Logistics from the margins

Abstract

Seaports at global margins rarely feature in contemporary discussions of the logistics industry. This paper brings together recent geographical writing on logistics with discussions of margins as paradoxical sites of inclusive exclusion. Building on fieldwork on the docks of Freetown, Sierra Leone – a port that experts in logistics problematize as a ‘contaminated’ place within the global shipping community – this contribution shows that seaports at global margins are in fact at the centre of key projects of global circulation. While logistics embodies universal aspirations to connectivity, it is profoundly dependent on the uneven terrains of global capitalism. To make this case, this contribution traces the interventions of a global terminal operator and the US Coast Guard to reposition a port at the margins and discusses their effects on logistical and political orders. In doing so, this paper offers a critical perspective on the power geometries of the global logistics industry. Logistics in this view is not only a political technology that creates seamless interconnectivity and transforms heterogeneous places with diverse socialities, political configurations and technological infrastructures into zones of global circulation. The implementation of logistics is also an intrinsically controversial, precarious and contested project.

Keywords

Supply chain capitalism logistics global South margins security

Introduction

Richard stands in front of his office at the waterfront in Freetown, pointing towards the new container terminal. ‘Over there, this is now where Europe begins’, states the harbour master of the deep-water port. In the early 2000s, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID, 2000: 4) described the small port as ‘the most expensive port in West Africa in large part because of its inefficiency and poor security’. In the following decade, the main port of Sierra Leone has seen quite a change. In 2011, the Sierra Leonean government leased the container terminal for an initial period of 20 years to Bolloré, a French business conglomerate with a large transport and logistics branch. What followed was a complete refurbishment of a section of the old colonial harbour, Queen Elizabeth II Quay. Nowadays, the big names of the global logistics imaginary – Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp – are located a stone’s throw away from Richard’s office, where ship-to-shore gantry cranes lift containers belonging to international mining consortia onto the quay.

The business arm of logistics is the organizational, technical and spatial response to the global search for resources and cheap labour (Neilson, 2012: 333) and builds the means of possibility for the contemporary worlds of global outsourcing and offshoring (Peck, 2017). Against this backdrop, efficient connectivity is the hallmark of today’s economies and a prerequisite for positioning places within global supply chains. In recent years, scholars have taken up the task to provide us with a better understanding of this industry that creates and reinforces connectivity via supply chains across vast uneven terrain. This research encourages readers to understand logistics not as ‘a purely technical or apolitical science’ (Danyluk, 2018: 633) but as a key political technology of contemporary capitalism that recalibrates the economy and shapes the world through connectivity (Cowen, 2010, 2014; Danyluk, 2018; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Tsing, 2009, 2016).

On the African continent, logistics has become one of the most relevant benchmarks for measuring the continent’s ‘proximity gap’ (Naudé, 2009: 1) to world markets. It is no coincidence that the paradigmatic objects of the industry, shipping containers, nowadays decorate the publications of organizations such as the World Bank on trade facilitation policies and reports. While African ports increasingly form part of both corporate terminal networks and global supply chains (Chalfin, 2010; Dua, 2017; Enns, 2018; Hönke and Cuesta-Fernandez, 2017), their position, however, remains fragile and controversial. A recent World Bank report, for example, concludes that ‘connectivity’ in Sierra Leone is still seriously lacking. Although the country’s capital, Freetown, sits on the shores of one of the largest natural harbours and its logistics infrastructure has seen significant investment in the past decade, the country is still placed in the bottom 20% of all surveyed countries (e.g. World Bank, 2018: 52).

Building on fieldwork on the docks of Freetown Port, this paper offers a critical perspective on the logistics industry from the margins of global circulation. By closely following the attempts of trying to shape and engineer the connectivity of a port at the margins this paper brings together recent geographical approaches towards logistics (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014; Danyluk, 2018; Gregson et al., 2017) with discussions of margins as paradoxical sites of inclusive exclusion (Ouma et al., 2013: 225; see also Sharp, 2013; Tsing, 1994). Margins are no longer geographical places but rather ‘analytical sites’ (Tsing, 1994: 279). As an epistemological vantage point, they allow for a critical encounter with the industry’s spatial imaginary and its ‘simplified and sanitized account[s] of the circulation of stuff’ (Cowen, 2014: 2). As an analytical approach, the view from the margins sheds light on the political life and the ambiguous b/ordering processes that form the basis of logistical orders.

The paper is structured in four sections. In the first section, I bring together the emerging critical debates on the global logistics industry with perspectives on the geographies of margins. In the second section, I follow recent reframings of West Africa’s Atlantic domain that have spurred new socio-economic dynamics in the realm of logistics. I exemplify this dynamic in the subsequent two sections. In section three, I trace the administrative transformations in Freetown Port and investigate how private infrastructure operators are currently trying to reposition the port as a node in a global terminal network. In section four, I trace how this repositioning of the port affects its place in the world in terms of supply chain security, turning Freetown from a marginal presence to a port of global relevance.

Encountering logistical orders

In recent years, logistics has become an object of growing interest among human geographers and other social scientists. In this literature, logistics constitutes more than a mundane and technical task of moving goods in the right quantity and quality so that they are in the right place at the right time. Critical scholars approach logistics as a key branch of contemporary capitalism that choreographs infrastructural spaces, communication flows and labouring bodies as a profit strategy across different markets (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Tsing, 2009, 2016). Critical geographers, in particular, position the field of logistics as an often unexamined background to the ongoing ‘neoliberalization of space’ (Cowen, 2010: 602), which spatially fixes ‘capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation’ (Danyluk, 2018: 631). As a technology of establishing and reprogramming the physical networks of economic globalization, the logistics industry thus shapes the conditions of connectivity and has a far-reaching political life. As Danyluk argues, ‘by opening up new extraction zones and by saturating regions with products, the logistics revolution has promoted the penetration of the commodity form into new areas, the dispossession of communal resources, and the dissolution of noncapitalist modes of life’ (Danyluk, 2018: 642).

The new attention being paid to logistics has already produced a rich literature that critically encounters logistical orders on different scales, from the politics of the global geoeconomy (Cowen and Smith, 2009) to labouring bodies in fulfilment centres (Kanngieser, 2013). On a variety of scales, supply chains stitch together logistics zones and corridors and enact new configurations of sovereignty, technology and space. Against this background, Tsing (2009, 2016) qualifies the contemporary configuration of capitalism as supply chain capitalism, a capitalist formation where networks of retailers, suppliers and sub-contractors produce and distribute goods globally, and not primarily for national markets. On a massive scale, the logistics industry rests on globally harmonized means of connection, including technical infrastructure, common standards and software protocols. Yet supply chain capitalism, as Tsing (2009) argues, links different places and people without creating homogeneous landscapes of accumulation. Instead, chains have become strategic, polymorphic business tools of what Mezzadra and Neilson (2013: 13) refer to as ‘differential accumulation’. They operate through the logic of spatial arbitrage, and exploit uneven ‘time-space coordinates in order to accumulate profits’ (Ong, 2006: 174). Hence, global arbitrage relies on and exploits discrepancies between different markets and thrives on the varying legal, physical and economic demarcations between nation states, and on ‘niche differences’ (Tsing, 2009: 167) in terms of cultural identity and subject position. As such, arbitrage not only geographically extends the division of labour but also leads to ‘a greater polarization between the core and peripheral zones of the world economy’ (Wallerstein, 1983: 25). Corporations, as Tsing (2009: 158) argues, use this and mobilize ‘“non-economic” arrangements’ of oppression and diversity such as race or gender for their supply chains. While those chains are highly standardized across space, subject positions and labour usually remain outside the sphere of supply chain standardization. This specific arrangement of capitalism is intrinsically connected to margins in two ways.

In the realm of logistics, the notion of margins mobilizes a bundle of associations. In business terms, the global economic margins may designate geographic territories or ‘peripheries’ that fall under the category of low-income countries. As such, they may promise new profit margins if properly connected by the logistics industry. Moreover, the outsourcing of activities may ‘drive down the firm’s marginal production costs’ (Bernard et al., 2015: 28). The trajectory I follow, however, instead mobilizes the perspective as an analytical approach in order to reflect on the spatial and economic as well as the social and normative orders of logistics. The notion of logistical orders refers to the ways in which circulation is organized. They consist of the political technologies, modes of governing, and spatialities that create and maintain the industry’s power geometries. As shown above, these orders build on and create a globally uneven terrain, thus linking centres with margins. Following Tsing (1994: 279), margins here are ‘not a geographical, descriptive location’. Global margins represent vantage points ‘from which we see the instability of social categories’ (Tsing, 1994: 279). Following Sharp’s (2013) analysis of ‘geopolitics at the margins’, such margins are thus not the blank interspaces between the pages of a narrative of global logistics. Although analyses of African logistics are often ‘scrupulously localized’ (Ferguson, 2006: 3), the logistical orders on the African continent are ‘inseparable from the functioning of the world economy’ (Hoffman, 2011: xv), yet only receive marginal attention (Chalfin, 2010; Hönke and Cuesta-Fernandez, 2017, 2018; Stenmanns and Ouma, 2015). As I will show, ports on the margins such as Freetown Port increasingly contribute to the complex global architecture of logistics. Against this backdrop, logistics fundamentally produces spaces that exceed the geopolitical ordering of North and South. As we have seen in the introduction, even local actors from the South increasingly approach logistics as a spatial technology that, if properly applied and executed, engenders b/ordering processes across the North/South divide in order to mobilize spatial arbitrage. At the same time, margins refer to the paradoxical plays of ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Ouma et al., 2013: 225) within the industry’s geometries of power. As bell hooks (1984: xvii) writes, ‘[t]o be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body’.

As a means of studying Freetown’s articulation in, and its rearticulation of, global logistics space, I followed different actors on a daily basis, from the managerial level to ‘middling technocrats’ (Roy, 2012), tally clerks and casual workers during three stays in spring 2014 and 2016, and August 2018. Getting into ports nowadays can be quite challenging. As I describe later on, the securitization of logistics space has made it difficult to obtain a port pass as a casual bystander. Moreover, every instance of corruption – a recent study estimates that around US$45 million per year are paid as bribes associated with the port of Freetown (Department for International Development, 2017: 25) – was increasing the difficulty, as most ordinary routines for entering the port are based on paying bribes to security personnel. After a process of gaining trust through corporate interviews, I was able to get close to practitioners in the field and to join the daily routines and work meetings of several stakeholders. As part of this, I conducted interviews with relevant actors inside and outside the port, but most importantly spent time on the docks of Freetown. Unspecified quotes in this paper refer to those meetings, interviews and casual encounters. As I followed a multi-sited trajectory, I then participated in port development and logistics security conferences and visited relevant connected ports, namely Tema Port in Ghana, Malta Freeport in Malta and Puerto de La Luz on the Canary Islands, to conduct interviews.

Logistics at global margins

In what follows, I offer a view from the margins to trace how the rationales of managerial logistics and its ‘global spatial imaginary’ (Chua et al., 2018: 622) have spurred a new socio-economic dynamic with ambiguous results in West African ports and, more specifically, in Freetown Port. In recent years, a range of actors from development banks and international organizations to consultancies and think tanks has taken an interest in ‘African logistics’. Transit corridors on the way to the ocean and seaports increasingly figure as infrastructures that modulate Africa’s relation to the world. According to development economists, Africa’s positionality is changing rapidly, ‘from being a niche market for shipping operators to gaining mainstream status’ (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2013: 9). After decades of stagnation and widespread negligence and mismanagement of logistics infrastructure, consultancies and shipping companies now anticipate a prosperous future for African economies. ‘African logistics’, as one consultancy states, stands for the chance ‘to build tomorrow’s markets’ (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2013). CMA CGM (2014: 2), a major carrier, has even declared that the continent ‘is at the heart of our strategic priorities’.

Until the outbreak of the Ebola virus epidemic in 2014, Sierra Leone was one such promising case. A decade after the bitter civil war that ended in 2002, analysts rated the resource-rich country as an emerging market (Marais, 2012). Industry experts predicted that Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, could deliver 40% of global iron ore demand in the near future (see KPMG, 2012). However, there was a large obstacle to this extractive shift. The decrepit and congested deep-water ports as well as inland transportation in the region were ill equipped for such an upsurge in use and their condition restricted further investment (Landon, 2013). This condition, as identified by the World Bank, had already led to severe port congestion, which translated regularly into delays for liner shipping services and affected all ports along a given service route. In 2004, for example, about 146 days were lost on services between European and African ports as a result of congestion (Harding et al., 2007).

Traditionally, seaports in West Africa were organized as ‘service ports’, operated by a government, a large company or imperial powers. Those ports provided, as ‘instrument[s] of state or colonial powers’ (World Bank, 2005: 1), the sovereign means for controlling hinterland trade networks. However, the reorganization of the sphere of circulation has put competitive pressure on ports. On a regional level, ports now compete in terms of crane productivity, customs duties, pilotage, draft and, most importantly, vessel turnaround times (Jacobs and Lagendijk, 2014). In this context, World Bank consultants have warned against possible geographical isolation as a consequence of inadequate logistics. ‘Without improved port efficiency, several coastal countries in West and Central Africa could become ‘de facto’ landlocked, having to bear approximately the same costs as a landlocked country’ (Harding et al., 2007: xiii). Furthermore, given the state of African ports as ‘bottlenecks’ in the early 2000s (Ocean Shipping Consultants, 2009), the World Bank (2005: 1) approached them as ‘the remaining controllable component in improving the efficiency of ocean transport logistics’. In order to overcome their position at the margins inherited from the extractivist schemes of colonialism, consultants framed new port governance schemes as a panacea (Foster and Briceno-Garmendia, 2012: 249).

Against this backdrop, global expertise on port operations scripted the local mobilization of new modes of infrastructural connectivity. Taken from the manual of neoliberal development interventions, their most important script constituted the legal and spatial reorganization of ports, elsewhere described as ‘terminalization’ (Olivier and Slack, 2006: 1417) or the ‘break-up of ports into terminals’ (Debrie, 2012: 2). Terminalization primarily entails the introduction of the ‘landlord model’, an administrative mode for the concession of one container, break bulk or oil terminal of a larger port to a private operator for periods of up to 50 years. This enacts a redistribution of authority and a spatial reorganisation of formerly cohesive full service ports (Chalfin, 2010; Hepworth, 2014: 1127). Under pressure from fiscal weakness and the ‘financial vice-grip’ of structural adjustment (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002: 992), between 2003 and 2010 all major West African container terminals underwent reform and were concessioned to only a handful of global terminal operators, dominated by Danish APM Terminals and the French company Bolloré Transport & Logistics (World Bank, 2016: 1). In most cases in West Africa, governments followed the World Bank edict of ‘selective privatization’ (Iheduru, 1994: 415). This meant that a private firm would equip the port with superstructure such as cranes and the workforce, while the public port authority remained the owner of the immobile assets and infrastructure such as the real estate, the quays and the fenders.

At first sight, it may seem that this historic ‘port-grab’ on Africa’s Atlantic domain has led to a fragmentation of formerly state-run monopoly ports, redistributed authority to private actors, and smoothly integrated West African ports into the seamless networks of interconnectivity, aimed for by the logistics industry. Yet, the following case will instead echo Chua et al.’s (2018: 623) point that reifying ‘logistics as a seamless system of instantaneous flow and total functional integration’ runs the risk of neglecting the industry’s diverse and contested power geometries on a global scale. By tracing the attempts that have been made to integrate Freetown into the circuits of transnational logistics, I will make a case for understanding margins as sites where global circulation is being both defined and contested.

Engineering the terminal

In the early 2000s, the port of Freetown was in a decrepit state due to the effects of the war, and logistics and development professionals portrayed the old colonial port with its chequered history as the most expensive, inefficient, insecure port in West Africa. As a USAID (2000: 4) report noted, ‘[t]he Freetown port has antiquated and inadequate equipment and facilities, security is poor, and the port suffered heavy damage during the past two years of the civil war’. During the later stages of the Sierra Leonean Civil War (1991–2002), rebel fighters of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) damaged and looted the port after they entered Sierra Leone’s capital in 1997. Consequently, the UN adopted resolution 1132, which enforced a sea, air and land embargo on Sierra Leone. As the port was crucial for control of goods imported into the country, the Nigerian air force repeatedly bombed the quays of the port and sank embargo-breaking vessels, as several eyewitnesses explained to me. This struggle over logistical orders overshadowed the state of the old colonial port in the years that followed and indicated once again that distinctions between the civilian and the military arm of logistics remain precarious (Cowen, 2014: 4). Freetown has a very important geographical location where the North and South Atlantic meet, and is also one of the largest port basins in the world with natural deep draft capacity,¹ but the port’s infrastructure was in a battered state due to the effects of the war. Since the Sierra Leonean Port Authority (SLPA) lacked the funds and expertise needed to refurbish the nation’s main maritime infrastructure, it prepared an international call for bids for a concession of the main berths to a private terminal operator together with an international port consultancy.

The French business conglomerate Bolloré proved to be most successful in the bidding rounds for Africa’s strategic maritime infrastructures. In the mid-1980s, Bolloré began to buy up French colonial-era transport companies specialized in trade between France and Africa – among them SDV, a freight forwarder, and DELMAS, a shipping company (Boko, 2018; Deltombe, 2009). This was the beginning of a new aggressive push towards the takeover of the African logistics sector. Over the past decade, Bolloré has expanded its presence tremendously to 46 African countries – with 16 container terminal concessions – and is now one of the main stakeholders in the continent’s logistics domain. In this regard, a former Bolloré employee once commented on this ‘port-grab’ openly, stating that ‘Africa is like an island, connected to the world by sea’. Therefore, ‘[w]hoever controls the cranes holds the continent’ (quoted in Deltombe, 2009: n.p.). By acquiring concessions of ports and offering stevedoring services, warehousing and freight forwarding, the company’s corporate strategy aims at the production of cohesive transnational logistics networks that are fully under the control of the company. It is thus no surprise that Bolloré’s logistics division has been indispensable for foreign military interventions in West Africa (Deltombe, 2009). In Sierra Leone, and many other countries in the region, the company does not stop at seaports like other competitors. In the hinterland of the ports, Bolloré owns dry ports, controls its own private corridor roads, runs specialized truck fleets and holds exclusive logistics contracts with mining companies. The company’s logistical activities are thus more than just organizational or technical fixes on the logistics industry’s margin as it takes control over vast logistical and political terrain.

As part of its operations on the African continent, Bolloré was awarded a 20-year concession for container handling in Freetown Port in 2011. A secretive actor with powerful connections to both French and Sierra Leonean government officials planned to replace the martial history of the port with its business approach. Allegations of corruption and close connections to government bodies often surround the corporate activities of the company in African markets (Jarry and Lough, 2018; Norris-Trent, 2018; Stothard, 2016). In Freetown, various informants suggested that Bolloré’s close personal ties to leading government officials and a special ‘facilitation fee’ had helped to outmanoeuvre an otherwise preferred local businessperson who already had a long business relationship with the port. With its goal ‘to raise the productivity of Freetown Terminal to the level of Africa’s top ports in the very short term’, as a manger told me, Bolloré took over the operation of Freetown Port in 2011, at a time when the port was at the bottom of the world’s logistics indices. Already in the months following the concession, the port community in Freetown experienced reduced turnaround times of vessels and a moderate boost in container movements per hour. Immediately after ‘gaining control over the cranes’, the company invested large sums in order to bring the remote terminal as a ‘port of West Africa’s new frontier’ (Mitton, 2012: 19; see also Ouma et al., 2013) into its transnational terminal network. For example, Bolloré imported new gantry cranes, refurbished large parts of the war-torn terminal and expanded the terminal’s operational area by draining an adjacent swamp. In addition to large-scale civil works, Bolloré launched a new management imperative for information, cargo and labour. The production of modern logistics space increasingly involves the installation of geospatial information infrastructure. Logistics, in this sense, is not just about the material and infrastructural management of the circulation of goods. The mobility of information intrinsically creates the background for the movement of cargo (Hepworth, 2014: 1126; Kanngieser, 2013). In Freetown, Bolloré introduced a terminal operating system as an interface that virtually links the terminal to other terminals and also creates a circuit between the terminal, cargo and the vessels. A manager described the system in technical terms as a tool that ‘allows for knowing the position and status of every container at any point of time’. The software manages in real time the entry and exit of goods, optimizes cargo flows at the gates and tracks containers and equipment. However, making things circulate comes at a cost. As it streamlines throughput, it also helps to keep track of tally clerks and drivers of trucks and reach stackers. As such, it provides a way to supervise the productivity of workers, to reduce their numbers on the terminal and to prevent traders ‘strolling around’ and looking for their boxes. The reduction of persons on the terminal that is meant to accompany this technical fix represents a major issue for the daily operations of Bolloré. The more crowded a terminal is, the more difficult it is to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate port users. To press ahead with this surveillance matrix, Bolloré introduced other techniques of labour control, such as the establishment of a pedestrian-free terminal and the compulsory wearing of reflective safety vests to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate port users. Visibly impressed by the civil works, the technical machinery and the new management imperatives, representatives from the local port authority briefed me prior to my visit to Bolloré that the modernized container terminal would resemble Hamburg or Rotterdam rather than the war-torn public break bulk terminal.

The picture that seems to emerge from Bolloré’s notorious port-grabs is that of a powerful actor that shapes the connectivity of a port through disciplinary power and a highly technocratic stance, replicates the imaginative geographies of logistics and extends the spaces of supply chain capitalism from hegemonic centres to margins. Seen from the ground, however, the goals of this industry – seamless interconnectivity along the uneven terrain of global capital, from margins to centres, and calculative space-time – are revealed to be contradictory and contested processes (see also Gregson, 2017). Reflecting on the current state of the port’s development, a terminal manager voiced his concern over the port’s actual condition as a ‘public port’. He was not so much referring to the administrative ordering recently introduced in Freetown as to resident squatters in proximate quarters that perceive the port as a public social space enmeshed in the fabric of the city. Against this background, port stakeholders, the shipping community and outside observers (Mitton, 2012: 20) characterize Freetown Port as a ‘notorious’ port. At a port development conference in Hamburg, a company representative referred to Freetown as a risky and challenging logistics outpost, due to the difficulties that the company is facing. Off the record, there was a broad agreement among port stakeholders that cargo theft from containers and non-containerized shipments, widespread corruption, smuggling and attempts by residents from the port surroundings to stow away in containers or on cargo vessels were seriously compromising the efficiency and security of the port. ‘We are ten years behind in comparison to Nigeria’, a terminal manager complained regarding the situation. Often, workers, visitors and third-party stakeholders meet, socialize or conduct business inside the terminal. A company executive complained: ‘Clearing agents and traders need to be educated. If they want to collect their imported car, they come with their whole family – mother, father, child, aunt etc.’ Moreover, when it comes to physical inspections of imported containers by Customs, the same French executive said with annoyance that, ‘it will be like a bazaar’. He compared the inspection in the terminal with a flea market in Paris. Inspection days are in fact busy days when importers and their friends come to the port. At times, it resembles a social event, during which petty crimes occur and goods from containers disappear from the terminal.

This obvious controversy between ways of operating and using a port leads to daily clashes, especially between local mid-level employees and port casuals. One day, an informant of mine furiously approached a truck driver who cut us off with his truck while talking on his phone. ‘Do you remember the first rule? Be responsible for yourself! If you use your phone, you only have 40% of your attention!’ A minute after that, he found another annoyance further down the quay. Alongside the very edge of the berth, a group of drivers had parked their trucks waiting for the next vessel to berth. Many trucks that enter the port are not roadworthy and the noise of bursting tires is a frightening yet familiar sound in the terminal. In the past, some containers had already fallen into the port basin, bringing port operations to a halt. The recovery of such a truck or container can take hours or even days, and not only increases costs for shippers, importers and exporters but also interrupts the tightly planned liner service with effects on other ports along the route (Foster and Briceno-Garmendia, 2012: 251). The general condition of trucks also leads on a regular basis to devastating accidents, as for example when a 40-foot container broke through the welded-on twistlocks that secured it and blocked Freetown’s main road for hours. Adapting to the standards of the logistics industry and the infrastructure of global intermodalism, many local hauliers have retrofitted old flatbed trucks with makeshift twistlocks to carry heavy 40-footers. It took a unit of the Armed Forces to lift the iconic global box of supply chain capitalism back onto a replacement truck (see Figure 1). Given the low percentage of paved roads in the urban area – only 24% in the area of greater Freetown are paved (World Bank, 2018: 63) – and the overall poor condition of the city’s narrow roads, transport from and to the port is cumbersome, unpredictable and often dangerous. This has overall effects for all port users, from casual workers to managerial staff. The latter complained incessantly about the traffic situation outside the port and usually had to start their day around 4.30 am to go round the daily traffic chaos.

Figure 1.

A fallen Maersk container on Motor Main Rd, Freetown, 2014 (author’s photograph).

These observations underline the need to think more carefully about technical and economistic discussions of ‘terminalization’ in port geography (see Olivier and Slack, 2006). Respacing a port at the margins into the uneven networks of the global logistics industry requires political and socio-technical adjustments. It is in this context that seemingly innocuous and sometimes mundane elements such as software solutions, security protocols, cargo handling technology, technical practices, safety cultures and so forth are deployed to create and contribute to a ‘technological zone’ (Barry, 2006) of logistics. Such elements are quite literally the nuts and bolts of Freetown becoming part of the wider logistics network. However, those networked elements are far from being simple repercussions or realizations of supply chain management textbooks. As the above description indicates, the day-to-day business of logistics involves arduous work in terminals, port and beyond. This resonates with discussions in anthropology, where scholars have shown that the diverse meta-narratives of contemporary global capitalism rarely mobilize a cohesive global synchronization of policy or materialize in global infrastructural formats (Chalfin, 2010; Collier and Ong, 2005; Ferguson, 2010; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). This is most certainly true for the very nature of global logistics. Although logistics embodies universal aspirations to connectivity, it is profoundly dependent on the uneven terrains of global capital and always needs to be meticulously assembled in practice (Gregson et al., 2017; Ouma, 2017; see Tsing, 2009). Margins are thus not marginal nor do they create minor effects but instead are crucial elements of global circulation.

A ‘contaminated’ port

This precarious accomplishment of connectivity at the margins raised serious concerns over the state of the region’s maritime security. In what follows, I discuss the political spillover effects of this logistical recasting by tracing attempts made to secure the port’s trade flows. As Cowen and Smith (2009) have shown, the recasting of security along supply chains in the early 2000s was part of a novel problematization of the territorial border. Global economic flows are increasingly at odds with tight border regimes as the unscheduled interruption of circulation at state borders leads to the devaluation of capital (Harvey, 2010: 41). With the advent of debates on supply chain security (see Cowen, 2010), ports at global margins received peculiar degrees of attention from maritime security experts (see Atlantic Council, 2010; Baker, 2011; Le Sage, 2011). In particular, the contradiction between facilitating efficient cargo flows from and to the global South and impeding unwanted corollary mobilities towards the global North began to figure prominently in debates about the state of West Africa’s Atlantic domain, turning it from a backwater to a new frontier for US security interests (see also Carmody, 2005). US policy circles pointed out that the already fragile connectivity would be prone to infiltrations of all kinds and warned in this regard that insufficient safeguards in West African ports and waters threatened the security of American ports:

West African ports, harbors, and shipping lanes are important components of the highly integrated global maritime transportation linked to U.S. and allied ports and traffic flows. While the region’s waters are a major transit route for international commerce, they are plied by a host of criminal actors […]. (Atlantic Council, 2010: 1)

This became even more relevant at a time when UN agencies and international anti-trafficking organizations problematized West African ports as an emerging ‘cocaine gateway’ (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011). Observers warned that drug cartels would begin using the insecurity of seaports to establish opaque supply chains connecting Latin America via West African ports to European consumers (Le Sage, 2011: 64). Speaking to this problematization and emphasizing the role of ports at the margins for the security of entire logistics networks, an official in Freetown explained: ‘A security lapse here could also have ramifications in other countries – it’s a global thing. For example, contraband, ammunition […] could be taken to America. […] They want to ensure that they have this global eye on every port’.

In the years that followed the remaking of West African port connectivity, security experts paradoxically placed Freetown inside and outside logistics space. Reminiscent of pathological descriptions of colonial spaces, the notions that Freetown as a weak spot might ‘contaminate’ global logistics networks or that the port itself is a ‘contaminated place’ were thoroughly taken up even in Freetown.² The port’s harbour master, for example, stated:

if a container is taken from Freetown and it is not scanned and that ship goes to Hamburg, that ship will not go to the US. Because it has come to a contaminated country. It’s possible that this container will contaminate Hamburg and also the US. So they will tell you, if the ship has come to Freetown, which is not compliant, even next year it will not go to Europe. Because it has gone to a contaminated place.

To cope with this problem of security and ‘contamination’ along the entire global supply chain, maritime infrastructures became an object of a new security agenda in the years following 9/11. While a policy of containment would jeopardize the logistics network, US officials approached supply chain security from an angle beyond national regulation by involving supranational entities such as the UN’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO) (see Cowen, 2010: 606). In 2003, the introduction of the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code by the IMO represented a major step in this regard (IMO, 2003). The ISPS code became the first meta-protocol for standardizing ship and port security arrangements on a global scale, and was successively translated back into the national law of the IMO’s member states. Written as a global ship and port security manual, the code stipulates numerous instructions, from conducting security and risk assessment of facilities, the physical back fitting of ‘port security zones’ to rather mundane safety regulations. The most visible lynchpin of the code is a scheme of access control, which generally implies the sealing off and large-scale fencing of code-compliant ports (Chalfin, 2010).

However, a problem that arose during implementation of the code was the indirect nature of the meta-protocol and its geographical scope (see also Hönke and Cuesta-Fernandez, 2018). During an interview, a port security officer presented his copy of the ISPS Code handbook – referring to it jokingly as ‘the bible of port security’ – yet explained at the same time that ‘we have a universal plan, but the application can never be uniform. So adaption is a key factor in port security’. From the outset, the question of translatability was a key controversy. Referring to the early 2000s, when a British security professional first sketched a port security plan, a member of the port security force elaborated how ‘this guy tried but he had no idea of what we’re actually doing here’. The implementation in Freetown faced not only conceptual controversy but also very practical problems. Although Bolloré conceptualized the modernized terminal as a uniform port zone within the networks of transnational logistics, it still depends on the wider setup of the port. A port terminal is not simply an enclave (Hönke and Cuesta-Fernandez, 2017). In this context, a manager emphasized, ‘a terminal can only pass ISPS compliance if the whole port does so’. Therefore, the transnational security code not only deals with the generic spatial formats of the global logistics industry but also with the whole port, including its turbulent history, and its surroundings. As a mode of government, the code needs to be transformed into ‘practical activity’ (Walters, 2012: 2).

Faced with this challenge at the margins of the US borderlands, the US Coast Guard (USCG) incepted the International Port Security (IPS) Program in 2004 (Atlantic Council, 2010: 38; USCG, 2005). Officially presented as an exchange rather than assessment cooperation, the IPS Program guides local port authorities towards the meta-protocol of the ISPS Code and aligns security practices in order ‘to reduce risks to U.S. ports and ships, and to the entire maritime transport system’ (USCG, 2016). A clear hierarchy underpins this programme since African port authorities can no longer claim a monopoly on security. To catalyse US conceptions of maritime security, liaison officers visit ports like Freetown on a quarterly basis where they try to transform the abstract meta-code into concrete border work. After their visits, they will file a report and recommend a guideline to the Sierra Leone Maritime Administration, such as stepping up the exercises for the security personnel ‘including drills on access control, container tampering and responses to fire alarm’. As witnessed in the port though, the success of such interventions is often rather limited. One source from the port’s administration framed the ISPS Code quite openly as a ‘child of the US government’. Another source added, ‘it’s for their own safety not for our safety, it’s for them to protect their country’. However, he also noted that he was happily prepared to implement US demands such as an operating CCTV system and new turnstiles at all port accesses if they provided cost-covering funds in return. Bolloré, in turn, approaches the security demands more from a calculative standpoint. As shown above, private corporations forcefully bring about securitization if it entails an operational advantage and lowers insurance premiums. In this context, though, a Bolloré manager smilingly noted in response to US security concerns, ‘I haven’t seen a container vessel going into the twin towers’.³

Attempts to engineer the state of circulation clash not only with the agendas of corporate terminal operators, but also with the situated political economy of the port. The margins, as Tsing (1994: 279) argues, are sites where contradictory practices, discourse and arrangements meet and ‘discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge’. While the port is a hub for ocean-going vessels, carrying the logos of the world’s major shipping companies, it is also a key maritime hub for local commerce and ‘“marginal” economic practices’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 617). Encountering a wooden canoe next to a Danish container vessel, a security guard explained to me, ‘[i]t’s cheaper than getting a car, because, look at the traffic. They bring back their farm produce to the city’. Moreover, many villages in the greater river estuary of Freetown can only be accessed by canoe. Under the rubric of security, however, those canoes are ‘challenging’, he explained to me. ‘Considering the ISPS code, there is no way that we can allow canoes plying our waters’. Recapping a report by the US Coast Guard, he concluded, ‘those canoes are sort of a threat for any vessel out there. It will discredit our port and our nation as a whole’. Another example of such an emblematic encounter on the uneven terrain of logistics space was repeatedly told during lunch breaks. Not long before, a US Coast Guard officer had entered the port at the break of dawn as part of an official audit and noted, later on, that he was not subject to any proper control or inspection at the gate. Increasing his annoyance, a street hawker followed him into the terminal in order to sell his newspapers to the morning shift. His crew later on noted that resident squatters often used makeshift paths into the secured port zone to ‘live off the port’. Reflecting on the work of the Coast Guard, a local security manager from the port authority problematized the IPS program for its ‘cultural gap’. He emphasized that ‘if you don’t have the full grasp of the cultural background, you will perceive the port as populated or even dangerous’. Yet, he countered such interpretations and instead emphasized the residents’ customary right to the port and the social hardship in the country:

Right, petty crimes often occur such as that people damage rice bags so that small amounts of rice spill out. Somebody puts some rice in his pocket. But we do not experience terrorism. We wonder where this ‘danger’ is coming from. There is a lot to improve, but it is secure here. We actually do not have organized crime like in US ports. That will not happen in Freetown.

In contrast to the local port community, international security advisers see these lax controls as serious problems as it is not just pilfering that occurs regularly. The port of Freetown figures in the shipping community as a hotspot for stowaways who try to embark on ships travelling to ports in the global North. Echoing the IMO’s (2014a) position on stowaways, the Director of Port Security emphasized that the presence of stowaways is always a gauge for measuring the potential of criminal or even terrorist activities. Thus, he argued that preventing unauthorized persons boarding ships also stops potential terrorists infiltrating global circulation.⁴ This problematization of stowaways received even more attention during the West African outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (2013–2016). After the outbreak, the IMO called on its member states to keep track of maritime security measures. As security initiatives such as the ISPS Code aim to secure legitimate trade while preventing the appropriation of trade channels by illegitimate users, they were also meant to keep trade moving while preventing the spread of the virus (IMO, 2014b). Soon, however, the brittleness of Freetown’s security scheme gave rise to fears about the ‘contamination’ of other trade ties. In this case, Freetown’s global relevance became most visible. A security expert warned that a single ship could bring the virus to the Panama Canal, infect the lock keepers and eventually block a major global artery (Saul et al., 2014). These concerns also led to port closures elsewhere for vessels coming from the affected region. A member of the operating firm of Malta Freeport in the Mediterranean described in an interview, for example, the denial of access to a vessel coming from Bolloré’s terminal in Guinea because of a fever one crew member had. In a joint appeal, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the IMO warned that such suspensions of logistics services would ‘seriously hamper the effectiveness of relief operations and could ultimately lead to increased suffering and death of people in affected countries’ (WHO and IMO, 2014: 1). This call was also brought to the UN’s Security Council by Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon (United Nations, 2014). Unfazed by this appeal, however, the world of corporate trade ‘put the cold calculation of cost at the center’ (Cowen, 2010: 602) and drastically reduced calls and in some cases even refrained from serving the affected countries. The promising logistics frontier at the margin temporarily became a logistical impasse.

As liner shipping avoided Freetown and its brittle security scheme, the port became disconnected and left out of the networks of global logistics. In contrast to trade disruptions elsewhere diagnosed as severe security flaws, the containment of Freetown made it possible to reframe Ebola from a global health problem to a quasi-localized ‘exotic and racialised phenomenon’ (Nunes, 2016: 543). The logistics industry revealed in this case nothing less than its ‘deadly life’ (Cowen, 2014). The necropolitical side of its power geometries brought about a ‘social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003: 40). While the industry’s socio-technical systems failed to provide for basic needs, that is to say the allocation of the right quantity of goods to Freetown just in time, a non-commercial participant tried to fill the deadly supply gap. Using the geostrategically located Humanitarian Response Depot on the Canary Islands as a staging area, the World Food Program established a new logistics channel by chartering a break-bulk vessel for dispatching rice and other relief items to the region.

Conclusion

This paper has drawn on the recent debates on the geographies of logistics and complemented it with a discussion of the socio-spatial concept of margins. While recognizing the dispersed power effects of logistics as a governmental technology, the paper has stressed the need to empirically follow logistical orders at the margins. This point was made using a case study on Freetown Port. The view from this port served as a vantage point to follow the ambiguous results of the recent ‘port-grab’ on West Africa’s ports and the attempts to position them within the uneven geographies of the global logistics industry. The paper has shown not only that ports on margins are at the centre of key projects of global circulation, but also that global circulation is a precarious accomplishment that needs to be constantly fixed through situated technopolitical interventions. As part of the operating mode of logistics – connecting difference and unevenness – margins are key sites of contestation. For residents, the port represents an infrastructure of social reproduction, providing options for casual labour or opportunities for petty crime. At the same time, the modern cargo vessels with hoisted Sierra Leonean flags of convenience and the countless containers with logos of international shippers on their side panels carry a paradoxical promise and denial of social and physical mobility for local residents. This becomes most visible in the controversial realm of security. While the question of securing circulation has been discussed as a geoeconomic recasting of logistics space (e.g. Cowen and Smith, 2009), a view from the margins allows us to theorize the precariousness and spatiality of such geopolitical and geoeconomic recastings. Although the logistical coupling of different supply chains and ports topologically renegotiates categories such as global North and global South and produces transnational logistical orders through infrastructural means, these orders remain precarious achievements. When we theorize the global logistics industry’s networks from its margins, we can see that geographic and social unevenness are a defining, yet at the same time constraining element for the spaces of supply chain capitalism.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For incredibly helpful comments and valuable remarks, I am particularly grateful to two blind reviewers and Deborah Cowen. I also want to thank the participants of the ‘States of Circulation’ workshop at the Danish Institute for International Studies, 2016, for their productive discussion of the first draft of this article. Sincere thanks go to Jan Bachmann, Marc Boeckler, Andreas Folkers, Peer Schouten, Finn Stepputat, Alexander Vorbrugg and Lea Welsch for their support and thorough reading of various drafts of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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