Actually Existing Security: The Political Economy of the Saharan Threat

The transformation of Saharan populations into an object of global security is analysed as a specific instance of security's expansion globally, as well as of its merger with development, understood as a side-effect of the former. It is shown that the search for threats in the Sahara, and the establishment of surveillance apparatuses, is a precondition for the detection and discursive production of these threats. Security, through its production of knowledge, manages to objectify what had hitherto constituted a borderland of knowledge and government. The securitization of the Sahara and its populations creates a field of intervention for diverse agents of security and development. However, it does so not as part of a coherent global regime of control, but on its own specific and random terms, within a political economy of danger that is the product of discursive and material struggles. The securitization of the Sahara, it is argued, should be seen as actually existing security — that is, a complex of security practices serving diverse interests, with contradictory and open-ended outcomes.