government, ‘forged new ways of projecting power through non-territorial public-private networks and systems’ (Duffield, 2001: 17). The most troubling implication of this merging has been the blunt definition of underdevelopment as a danger, a condition that breeds insecurity in both the domestic and international spheres, thus legitimating the peace and war interventions of neoliberal governmentality and the contemplation of transforming entire societies (Duffield, 2001: 22–43).

Whereas in the early postcolonial era, those who lived in or were content with their ‘underdevelopment’ were broadly viewed as ‘backward’ people whose lack of progress reflected their epistemological inadequacy, that is, they had nothing to teach ‘us’ and could only learn from ‘us’, in the late postcolonial era the merging of development and security rendered such people additionally as ‘dangerous’, via association with terrorism, migration, humanitarian disasters and so on. It necessitated not only the fighting of ‘new wars’, the opening up of new frontiers of strategic engagement with the other, but also the support of ‘new forms of peace’, whereby neoliberal governance and local conditions could cohabit. Thus, agents of global governance would negotiate the terms of development with local forces or coercively install a neoliberal regime before attempting to negotiate the peace required for its operation. The implications of these trends have been extensively studied through critical approaches to development, peace, conflict and international relations more broadly (e.g. Richmond, 2012).

From this perspective, initiatives like the VETCAP and MEDCAP are but an extension of global ‘governmental rationality’ – liberal ‘empire’ or ‘liberal way of war’ (Dillon and Reid, 2001; Duffield, 2010; Hardt and Negri, 2001). Wherever armies and embassies engage with other actors, such as NGOs, the objectives and methods of intervention become more complex due to the ethico-operational guidelines of most NGO activities. It is naïve to assume that NGOs, especially those partnering with the military-diplomatic apparatus, are innocent actors in the development and humanitarian ‘game’ due to their enunciated concern with the suffering of any-man-whatever. NGOs, much like the state, are involved in the biopolitical terrain albeit with different means and more nuanced ends. By privileging the figure of ‘man’ as abstract human capacity (either diminished through state incapacity or optimized through developmental intervention), NGOs acquire a moral alibi for their action and can ‘conduct “just wars” without arms, without violence, without borders’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001: 36). In addition, NGO concerns for universal rights and needs, and the moral language with which they mark the sins of the enemy (privation, atrocity, bad governance) legitimizes their salvific missions. Yet NGOs and now the US military are involved in more than biopolitical governance. They operate in spaces where governance exists in unrecognizable or ‘undesirable’ forms, or where African state instruments are said to have ‘fallen from the hands of those supposed to be exercising’ them (Mbembe, 2001: 24). Here, the NGOs, militaries and diplomats can only negotiate the terms of their engagement with communities and states whose governmental milieu differs from Foucault’s description of western ‘bio-power’ (Ferguson, 2006: 282).

Doubtless, there are resonances between Foucault’s governmental regime that ‘has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’ and the various forces that seek to determine the parameters of life and capacity building in Africa. However, a critical analysis of state formations in Africa and the relationship between securities, economies, territories and populations raises tantalizing questions for biopolitics. Not only is the state’s capacity for ‘efficient’ and ‘centralized social engineering’ limited, but it also has to deal with empirical facts of governance that make it difficult and sometimes impractical (if not undesirable) for the state to operate under ‘a single rationality’ (capitalism, democracy, etc.) or try to order ‘the biological resources of its population in the sense of the “bio-power” model’ (Ferguson, 2006: 283). Most significantly, one has to recognize ‘strategies of extraversion’, whereby local postcolonial subjects utilize diplomatic, military, economic, religious and cultural resources to re-negotiate their subjectivity and dependence and recover part of their ‘lost’ power by carving temporary spaces of autonomy and sovereignty (Bayart, 2000, 2009). These gaps and limits of governance highlight modalities for engaging postcolonial communities, highlighting the dynamism and fluidity of relationships that exceed the art of government and point to the art of diplomacy.

Attentiveness to these empirics – even where the idiom of governance is deployed in terms of neoliberal ‘self-help’, strengthening of ‘civil society’, democratization and decentralization – calls for a different analytics of the ‘politics of life’. Rather than being viewed as zones of incompleteness in need of supplemental governance, the multiplicity of postcolonial politics ‘bypassing’ the state or complicating its operations means that such zones ought to be revisited as spaces for diplomatic engagement. On the economic plane, such modes of ‘bypass’ and co-optation could take the form of everyday strategies and tactics of survival as evinced by infrastructural formations in ‘pirate towns’ or migrant enclaves in Johannesburg and Eastleigh in Nairobi (Simone, 2006). Similarly, the informal economies of inventively fending for oneself, some of them involving creative use of state apparatuses, present yet another zone of diplomatic-governmental co-presence that is often articulated in a language that commonly recognizes state lack, gap or nullity. For example, the existence of such zones as the neopatrimonial networks in Mobutu’s Zaire or the transformations in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) ‘Systeme D’ (se debrouiller), where people in the Kivus ‘get by without the state’ by engaging in ‘self-development’ through constructing not only parallel diplomatic and economic livelihoods but also parallel ‘infrastructural and welfare support mechanisms’ (Jackson, 2002: 521–522).

In addition to strategic barriers and tactical flights from state penetration and ‘being governed’ (Scott, 2009), are a series of commitments and heteronomous relationships that contribute to an explosion of diplomatic capacities and actors in need of continuous mediation. In his study of state formations, subjectivity and citizenship in equatorial Africa, Mahmood Mamdani (1998: 4–5) maps out how African identities emerge and are linked to (post)colonial racial, ethnic, civic rights and customary law and the forms of governance that they make possible or impossible. These postcolonial identities and relationships and the less recognized mediation practices that they privilege complicate attempts by states to govern communities, mobilities and lives within specific territories. Significant here is the range of symbolism attached to spaces, the human body and ways of living that make it impervious to established forms of state regulation. For instance, burial rites coincide with autochthonous claims to belonging, thus infusing the soil with meanings beyond those derived from the statist territoriality or capitalist value. Similarly, nativist and sometimes vernacular cosmopolitan or millenarian orientations towards possible selves/others continuously make the nationally sanctioned idea of community and diplomacy unimaginable with far-reaching implications for cohabitation (Bernault, 2006; Geschiere, 2011; Mbembe, 2007).

The above limits to postcolonial governance and biopolitics often remain unaccounted for. Our diplomatic account of these limitations seeks to go beyond the quasi-state thesis (Jackson, 1990), theorizations on strong societies/weak states (Migdal, 1988) or the collapsed and failed states policy analyses (Zartman, 1995). Through our reading of the diplomatic dimension of what is often presented as a zone of governance that is either authentic or inauthentic, strong or weak, successful or failing, we interrogate the liberal public rhetoric; that is, the discourse that presents governmental interventionism as hawkish and ambitious while recognizing the deeply rooted liberal idea that ‘“one always governs too much” - or, at any rate, one always must suspect that one governs too much’ (Foucault, 2010: 319). In the postcolony, the liberal suspicion of excessive governance is quickly transformed into a call for different or proper governance, given the certitude with which the liberal logic encounters ways of being in the world that do not comport with its vision of ‘human capital’, life or economic regulation (Foucault, 2010; Mamdani, 2004: 18).

While such encounters might diminish the diplomatic capacities of non-recognized actors through practices that encourage relations based on philanthropy, development or ‘pre-emptive police or military action’ (Mamdani, 2004: 18), the encounter with an undomesticated otherness and life beyond the abstracted population also creates the conditions of possibility for new forms of diplomacy or hybridized formations of governance, through special or shadowy intermediaries that seek to reach the ‘ungoverned’.

Merging diplomacy, defence and development

The recognition of new or hitherto unrecognized sites of diplomacy combined with the emergent military-diplomatic apparatus reveal how the utility of governance, its necessity and even its excess, is not a given. It can breed suspicion and be posed as a problematic for interrogation, both from the angle of governmental agents and governmental subjects, from above and below, as well as from spaces at home and abroad. On the one hand, efforts to merge the 3Ds can be viewed as an attempt to accelerate and complete biopolitics worldwide, to govern the global polity through agents and networks operating from varying distances with various degrees of intimacy (Neumann and Sending, 2010). On the other hand, they can be regarded as an acknowledgement that engagement with others cannot be reduced to mere governmental exercises and military actions. Developmental-humanitarian plans, surveillance, policing and occasional warfare when deemed necessary oscillates with diplomatic outreach towards the ‘ungoverned’ or targeted communities within their midst. It includes constant negotiation and innovation in engaging them as evidenced by current shifts in the implementation of US foreign policy that seek to capture this new form of relation and with it the politics of life.

In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of the US Department of Defense, the US government is categorical about the need for merging the 3Ds, and is critical of ‘authorities and structures [that] assume a neat divide between defense, diplomacy, and development that simply does not exist’ (QDR, 74). It submits that ‘the integrated use of diplomacy, development and defense, along with intelligence, law enforcement, and economic tools of statecraft’ are essential for advancing national and common interests, and for maintaining US ‘stewardship of the international system’ (QDR, 13).

The US army’s recognition of the need for 3D integration mainly resulted from its wartime experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, where beyond the actual military campaign that it fought, it was charged to ‘win hearts and minds’ on the ground. These experiences, however, are now replicated in places where the USA is not fighting a war or serving as an occupying force, most notably in Africa through AFRICOM. Interestingly, we also see the replication of these ideas in the integration of the functions of the Black and Blue United Nations (UN) operations, such as in the merging of the political-military and humanitarian-developmental missions in Somalia and the DRC. The European External Action Service has already integrated its diplomatic and developmental activities through programmes like the European Neighbourhood Policy, but the defence dimension is currently underdeveloped. Nonetheless, the EU involvement in Kosovo, Operation Atalanta to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia, and the EU stabilization force in the DRC have been notable cases where the challenges of coordinating the 3Ds or the potential benefits of merging them at different levels is an issue of concern for European policy-makers, and will become more prominent if the ambitious idea of a EU army materializes.

Within the US State Department, the notion of the 3Ds is viewed positively, at least officially. Like the QDR, the First Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), also compiled in 2010, strongly supports inter-agency collaborations as well as civilian–military partnerships with ‘like minded people and nations to solve the pressing problems we all face’ (see Hillary Clinton’s opening address to QDDR). There is, nonetheless, a notable difference in emphasis between the two reports, concerning the 3Ds. Whereas the QDR uses stronger terms such as ‘integration’ to explain and shape the perceived fusion between the 3Ds (QDR, v, xiii, 13, 57), the QDDR refers to the 3Ds as a call to ‘work together’, as ‘equal pillars’ or ‘core pillars’ of US Foreign Policy (QDDR, 18, 75, 79). The State Department points to ‘Partnering with the Department of Defense’, offering diplomatic support (QDDR, 54), or utilizing the military as a ‘development partner’ (QDDR, 78) or integrating the military within an ‘international operational response framework’ where ‘clear roles and responsibilities’ are identified’ (QDDR, 142–3).

What the State Department seems to fear with regard to the fusion of the 3Ds is subordinating US foreign policy activities to military agendas and priorities. As suggested in a policy paper: ‘Instead of equalizing development, diplomacy, and defense, an unbalanced 3D security framework that only strengthens DOD [Department of Defense] capacities could increase the militarization and politicization of development and diplomacy’ (Schirch and Kishbaugh, 2006). The resultant loss of ‘impartiality’ of civilian agencies and developmental NGOs collaborating with the US military, leaving aside the prior politicization of development by association with the State Department and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), are less well understood or meaningfully addressed in these enthusiastic policy documents. The documents also display a deep misunderstanding of the threats and vilification that civilian agencies receive on the ground based on their association with the US military, especially if the latter is explicitly or implicitly a participant in an active conflict (Schirch and Kishbaugh, 2006). Similarly, the dispelling of the naïve belief that any inequalities or iniquities can be adequately dealt with through better inter-agency consultation, secondment of personnel and creating ‘structural firewalls’ between the 3Ds (i.e. bureaucratic assigning of appropriate roles and tasks) has contributed to a shift in public discourse. This can also explain why the initial enthusiasm with the use of the term 3D among certain think-tanks and peace institutes has now changed; although the policy has remained, the name has changed in one case from 3D to 3P (Partners for Peacebuilding Policy). ⁵

For long-term strategists of US diplomacy, nonetheless, the 3D vision offers an opportunity for shaping the transformation of diplomacy. In part, this is due to the radical shifts arising from the increase of diplomatic actors, the civilian-NGO involvement in developmental, humanitarian and peacebuilding projects, the public-digital communicative turn in diplomacy and the post-9/11 world that resecuritized the globe and redefined US priorities. Indeed, the Transformational Diplomacy Initiative launched in 2006 under the former US State Secretary, Condoleezza Rice, recognized that ‘our world is changing’ and advocated for the need to ‘change diplomacy’ and ‘work in new ways and in new places, with new partners and for new purposes’ (Rice, 2008). The transformational elements of this new diplomacy were given an interesting double meaning that made it at once a strategic and an ontological project. On the one hand, it referred to the transformations within the US diplomatic service to make it more innovative, efficient and effective; on the other hand, it referred to the advancement of ‘transformational goals’, given how globalization is ‘transforming our world’, enhancing decentralization but also ‘revealing the weaknesses of many states, their inability to govern effectively and to create opportunities for their people’ (Rice, 2008). In a nutshell, transforming the diplomatic service, which in turn can, through inter-agency and transnational collaborations, transform the world.

From this perspective, transformational diplomacy has given diplomacy a ‘new purpose’ as it extends to a governmental mission beyond one’s territory, by way of supporting or fulfilling the biopolitical function of other states perceived to be in such need. As explained by Rice:

Perhaps our greatest foreign policy challenge, now and in decades to come, then, stems from the many states that are simply too weak, too corrupt, or too poorly governed to perform even basic sovereign responsibilities like policing their territory, governing justly, enabling the potential of their people, and preventing the threats that gather within their countries from destabilizing their neighbors and ultimately, the international system. (Rice, 2008, italics ours)

To that extent, the notion of diplomatic outreach is re-valorized: striving to reach ‘new places’ that beg for ‘good governance’, and where no place appears to be far enough. At the very least, it requires ‘diplomats to be active in new places far beyond the walls of foreign chancelleries and American embassies’; at its most ambitious, it means trusting ‘people to manage greater amounts of risk’ and to acquire ‘the best technology to liberate them from embassies and offices, so they can work anytime, anywhere’ (Rice, 2008): the diplomatic pursuit of governing the global polity and optimizing life – anytime, anywhere.

Engaging the ‘ungoverned’: AFRICOM’s biopolitical operations

The diplomatic aspect of the 3D effort has the potential to make new representations and provide alternative knowledge and counter-conducts, which encourage biopolitical agents to move from negation to negotiation in the encounter with Africa. Nonetheless, current attempts to creatively engage Africa commonly reproduce problematic discourses and methods of engagement with far-reaching implications for lives and livelihoods on the continent. While the limits to government do exist in Africa (like anywhere else), the dominant regimes of recognition and intelligibility that the USA privileges as part of its 3D strategy have led to primary interest in what the USA considers to be ‘Africa’s ungoverned spaces’ (McNeill, 2011). Yet, the more ‘ungoverned’ or violent the space the less diplomatic the encounter, as security and defence become the priority.

According to Teresa Whelan, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, these spaces are part of a ‘new threat paradigm’. Among other things, the label ‘ungoverned space’ is deployed to develop strategies for engagement with territories that bear the following characteristics: physical inaccessibility/impenetrability; competing governance regimes; logics arising from a sovereign state’s ‘inability or unwillingness to exercise authority over part or whole of a country’; exploiting legal norms or processes by actors who threaten domestic or international order (terrorists, illegal migrants, nomads, etc.); and governmental inability to ‘monitor and control circulation’ of peoples and things due to the opacity of these activities. ⁶ As put in a commissioned Report for the US Department of Defense, ‘ungoverned area’ was assessed not only in terms of lack or gaps but also in terms of their way of governance. That is, ‘“Ungoverned areas” should be assumed to include under-governed, ill-governed, contested and exploitable areas’. To that extent, ‘agencies in defense, diplomacy, development and other fields all have capabilities’ to prevent such areas from becoming ‘safe havens’ for ‘illicit actors’. ⁷

Nowhere is this ‘ungoverned areas’ mission clearer than in the activities of the newly established AFRICOM. As a strategic command responsible for the whole of Africa (interestingly with the exception of Egypt), AFRICOM’s ‘whole-of-government approach’ ‘reflects a much more integrated staff structure’. As illustrated above, the integrated structure brings a ‘significant management and staff representation by the Department of State, USAID, and other US government agencies involved in Africa’. ⁸ It targets ‘broad objectives’ through humanitarian, military–military and civil–military operations (CMOs) (Losey, 2011: 77). Given its broad mandate, AFRICOM is now concerned with ‘Phase Zero’ operations, which include duties and activities that were previously the concern of non-military US agencies, NGOs and local communities – from building schools and digging wells, to HIV/AIDS research/advocacy, dental work and veterinary immunization exercises. ⁹

This new terrain of operation incorporates new forms of knowledge and puts old actors to new use while inserting others into an elaborate diplomatic-developmental-military network. The ethical and political stakes of such projects were highlighted in a March 2009 Focus Group Discussion between a Civil Affairs evaluation team and professionals from Garissa, Kenya. During this session, one respondent gave an account of having witnessed a ‘strange kind of aid’, where the spectacular and ironic character of the militaristic optimization of life and engagement in practices other than war was characterized by a Civil Affairs operation agent as ‘giving treatment to a mother with a child while another one protects him with a gun’. ¹⁰

In addition to medical teams, the US military employs Human Terrain teams ‘composed of both military and social science personnel embedded’ in field units to acquire the socio-cultural knowledge required for ‘kinetic’ and ‘phase zero’ operations. Through the use of ethnographic techniques, the Human Terrain teams contribute to the ‘alignment’ of academic work and the US Army, thus militarizing the discipline of Anthropology in a manner reminiscent of colonial era associations (Albro, 2010: 22).

On the surface, the interest in other cultures on the part of the military and its involvement in the acquisition of detailed knowledge of the people they engage provide a potent site for reflection on the changing ‘face’ of soldiering and diplomacy. Through intimate engagement with foreign peoples’ cultures and everyday lives via fieldwork, the new soldiers seem to depart from the ocularcentrism, virtualization and distancing effects of US techno-warfare arising from the increased use of satellites and drones (Der Derian, 2009; Gregory, 2011; Hill, 2009).

However, the form of closeness and cultural knowledge arising from the activities of soldiers on the ground is also problematic. Not only does it contribute to the ‘weaponizing of culture’, but the ‘mosaic war’ (moving from ‘hand grenades to handshakes’) also diminishes the reflexive aspect of cultural encounters by replacing ethics and inquisitiveness with strategic measurement, cultural aggregation and various forms of ‘biopiracy’ (Hill, 2009: 255; Lutz, 2006: 292). These moves by the military participating in ‘Operations Other than War’ have been considered an attempt to ‘demilitarize the military’, while others view such activities as the militarization of civilian practice.

Human Terrain Systems (HTSs) are but one dimension of 3D and the complex ethical and political questions derived therefrom. While HTSs use knowledge of foreign cultures and lifestyles to foster power over life, some of AFRICOM operations, in particular the CMOs, present interesting examples of biopolitical strategies. That is, as the US military becomes increasingly concerned with HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, surveillance of infectious diseases like Ebola and reaching out to communities affected by health concerns, it has had to get into partnerships with African militaries, research institutions, the media, NGOs and local authorities. These CMOs (MEDCAP, Dental Civic Action Ptogram [DENTCAP] and VETCAP), or military–military partnerships like the US Army Medical Research Unit-Kenya (USAMRU-K), miniaturize and proliferate the sites of diplomatic, developmental and defence engagement. Not only are they concerned with the diseases posing a direct threat to human bodies and populations, but also they extend this biopolitical concern to the livestock that sustain, optimize or endanger the lives of foreign populations. ¹¹

As stated in a Special Warfare article on ‘Planning, Executing and Evaluating VETCAPS’, ‘the overarching objective of a VETCAP is never solely to treat animals, but rather to influence the civilian population as part of a broader mission’ (Bayar, 2013: 53). In the case of a project carried out by the CJTF-HOA in Karamoja, Uganda, in 2009–2010, the VETCAP teams assisted ‘the Ugandan People’s Defense Force [UPDF] with improving community relations in order to facilitate a small-arms disarmament campaign in the region’ (Bayar, 2013). Unfortunately, the collaborative effort between the VETCAP teams and the UPDF revived the community’s mistrust for the UPDF due to a history of violent disarmament practices that are often accompanied by the loss of livestock, human life and property or developmental attempts to put the economic and cultural activities of the Karamojong under state/military control.

The symbolic and material value of a project that seeks to optimize the lives of livestock of nomadic communities is not to be underestimated. Among the Karamojong, like most pastoralist groups in East Africa, ‘animals define one’s status in the society’. They are the marker of wealth, source of pride and are part of an elaborate economy where cattle-rustling or raiding is an acceptable means of ‘providing the community with additional wealth’ or illustrating one’s ‘ability and capacity to found and protect a family’. It is for these reasons that the governments in the region and most development actors consider this way of life a ‘problem in need of a solution’ and seek to transform the Karamojong into sedentary agriculturalists or less aggressive pastoralists (Iyodu, 2009: 2). ‘Well-meaning’ as the VETCAP mission to Karamoja might have been in developmental terms, the team’s attempt at winning hearts and minds through livestock vaccinations ran the risk of ‘fuelling animal theft by creating a pool of animals that had recently received healthcare and were therefore more valuable’ (Bayar, 2013: 53). Typical of sedentary and modern surveillance thinking, the VETCAP team resorted to practices such as ‘branding animals and treating only animals whose owners kept them in kraals – systems of fences – guarded around the clock by the UPDF’ (Bayar, 2013). It thus imported new governmental practices and military demands as a condition for enhancing life for the nomads.

Concluding thoughts

The explorations above are best read as an attempt to map the passage from biopolitics to biodiplomacy and vice versa, occasioned by the merging of diplomacy, defence and development. We accorded special attention to the transformations in diplomatic thought and practice and extended these insights to think about the politics of life. We showed how 3D can bring together multiple voices and create spaces for problem-solving purposes but in doing so also create new problems, coopt agency and breed violence.

The focus on problem solving rather than problematization, governance rather than diplomacy, and command rather than negotiation, flattens out and even erases the multiplicity of sites from which new or dissenting diplomatic voices can emerge. The integrated approach characteristic of 3D creates ambivalent effects; that is, it can create diplomatic spaces that are still counter-diplomatic or life-managing practices that deploy death as a way of securing the lives they privilege. That is to say, the attempt to ‘engage the ungoverned’ through innovative diplomatic practice can still entrench a governmental regime where reflexivity and ethical encounters with otherness are given only a token address.

Similarly, something is lost when one overlooks the diplomatic and privileges analyses that focus on the governmental dimension of biopolitics. Doubtless, a governmental logic underlines the ‘intensification and extension’ of liberal forms of power geared towards the ‘administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death’ (Dillon and Reid, 2001: 41). However, beyond the governmental, beyond the ‘conduct of conduct’, beyond the ‘war without arms’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001), one has to consider the place of diplomacy as we encounter sites and practices where conduct is negotiated and mediated: sites where lives, meanings and peoples exceed ‘the population’ and exist in territories or extra-territorial spaces where liberal governance’s reach is limited or contested.

As the cases above illustrate, the parallels between the new liberal regimes of biopower, the liberal way of war and liberal way of development to which Dillon and Reid or Duffield make reference are too obvious and potent to be dismissed. What is not obvious, and definitely requires further interrogation, are the meanings, gaps and relationships that exceed the liberal logic of governance; the numerous spaces, lives and potentialities that are problematically marked as ‘ungoverned’, or ungovernable due to their existence outside the logic of the state’s ‘unlimited internal objectives’ or unacknowledged by its ‘limited external objectives’ (Foucault, 2010: 6–7); spaces and lives that are entangled with, but cannot be fully accounted for by governmental logics concerned with ‘the population as a political problem, as a biological problem and as power’s problem’ (Foucault, 2003: 245).

The linking of diplomacy with liberal global governance promotes a transnational ethic of responsibility for optimizing life and supporting humans in need wherever they are, something that has unleashed a new era of compenetration where anyone who can, does intervene in the ‘internal’ affairs of others (Badie, 2013). ¹² To that extent, the merging of the 3Ds can be viewed as an attempt to penetrate those regions that persistently resist national and/or global governance as well as those whose incorporation remains fragile or uncertain. We have argued in this article that penetration is not limited to command, law enforcement and occasional use of force, but that it also entails a diplomatic engagement, between the agents of the ‘ungoverned’ and those who can reach them, aim to optimize their life conditions and, in the end, negotiate their subjection to regimes of governance. With the proliferation of diplomacies and practices of biopolitics, the so-called ‘ungoverned’ populations continue re-negotiating life and the terms of their subjection as they forge spaces of emancipation, autonomy and heteronomy.