Policing Africa: The US military and visions of crafting ‘good order’

Abstract

Current Western security doctrines assert that state fragility, radicalization and humanitarian disasters in the global South feed into ‘persistent conflict’. Such a scenario consequently requires a closely coordinated and integrated response from political and military actors. In this context, Western governments have introduced the concept of stabilization in their approaches to ‘fragile’ states. This article aims to understand the expanding activities of the US military in sub-Saharan Africa, which are conducted under the label of stability operations. It will be argued that the vast spectrum of activities under this label – from health projects to drone attacks – can be made comprehensible through the concept of policing, understood as processes of regulating communities with the aim of establishing ‘good order’. Key pillars of the US military’s stability operations operations doctrine – namely, a focus on the welfare of the population (on a par with the minimum use of force) as well as an extended preventative engagement – overlap with concerns of police power. Presented by security strategists as vulnerable to instability, sub-Saharan Africa has become an experimental ground for the US military, where ideas on stability operations are tested. Empirically, the article discusses two manifestations of stability operations that warrant an analysis through the concept of policing: US Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) civil affairs projects and the US military’s active involvement in ongoing conflicts.

Keywords

Africa intervention policing stabilization US military

Introduction

Current Western security doctrines assert that state fragility, radicalization and humanitarian disasters feed into ‘persistent conflict’. Such a scenario consequently requires a closely coordinated and integrated response from political and military actors (UK Government, 2010; US Department of the Army). In this context, the concept of stabilization has made a return to the foreign policy and military doctrines of a number of European countries, the United States and the United Nations (International Security and Stabilization Support Strategy (ISSSS), 2009; UK Government, 2011; US Department of State, 2013).

This article addresses the question of how we can conceptually grasp the spectrum of the US military’s activities in sub-Saharan Africa that are conducted under the label of stability:¹ a complementation of the use of coercive means with an expansion of preventative activities in issues of governance and social ordering. The core observation this article makes is that the military concept of ‘stability operations’ widens the scope of military responsibilities not just in post-conflict contexts, but also, more importantly, into contexts where violent conflict is absent. The US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has increased its preventative involvement in issues of health, infrastructure and governance across the African continent. At the same time, the command has set up a surveillance network in order to conduct covert action and drone attacks against terrorist suspects. Critical observers argue that the US military’s development activities are dangerous, not least because they disguise the USA’s real security interests, namely, counter-terrorism (Besteman, 2009; Keenan, 2009). On the other hand, US military analysts have taken counterinsurgency thinking and practice to non-war spaces, arguing that future military engagement in the context of so-called ungoverned spaces will have to be less kinetic, more preventative, and concentrate on the population (Flavin, 2011; Taw, 2012; United States Institute for Peace and US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (USIP/PKSOI)). Both sides would argue that the military’s new modus operandi results in the redrawing of the boundary between civilian and military responsibilities. However, I suggest that these perspectives only provide a limited understanding of the intricacies of the activities of the US military that are characterized by an increasing preventative engagement in social ordering backed up by the potential use of force. Instead, I propose that the analytical perspective of policing is better equipped to make the stabilization practices of AFRICOM comprehensible. Policing can be understood as an expanding regulatory process for realizing a notion of ‘good order’ for which, however, the capacity to act through force is constitutive (Ryan, 2013).

As I will show, key pillars of the US military’s stability operations doctrine – namely, a focus on the welfare of the population (on a par with the ‘reasonable’ use of force) as well as an extended preventative engagement – overlap with concerns of police science. Yet the crucial difference is that the stability doctrine means adjusting these concerns for the international sphere, aimed at ordering not domestic populations but ‘fragile’ states. The African continent, presented as rife with conditions of fragility and vulnerability by security strategists, has become an experimental ground for the US military, where the new ideas on stabilization can be tested.

This article will proceed as follows: The first section introduces the analytical perspective of policing and its value for an analysis of the contemporary reconfiguration of US military practices in the global South. Thereafter, the article reconstructs the emergence of stabilization as a policy agenda in Western foreign policy within the context of other security–development interventions, before zooming in on the US military’s doctrine of stability operations. In the second part of the article, I analyse how the new modus operandi for the military in non-war contexts plays out in East Africa. Through the discussion of two types of AFRICOM’s activities, namely, the command’s civil affairs projects in Eastern Africa and the US military’s active role in ongoing conflicts, I show how AFRICOM’s parallel engagement in governance and covert actions, the simultaneous deployment of civil affairs teams and special operations forces, gradually leads to a normalization of preventative military activity aimed at fostering a notion of ‘good order’ in so-called fragile contexts. It is in that sense that we understand the activities subsumed under the label ‘stabilization’ as a form of policing.

The concept of policing

There is a growing focus in criminology and international relations on the role of police and policing in transnational security governance (Hills, 2000; Johnston and Shearing, 2003) and in relation to Western warfare and post-conflict interventions (Dean, 2006; Hardt and Negri, 2001). Yet much of the literature focuses on the modern understanding of the police as an institution for crime prevention and law enforcement, adhering to a strict division between the police and the military or stating an international police ethics exists (Greener, 2009, Sheptycki, 2000). In contrast, I follow Michel Foucault’s historical analysis of early modern Europe, a period when ‘police’ was mostly concerned with issues of welfare and the happiness of the population. Within a more sociologically oriented literature, ‘police’ refers to a mode of governing that aims at the ‘good’ administration of the social realm, as discussed in French and German literature on police science (Polizeiwissenschaft) in the 17th and 18th centuries (see e.g. Dubber and Valverde, 2006a; Foucault, 2007; Neocleous, 2000a). As Neocleous has shown, the meaning of the words ‘police’ and ‘policy’ across Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries was by and large constant, ‘denoting the legislative and administrative regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of good order’ (Neocleous, 2000b: 721–722; for a more detailed discussion, see Foucault, 2007: 311–358). The notion of policing pursued here rests on a concern with the production of order and welfare for the population through an expanding regulatory mandate and the ‘reasonable’ use of force (Dean, 2010: 107–115; Dubber and Valverde, 2006b: 2; Neocleous, 2006: 35–36). In the context of Polizeiwissenschaft, the concept developed its most ‘diverse and uncertain’ meaning, as the diversifying state administration was increasingly concerned with the question of the right methods for the realization of good order (Knemeyer, 1980: 180). Thus, ‘police’ included both the conditions and the content of order, and therefore had a particular normative dimension, as it aspired to the ‘coaching’ of the population toward an ‘orderly, modest, courteous and respectable’ behaviour (Knemeyer, 1980: 174). An understanding of ‘good order’ is historically contextual, but in German Polizeiwissenschaft the notion referred ‘both to protection from danger and to concern with matters of welfare’ (Knemeyer, 1980: 182).

A core aspect of policing is its broad ambition – the ‘desire to regulate all manner of what appear to us quite heterogeneous things and activities’ (Dean, 2010: 109). Confronted with the waning structures of feudal society, ‘police’ in early modern Europe referred to the effort of regulating everything ‘that goes unregulated’ or ‘lack[s] order or form’ (Pasquino, 1991: 111). In his reading of administrative compendia, Foucault shows the extensiveness of the regulatory intervention of the police at that time: police were concerned with education, poverty, health and market relations, as well as religion and morality (Foucault, 2000: 317–323). In this regard, policing as a process is expansive: it sorts and categorizes, or, as Ryan (2013: 439) put it, it ‘demarcate[s] one category of population from another; while at the same time facilitating cooperation, information sharing and consensus’. Yet this broad understanding of policing as a way of regulating social relations attracted the critique of liberal thinking and was gradually replaced by a narrower concept, that is, one in which the police were seen as an institution primarily concerned with matters of security (Knemeyer, 1980: 183; Neocleous, 2000a; 2000b: 720–724).

The modern understanding of police as an institution has historically been linked to the sovereignty of the modern state. As a state institution, the police share commonalities with the military, most notably the legitimate use of violence. When the distinction between the police and the military is discussed from this perspective, at least two common lines of thought can be identified. First, in the context of liberal thinking, the police are tasked with enforcing the law internally, while the military defends the state territory from external threats. Second, with the principle of minimum use of force, the police aim at the provision of order rather than at attaining victory over an enemy (see Dean, 2006: 193–198).

The post-Cold War discussion on the changing character of war and intervention demonstrates, however, that these ideal demarcations do not hold in practice. The deployment of Western police forces in multilateral peacekeeping or bilateral training missions, the sharing of information between police forces internationally, and widened responsibilities of military actors in the domestic sphere of distant societies challenge the assumption of a clear distinction between the domestic and the international (Bigo, 2001; Greener, 2009: 92–109). While traditional police science aimed at strengthening existing state power from within, current international discourses on stabilization convey the idea of international policing concerned with the formation of the social realm, or the establishing of ‘good order’ across borders.

In policing, the use of force is the last resort. In fact, the minimum use of force marks a key characteristic of the police. Drawing on Benjamin’s (1986) ‘Critique of Violence’, Ryan (2011) has argued that the police principle of reasonable force constitutes the level of violence that is necessary to re-enact law where it has receded or create law in spaces that law has not (yet) reached. In Ryan’s (2011: 39–50) account of state-building, visions of liberal peace seek to replace military force with a ‘more rationalized force’ at the international level. The management of unruly or vulnerable communities through welfare projects and the possibility of coercion under conditions of perceived disorder pull together the concerns of both military and civilian foreign policy actors under the label of stabilization. Hence, I apply a broad notion of policing as an analytical perspective to comprehend the array of practices of military forces in ‘fragile’ spaces. However, rather than aiming to create a unified theory of internationalized policing, the aim of the present article, following Dubber and Valverde (2006b: 4), is to ‘document the affinities, borrowings and similarities that link uses of “police”’, and to identify ‘family resemblances’ in the context of current stabilization interventions in so-called fragile states. Therefore, the next section turns to the recent popularity of the policy agenda of stabilization.

The versatility of stabilization

Stabilization in Western foreign policies

While the concept of stability, which is the main focus of this article, enjoys high currency in military circles, it is not a military concept per se, and it needs to be situated within broader security and development interventions in contexts framed as fragile. During the last decade, a number of Western governments and multilateral organizations have institutionalized the idea of stabilization in different ways in their approaches to violent conflict and state fragility. Well-known examples include the US State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and the British Stabilisation Unit (UK Government, 2011; US Department of State, 2013), as well as the United Nations (UN) stabilization missions in Haiti, Timor-Leste and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The policy instrument of stabilization, as it is used in these contexts, builds upon earlier attempts to coordinate and integrate civilian and military efforts to end or prevent conflict and disorder in the global South. In 1992, the Petersberg Declaration of the Western European Union spearheaded an increased coordination of civilian and military efforts within international humanitarian and peacekeeping operations. A close civil–military coordination became later a cornerstone of the UN’s ‘integrated’ missions (Annan, 2005; Western European Union, 1992).² Today, so-called whole-of-government, comprehensive or inter-agency approaches are an almost unquestioned part of policies towards fragile states at the UN, NATO and the EU, and among countries that include the UK, the USA, the Netherlands and Denmark (for an overview see Friis, 2010).

The popularity of the stabilization agenda in policy circles rests on its versatility. The concept includes both a containing and a transformative element, and it provides spaces for the fight against terrorists as much as for the protection of civilians and the building of local capacity. One can argue that it is the concept’s modest ambitions – it denotes a lower degree of normativity than state-building and mirrors to a certain extent the shift in parts of Western development policy towards ‘good enough governance’ (Grindle, 2002) – that make it a boundary concept. In other words, it is both ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs’ and ‘robust enough to maintain a common identity’ between different social worlds (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393). As used in recent military doctrine in the USA and the UK, the concept of stabilization links military objectives to concerns about state fragility and instability discussed in the fields of post-conflict reconstruction and development. For example, the British armed forces define stabilization as:

the process that supports states which are entering, enduring or emerging from conflict in order to: prevent or reduce violence; protect the population and key infrastructure; promote political processes and governance structures which lead to a political settlement that institutionalises non-violent contests for power; and prepares for sustainable social and economic development. (UK Ministry of Defence, 2009: xi)

Because of its ambiguity, the notion of stabilization can be said to mirror police science’s concern for ‘good administration’ through extensive regulation of the domestic sphere, and translates it into a ‘holistic’ approach for ordering what is perceived to be fragile statehood on an international level.

During the Cold War, the foreign policy objective of ‘stability’ generally referred to the legitimacy and longevity of government and thus the absence of structural change (Dessauer, 1949; Hurwitz, 1973). For the sake of stability, both superpowers safeguarded authoritarian regimes in sub-Saharan Africa. Confronted with the sudden changes in Eastern Europe and Africa, post-Cold War conceptualizations of stability had to allow for societal transformation. Modified as ‘structural stability’, the term made a return to policymaking in the mid-1990s as the primary objective of the European Community’s conflict prevention paradigm. The European Commission (1996: 2) understands structural stability as ‘a dynamic situation, a situation of stability able to cope with the dynamics inherent in (emerging) democratic societies … with the capacity to manage change without to resort to [sic] violent conflict’.

The use of ‘stability’ by Western policy actors overlaps with early definitions of resilience, understood as the ability to withstand shocks and the maintenance of (or return to) equilibrium (Folke, 2006; for a critical view, see Cooper and Walker, 2011). Resilience is now additionally a standard objective in foreign aid with regard to state fragility (European Communities, 2009: 71–76; Folkema et al., 2013; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC), 2008). A guiding OECD policy document on resilience and fragile statehood sees a tension between the concepts of stability and resilience, depicting the former as an objective of past times: state-centred, reactive and top–down, rather than society-centred, preventative and bottom–up (OECD/DAC, 2008: 12–18).³ However, I argue that the US military’s approach to stability and the development community’s resilience paradigm share a number of characteristics: both concepts hold that an external agent has superior knowledge about the society in question,⁴ and accordingly perpetuate the narrative of a vulnerable political context in need of external steering. Both ideas pursue, in fact, a preventative rather than a reactive engagement in a fragile state. One can even argue that resilience is subsumed under and part of the stabilization agenda, because, as the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee puts it, it is ‘resilience in the social contract that creates stability in a state’ (OECD/DAC, 2008: 18).

The US military’s doctrine of stability operations

When zooming in on the US military’s rationalization of stability operations, we encounter key dimensions of policing: first, a concern for the welfare of the local population, which requires a deeper engagement in issues of governance; and second, an emphasis on preventative activities, to which, however, the use of reasonable force remains central.

Yet the US military’s emphasis on stabilization activities needs to be seen in the context of the ‘asymmetric’ challenges encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US military’s response of counterinsurgency. The military concept of stability operations both builds upon and develops ideas of counterinsurgency, particularly the emphasis on the concerns of the local population, the importance of reconstruction and the minimum use of force (Galula, 2006; Kilcullen, 2010; Smith, 2005; US Department of the Army, 2007a). David Galula’s (2006: 63) argument that counterinsurgency is 80% political and 20% military has been well rehearsed within the military debate. Generating knowledge through intelligence, social network analysis and expert knowledge of sociocultural norms and habits are preconditions for organizing the instruments necessary for protecting and winning the support of civilians (US Department of the Army, 2007a: 82–113).

Even though the field manual on counterinsurgency states that excessive violence against the civilian population can have detrimental effects (US Department of the Army, 2007a: paras 1-150–1-153), defeating the insurgent remains without doubt the principal goal of counterinsurgency warfare. The novelty of the concept of stability operations is that it outlines military responsibilities not just for post-conflict situations, but also – and more importantly, for the argument made in this article – for peacetime situations. In 2005, the US Department of Defense’s (2005) Directive 3000.05 put stability operations on a par with combat operations, a step that for Jennifer Taw (2012: 2) constitutes ‘the [US] armed force’s most significant adjustment since the establishment of the Department of Defense in 1947’. In a clear resemblance of policing, the directive defines stability operations as ‘military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order in states or regions’. The directive makes clear that, even though most stability tasks will be provided by indigenous or other civilian agencies, ‘U.S. military forces shall be prepared to perform all tasks necessary to establish or maintain order when civilians cannot do so’. This encompassing definition of military tasks provides for the possibility of a US military government under conditions of state failure.

The official doctrine of stability operations (US Department of the Army, 2008) offers a similarly broad view on the military’s role in reconstruction, development and state-building. However, in contrast to the field manual on counterinsurgency, this document has so far gone almost unnoticed in critical security studies.⁵ This is surprising, as this document outlines a framework for future engagement of the US military in situations ‘from stable peace to general war’ (US Department of the Army, 2008: para. 1-11). The few studies that exist point to the ambitious agenda and potentially far-reaching implications of the stability operations that the doctrine introduces (Gordon, 2010). Collinson et al. (2010: 276) argue, for example, that the integration of military and civilian tasks and the engineering of sustainable state–civil society relations in distant spaces provide stabilization with a ‘broader transformative, geographical and historical scope’. Jennifer Taw argues that stability operations have become the US military’s ‘new raison d’être’, as they extend the duties of the US armed forces to include the ‘establishment and maintenance of order’ both in war situations and in peacetime (Taw, 2012: 3, 1).

The US Army defines stability operations as encompassing military missions that, in coordination with ‘other instruments of national power [to] maintain or re-establish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction and humanitarian relief’ (US Department of the Army, 2008: vi). Even though the US Army does not engage in a debate on state-building, the stability operations doctrine includes the end-state vision of the ‘rule of law, social well-being, stable governance, a sustainable economy’ (US Department of the Army, 2008: para. 1-79). The doctrine provides a number of detailed tasks for military actors on each of these visions. Short-term tasks aimed at restoring essential services are complemented by long-term activities of supporting local governance and economic development through building local governance structures, preparing elections and ‘shaping perceptions’ of the local population through ‘information engagement’ (US Department of the Army, 2008: paras 3-47–3-74).

To judge from the expansive list of activities for the military within stability operations, the doctrine exposes commonalities with a previous understanding of policing as the ‘good administration’ of public life and the promotion of welfare for the communities (Neocleous, 2000b: 721–722). The implications are twofold. First, the extensive involvement of external military units in governance issues of another state potentially displaces domestic ownership over these issues. Second, such an engagement in governance issues is not limited to an immediate post-conflict reconstruction phase but will be applied in peacetime contexts with the objective of ‘sustaining the long-term viability of host nations and provid[ing] the foundation for multinational cooperation that helps to maintain the global balance of power’ (US Department of the Army, 2008: vii). It means, in effect, that a regular and preventative regulatory engagement of the military in ‘fragile’ contexts – a policing function – is a precondition for maintaining the ‘global balance of power’. The words of former US defense secretary Robert Gates are paradigmatic in the context of prevention: ‘what is likely though, even a certainty, is the need to work with and through local governments to avoid the next insurgency, to rescue the next failing state, or to head off the next humanitarian disaster’ (US Department of the Army, 2008: para. 2-1). The extension of military activities in the absence of violent conflict is called ‘peacetime military engagement’ or ‘phase zero’.⁶ Peacetime engagement mainly involves training of ‘partner capacity’ through joint exercises or security sector reform programmes (US Department of the Army, 2008: paras 6-1–6-31), but also includes the development projects of US civil affairs teams that are carried out in problematized but non-war spaces, which will be studied in the next section. Retired General Charles Wald argued that phase zero ‘is essentially a conflict prevention strategy’ (quoted in Taw, 2012: 142).

The use of coercion to end hostilities remains a central part of the stability operations doctrine, however. It is at the intersection of ‘neutralizing hostile groups’, ‘protecting populations’, ‘supporting better governance’ and ‘economic development’, where ideas on counterinsurgency and stabilization overlap. Here, at this entanglement, the value of analysing the US military’s take on stability through the concept of policing comes to the fore, as the use of force, ‘good administration’ and persistent preventative engagement seem to be equally pertinent.

The remainder of the article will show how the US military becomes engrained in the fabric of ‘fragile’ contexts in Africa through policing practices. The African continent, problematized in Western security and development policies as abundant with multiple challenges said to be emerging from ‘ungoverned spaces’, has for the US military become a laboratory where ideas on the military’s preventative and ‘horizontal’ engagement are tested under the umbrella of stability. As I will show, AFRICOM’s expanding engagement in health and development issues, on the one hand, and surveillance, counter-terrorism and military training, on the other, merit an exploration through the concept of policing.

Africa as an experimental ground

The vision

According to a US Army publication, the African continent is the US military’s ‘last frontier’ – a territory not yet fully mapped by the world’s largest military (Army Times, 2012). US Africa Command, established in 2007, was presented as a military command of a different kind.⁷ Appropriating terms and concepts of humanitarian assistance and development, AFRICOM’s first commander general, William Ward, said that ‘AFRICOM will add value’, will make a ‘positive difference’, and will ‘do no harm’ (US Africa Command, 2011: 24).

Strategic awareness of the US military for the African continent is relatively recent. Except for regional training exercises and humanitarian assistance, the USA reduced its military activities after the failed intervention in Somalia in 1993. In 1995, the Pentagon argued that there is ‘very little traditional strategic interest in Africa’ (US Department of Defense, 1995).⁸ The attacks on 9/11 changed this assessment radically. It had hitherto not been an unusual discursive practice in foreign aid to frame political authority in postcolonial spaces as weak and deviant from European experiences – conceptualized as, for example, ‘low income countries under stress’ or ‘difficult partners’ by donors such as the World Bank – and as prone to instability. However, after 9/11, ‘weak’ states were no longer only seen as a threat to their own populations, but also viewed as threats to international security (Bilgin and Morton, 2002; Bush, 2002; White House, 2002). Taxonomies of deficient statehood morphed into more generic notions of either fragile states or ‘ungoverned spaces’ that offered safe havens for clandestine activities and radicalization (Lamb, 2008; Rotberg, 2003; for a critique, see Clunan and Trinkunas, 2010). However, instead of acknowledging the limits of steering those spaces, presenting vast regions as ‘ungoverned’ has been a call for action and eventually resulted in the establishment of US Africa Command in 2007 (Bachmann, 2010; Hoffman, 2011).

It was suggested in the US strategic literature at that time that, through the new command, core tasks of stability operations will be realized: preventative engagement, contributions to improving governance and a closer coordination with civilian partners instead of a large troop presence. AFRICOM was presented as leading the way forward when it came to integrating civilian and military expertise. Military analysts argue that AFRICOM has the greatest potential for addressing global instabilities in terms of interagency coordination, and it should consequently be made, in the words of Shin (2009: 32), a ‘laboratory for nurturing a whole-of-government approach to stability operations that goes well beyond Africa…. AFRICOM’s success could affect the missions of other combatant commands and how they are organized’. Another analyst suggested making AFRICOM a ‘true interagency command’, headed by a ‘civilian commander’ who would at the same time be the US ambassador to the African Union. Munson (2008: 100) proposes replacing the term ‘command’ with one better suited to the fundamental changes: ‘perhaps one should begin with the organisational model of an embassy rather than a military organisation’.

Owing to Africa’s multiple challenges of ‘marginal governance’, population pressure and ‘anaemic economic development’, as pointed to in a strategic review draft by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Working Group in 2010, the continent is likely to become a ‘priority theatre’ for the US military (Joint Chiefs of Staff Working Group (JCSWG), 2010). Consequently, the African continent is framed as a site where new military arrangements in non-war zones could be exercised, taking into account the need for a deepened role of the US military in spaces where violent conflict is to be anticipated:

African nations present a full spectrum of challenges in pre- and post-conflict settings and other stressful government conditions … providing the opportunity to preserve and refine hard-won experience from Afghanistan and Iraq and test new post-Cold War security cooperation concepts. AFRICOM has made it a goal to build a premier organization integrated with the interagency. The challenges in Africa provide the ideal opportunity to test and operationalize interagency integration and new security cooperation and planning concepts in an important theatre. (JCSWG, 2010)

This review calls for the deployment of ‘horizontal’ strategies that would ‘employ sustained long-term approaches to change underlying conditions’ of a problem (JCSWG, 2010). It is particularly in the practices of the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF–HoA) that we can see a more ‘horizontal’ and preventative engagement emerging. CJTF–HoA started as a counter-terrorism mission in 2002, but has since turned into a so-called indirect approach aimed at addressing root causes of a potential radicalization of Muslim youths in Eastern Africa. CJTF–HoA’s turn to prevention by deploying civil affairs teams that address the welfare of problematized communities will be examined in the final section of this article.

The vision in practice

The spectrum of AFRICOM’s activities is so vast that it constitutes a challenge to map. Even though there is only one official US military base on the continent, different components of the command engage in a vast array of different practices. For example, they provide military-to-military training programmes for African militaries or multinational peacekeeping forces; support security sector reform; fight terrorists through covert action and drone attacks; deploy special operations forces; set up a network of operating locations and a vast logistics network; do aerial surveillance missions; engage in community outreach activities; set up a network of operating locations, including warehouses and airstrips that facilitate the command’s logistics; and engage in health, education and other development programmes across Western and Eastern Africa.⁹

Figure 1 – the result of an investigation carried out by US journalist Nick Turse – shows that in the last two years the US military has been active in 49 out of 55 African countries. The map not only leaves the observer puzzled by the sheer magnitude of AFRICOM’s presence in Africa, but also raises the question as to what purpose these diverse activities serve. Do these activities amount to a militarization of US Africa policy, as some critical observers have argued (Keenan, 2009)? Or, are we witnessing a civilianization of the US military, considering its emphasis on ‘horizontal’ engagement of civil affairs teams in civilian capacity-building and development? I find that neither of these perspectives is well suited to grasping the extensiveness and intricacy of US military activities on the continent. It is rather through the perspective of an expansive ambition of police power to regulate ‘quite heterogeneous things and activities’ (Dean, 2010: 109) that we can comprehend the normalization of the US military as fostering a notion of ‘good order’ across Africa under a general notion of stability.¹⁰ In the remaining part of this article, I will illustrate this point by discussing instances of US military activity in Eastern Africa in which prevention, welfare for the population and the possibility of the use of force come to the fore. These dimensions correspond to the understanding of policing outlined above. I will first examine the civil affairs teams’ projects in health and education infrastructure in Uganda and Kenya. The second example is AFRICOM’s involvement in ongoing conflicts and the potential use of force.

Figure 1.

Activities of US AFRICOM in 2012 and 2013.

One visible shift in US military engagement in Africa has been the move to an ‘indirect approach’ in efforts to counter terrorism. The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review defines an indirect approach as the ability ‘to work through and with partners’ and to ‘sustain a persistent and low visibility presence’ (US Department of Defense, 2006: 11). ‘Preventing future conflict’ is one of four ‘cornerstones’ of AFRICOM’s stated mission objectives (US Africa Command, 2013a), and it is CJTF–HoA’s shift of emphasis from hunting terrorists towards preventing radicalization through welfare projects that is considered crucial for the mission’s success:

Operating across large areas but using only small detachments, CJTF–HOA is a prime example of distributed operations and economy of force. Military, civilian, and allied personnel work together to provide security training and to perform public works and medical assistance projects, demonstrating the benefits of unity of effort. (US Department of Defense, 2006: 11)

CJTF–HoA’s civil affairs teams, coordinated from the headquarters in Djibouti, have been implementing medical, veterinary, and small-scale humanitarian and infrastructure projects across Eastern Africa for almost a decade.¹¹ Most of the projects are carried out in areas that US security strategists conceptualize as being ‘under-governed’ and as exploitable by terrorists.¹² CJTF–HoA civil affairs teams have implemented hundreds of projects across Eastern Africa, with a focus on Djibouti and the northern and coastal parts of Kenya. The activities include school and health centre renovations, drilling of wells, training of militaries, training of civilian staff in health and public safety, veterinary programmes, community outreach and humanitarian practices.¹³ Two things are striking with regard to the activities of the civil affairs teams in this region. First, there is an increasing engagement in humanitarian, health and infrastructure projects in which the link to matters of counter-radicalization or stability is hardly palpable. Second, the persistence of the activities of US civil affairs teams in certain regions not only leads to the perception of the US military as the primary source of external funding by potential beneficiaries, but also contributes to the subtle normalization of the US military’s role in local welfare issues.¹⁴ One can, however, make sense of these inconsistencies when we read the US military’s expanding investment in social ordering as a function of policing.

One of the most advertised current US programmes in Uganda is the One Health Initiative, which aims at improving veterinary and public health services and at preventing the spread of contagious diseases. The initiative includes ‘classroom sessions on basic disease surveillance, recognition, epidemiology, water sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, family planning, as well as maternal and child health’ and highlights the importance of the welfare of the local communities (US Embassy, 2013). The initiative is promoted as a holistic whole-of-government programme, involving the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Ugandan civilian authorities, the Ugandan armed forces and CJTF–HoA civil affairs teams. Even though the security aspect of these activities is not discernible, CJTF–HoA officials try to frame the health programme ineptly in terms of protecting US interests: ‘we are helping protect the [US] economy, the market, the farmers, and animals by keeping these devastating diseases out of our country’ (US Africa Command, 2013b). Through a widely advertised programme such as the One Health Initiative, the US military becomes intertwined with local governance issues in a peacetime context.

Even though the achievements of the US military’s civil affairs teams in Lamu County in the northern coastal region of Kenya are not as widely advertised, the normalization of US military teams as aid donors occurs through the persistence of their projects. CJTF–HoA’s Maritime Civil Affairs Teams have been active in the Lamu region for nearly a decade. They have implemented around 200 projects in Lamu County, most of which are school renovations and water catchment projects.¹⁵ The interviews show that in a region where the presence of international aid organizations is comparatively low, for many beneficiaries the civil affairs teams become the first addressees when it comes to raising needs to potential external funders.¹⁶

This perception of military teams becoming development implementers is shared by some of the team members themselves:

The grand force-to-force wars are over. What you need is a preventative engagement, stability missions. Civil affairs have to come up with sustainable solutions that include a focus on educating the people. Sure, this [i.e. what the teams do] is development, but for me poverty reduction and stability go hand in hand. The objectives of civil affairs and development are the same. Whoever is best at doing the job should do it. The civil affairs teams are force multipliers for the NGOs.¹⁷

The practice of military units engaging in welfare issues is, however, contested. While these small-scale development projects face many of the same dilemmas as traditional aid operations – particularly in relation to ownership, sustainability and donor dependency – such problems are magnified by the fact that the projects intensify the US military involvement in reordering African societies through an increased regulatory engagement in local governance processes.

While this already reflects the concern with ordering inherent in policing, arguably, the fact that AFRICOM engages in development projects in itself does not amount to policing. Yet, in contrast to the situation for regular aid donors, of course, the use of (reasonable) force – constitutive for police power – remains part of the repertoire of AFRICOM’s order-making practices. Hence, the preventative welfare projects need to be studied in the context of the general problematization of ‘ungoverned spaces’ and the assertion that those spaces provide fertile grounds for radicalization and violent conflict. The killing of terrorist suspects and the deployment of special operations forces to capture rebel leaders, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) Joseph Kony, constitute the other side of the US military’s stability engagement. Leaving aside AFRICOM’s operation Odyssey Dawn 2011 in Libya, two kinds of operations stand out in this regard: AFRICOM’s role in the war against the LRA in Uganda and the increasing number of covert operations, surveillance actions and drone attacks against suspected terrorists.

With the aim of supporting the Ugandan government in its fight against the rebels of the LRA, US President Barack Obama, in October 2011, sent 100 so-called military advisors to Eastern and Central Africa (Obama, 2011). These units are dispersed on bases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and Uganda (Whitlock, 2012a). The active support of the US military in capturing the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, adds a moral justification for AFRICOM’s very operations and additionally legitimizes any actions of the Ugandan military in this region. Rights activists in northern Uganda raise concern that, with the arrival of combat-equipped special forces in the conflict, a military solution to a conflict that has been going on since the late 1980s has once more become the only legitimate one.¹⁸ Critical voices are then considered as criminal or immoral and presented as further proof of the necessity of a military intervention itself, as Branch (2011) has vividly demonstrated in his study on the conflict in northern Uganda. Thus, the US special forces in this conflict do not engage in combat. However, this does not necessarily imply an absence of force. As the coercive power of the police is latent in its presence, so does AFRICOM’s engagement on the continent carry the possibility of violence. As Ryan (2013: 442) has argued, violence begins ‘with the arrival of an individual within whom the capacity to inflict death resides’.

The second example is the use of covert action against terrorist suspects as a standard tool of operation. Special operations forces and private contractors scan large parts of Central Africa for Al-Qaeda affiliates. Furthermore, the Horn of Africa – particularly Somalia – is mapped by drones that start from airfields on the Seychelles and in Ethiopia (Turse, 2012, 2013; Whitlock, 2012b). The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea reported that ‘unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles routinely operate in Somali airspace’, and it considers their use – owing to its military character – ‘a potential violation of the arms embargo’ (UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, 2012: 224, 231). Some of these flights have been used for targeted assassinations of suspected Al-Shabaab fighters. Since 2007, up to 150 suspected militants and civilians have been killed by US drone strikes and covert operations in Somalia (Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 2013). Targeted operations are executed not only in the war zones in Afghanistan, but also on the African continent. One of the most recent ones was a raid by special operations forces on a house in the Somali town of Barawe only days after the hostage drama in Nairobi’s Westgate Shopping Centre in September 2013. The US forces were looking for a senior Al-Shabaab figure. The operation failed – and two al-Shabaab fighters were killed (Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 2013; Guardian, 2013). Force is used selectively – ‘reasonably’ in policing terms – to remove individual ‘spoilers’ from spaces that are perceived to be on the brink of sliding into disorder.

Welfare and the management of order/disorder are the two primary concerns of police science on the domestic level. In the context of ordering fragile states, as the case of US AFRICOM has demonstrated, we see that external military institutions are increasingly occupied with exactly these issues: prevention, governance, social ordering. As we have seen, the means the US military uses in fostering stability are manifold. Despite AFRICOM’s appearance as a governance partner, such an appearance can always be backed up by the use of coercion if this is deemed necessary for maintaining a particular notion of order.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to conceptually understand the current reconfiguration of US military doctrine and practice that is currently taking place under the label of stability. Through a discussion of the US military’s stability operations field manual and the practices of US Africa Command, I have suggested that the spectrum of activities can be understood most comprehensively through an analytical perspective of policing, in which the aim of establishing ‘good order’ through an expansive regulatory engagement in issues of welfare is applied to contexts of ‘fragile’ statehood and ‘ungoverned spaces’.

As discussed in the article, the problematization of spaces as ungoverned is a call for action and has produced new forms of governance interventions. Those spaces, assumed by security strategists to be between war and peace, are subjected to myriad forms of external engagements. Fighting terrorists, preventing insurgencies, managing disasters, rebuilding societies, and building democracies and market economies are all assembled under the heading of stabilization. Mitchell (2010) calls this framing of ungoverned spaces the ‘geopolitics of broken windows’, as it draws on the link made earlier in Western urban contexts between neglect and social disorder. While the response to the broken windows theory was the policy of zero tolerance, the new interventionism in ungoverned spaces in the global South is a mix of preventative welfare issues and reasonable force aimed at establishing today’s version of ‘good order’, called stability.

Does an emphasis on the well-being of populations, reconstruction, governance and development in the recent discourses and practices of stability operations undermine or redraw the line between civilian and military tasks, as feared by a number of civilian agencies during the close civil–military collaboration in Afghanistan? I have argued that the focus on the line between civilian and military responsibilities is limited in its capacity to account for the current spectrum of the US military’s activities in its ‘operations other than war’ in sub-Saharan Africa. As police power operates ‘on both sides of the thin blue line that separates order from disorder’ (Ryan, 2013: 443), the exact position of the boundaries between what are seen as ungoverned, fragile and vulnerable spaces is not recognizable. These spaces are, to different extents, in need of ordering interventions. The article has argued that we can use policing as a way of inquiring about the very simultaneousness of coercive and more ‘benign’ engagements of militaries in fragile settings under the umbrella of stabilization. Killing terrorists and the refurbishment of schools are not in disagreement, but serve in their synthesis of welfare and coercion the same objective of social ordering through the concept of stabilization. When following this analytical lens, future research could be more attentive to the (potentially) violent practices of managing ‘disorder’, or the entanglements of police and war (Bachmann et al., 2014; Neocleous, 2014), rather than to the question of the ‘right’ division of labour between civilian and military actors. Taking into account the views of the communities targeted by stabilization activities, further research additionally needs to study dissenting voices to stabilization practices, and to inquire into the consequences of such a strategization of peacetime environments by external militaries for wider North–South relations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Colleen Bell, Adam Branch, Miguel de Larrinaga, Jana Hönke, Christian Olsson, Barry Ryan, Finn Stepputat, Maria Stern and Peer Schouten who, at different stages, provided invaluable suggestions on how to tease out the main points made in this article. I would also like to thank the four reviewers as well as the editors of Security Dialogue for their comments and suggestions.

Funding

Research for this article has been funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s Department for Research Cooperation (SAREC), under grant SWE 2011-124.

Notes

Jan Bachmann is a Lecturer at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He is the co-editor (with Colleen Bell and Caroline Holmqvist) of the forthcoming volume The New Interventionism: Perspectives on War–Police Assemblages (Routledge, 2014). Recent publications include ‘Governmentality and Counterterrorism’ (Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2012) and ‘Kenya and International Security’ (Globalizations, 2012).

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