From conflict zones to shopping malls, from resource extraction sites to luxury tourist enclaves, private security has become a ubiquitous feature of modern life. While the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’ continues to be one of the defining features of state sovereignty, and one of the most powerful elements of the modern political imagination, the realities of security today increasingly transcend its confines, and include a wide range of private actors. At its most controversial, private security is represented by the combat active soldier, heavily armed and actively involved in warfare. At its most mundane, it involves the unarmed guard at a hotel entrance, or a neighbourhood watch of concerned citizens mobilising local energies in the pursuit of safety and security.
Africa is, of course, no stranger to these various forms of private security, although it is fair to say that to date, the military dimension has dominated discussion. The infamous activities of mercenaries such as Bob Denard and ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the more distant exploits of Cecil Rhodes and the privately-financed armies of his commercial empire, mean that Africa easily lends itself to portrayal as the natural environment for rapacious and ruthless forms of entrepreneurship and control in which private gain is intimately and directly linked to the ability to wield private violence. More recent spectacular actions, such as Executive Outcomes’ (EO) intervention in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and Simon Mann's aborted coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in 2004 only reinforce this image of Africa as the chosen playground of the world's soldiers of fortune.
It would be both foolish and wrong to deny the impact of mercenaries on the recent, as well as the distant, history and political economy of Africa. However, care is needed lest the power of this legacy and the important lessons that it holds are allowed to obscure a clear understanding of contemporary realities. Africa remains a continent replete with private security actors, yet as in much of the rest of the world, the nature and dynamics of security privatisation have undergone profound changes in recent years. Accordingly, analyses rooted in the by now decade-old activities of companies like EO may be ill-suited to a full appreciation of the political and economic impacts of today's more pervasive forms of security privatisation and changing private military activities.
Instead, new forms of security privatisation demand new conceptual tools and a certain reorientation in empirical analysis. The goal of this Special Issue is to contribute to a wider understanding of the privatisation of security in Africa, starting from the assumption that political critique requires an appreciation of the dynamics and structures driving and underpinning the processes of privatisation. We deliberately cast the net wide, and seek to provide empirical and analytical illustrations of the depth and diversity of security privatisation. As such, we include rural non-state security actors, urban vigilantes, global private security companies, private military companies, as well as private prisons, arguing that these various forms of security privatisation are in important ways linked to the same processes of transformation. By surveying the breadth of private security activity on the continent, and the varied political and economic factors driving its growth, the Special Issue seeks to broaden debate over the sources, impacts, and implications of these important, yet often under-appreciated, developments.
In this introduction, we situate security privatisation within contemporary debates in political economy. In particular, we draw attention to the constructed character of the public/private distinction, and argue that in the same way that the original emergence of this distinction was central to the development of capitalism and the rise of national bourgeoisies, we are currently witnessing a redrawing of this division which is in turn crucial to the understanding of contemporary global capitalism, and to the emergence of (global) private security. The manner in which the public/private, as well as the global/local, distinction is currently being re-articulated reflects important transformations in power and authority, and is central to an appreciation of the political impact of the various forms of private security on the African continent.
The Re-emergence of Private Security
Although the realms of political economy and security are often treated in isolation, the two have a long and intimate history in the evolution of liberal capitalism. The constitution of a ‘private’ economic sphere was in important ways made possible by the removal of the control of violence and coercion – what we today call ‘security’ – from private hands into the ‘public’ or political domain. This transition was a key feature of the move from feudalism to absolutism, in the consolidation of the modern state, and in the shift of social power from a landed aristocracy that wielded violence as part of its socio-economic position and dominance towards the rising commercial classes, whose position and property was underpinned by liberal conceptions of rights and an increasingly formalised and centralised monopoly of state violence that could enforce and secure them. Similarly, the subsequent development of nineteenth century liberal capitalism was linked to the construction of individuals whose economic liberty was part and parcel of their freedom from violent coercion by other private individuals, and the corresponding location of these individuals within new forms of market discipline and coercion. In short, the existence of a public sphere of security in principle applying uniformly to all subjects was, as both Max Weber (Gerth & Wright Mills, 1946) and Karl Polanyi (1944) stressed, a key element in the evolution of liberal capitalism and its specific articulation of the relationship between the economy and society (see also Anderson, 1974 & Wood, 1981).
These developments were of course neither simple nor uniform, historically or geographically. Private violence continued in many forms. Globally, the imperial commercial activities of the Chartered Companies involved the use of extensive private force throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; by 1782, for example, the English East India Company's armed force outnumbered that of the British army at the time, consisting of over 100,000 British, German, Swiss and Indian soldiers. Similarly, privateering or piracy was an integral element of early-modern commercial, as well as military, competition. At more individual levels, private violence continued to be seen as legitimate in even some of the most advanced industrial countries until at least the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, duelling as a matter of honour between gentlemen – a relic of feudal class hierarchies expressed through the right to engage in private violence – continued. In 1804, for example, the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, killed former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel, while in Germany the practice continued up to the First World War. The use of a wide variety of private force for the ‘public’ task of policing was also widespread in Europe until the later decades of the nineteenth century. The same was true in the United States, where the activities of one of the most famous – and in some eyes infamous – commercial private security firms, Pinkerton's, provided investigative and arrest capacities on railways across the country, engaged in often violent suppression of labour disputes, and even for a time policed substantial parts of the city of Chicago.
In the colonies, of course, private force was even more prevalent and the connections between private and public force equally complex. Policing was a key part of strategies of imperial domination, and the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes had its own paramilitary, mounted infantry force. Similarly, the first recognisable police force in Kenya was private, in the sense that it was set up by the East Africa Trading Company (later the Imperial East Africa Trading Company) in 1896. The company had an armed security force, recruited predominantly among the Indian police and watchmen, and the force was governed by Indian police statutes (see Clayton and Killingray, 1989). During the colonial period, commercial companies often maintained private forces; for example, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, a subsidiary of De Beers, employed a private police force of 35 armed men to protect its diamond concession in the Kono area. Colonial rule also relied extensively on chiefs and more or less invented ‘traditional’ structures for a variety of policing and security tasks, whereby chiefs acted as a form of local extension of colonial rule.
Private force was thus far from absent during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as Janice Thomson (1994) has usefully remarked, historically the state's monopoly of violence is the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that in broad terms the tendency throughout this period was toward the increasing concentration of force in public hands and the progressive marginalisation of its direct connection to private actors. The disappearance of the Chartered Companies, the outlawing of duelling, the progressive restriction of mercenarism, and the constriction of the activities of private security firms like Pinkerton's, all in their different ways show that the story of liberal capitalism is to a large extent also the story of the increasing public control over security and a restriction of private activities and capabilities. By the same token, the end of formal colonial rule was accompanied by the explicit and extensive (and by no means unproblematic) building of public security forces of all kinds by the newly independent states, as an effective monopoly of violence was regarded as a crucial part of the state-building process. Often this nation-building project entailed an attempt to curtail the power of chiefs, but to date many continue to exercise significant authority in the security and justice sectors, reflecting the longevity of what Mahmood Mamdani (1996) has termed the ‘bifurcated’ state. That said, in Africa, as elsewhere, any glance at political debates and developments during this period reveals the gradually increasing dominance of public control over security at the expense of the private, and the centrality of a public monopoly of violence both in practice and in competing visions of political order.
In the light of this history of centralisation, the resurgence – and re-legitimation – of private security both within national territories and globally in the last thirty years is striking. Over the last decade, for example, the growth of the private military sector has taken place at breakneck speed. Private firms now play major roles in the areas of logistics and training in many Northern militaries (Singer, 2003; Avant, 2005). Far from operating in the shadows of legality like the mercenaries of yesteryear, these private military companies (PMCs) are closely connected to the policies of national governments, development agencies, and NGOs. It has been claimed that to an ever-increasing extent the United States could not go to war without the ‘contractors’ who provide extensive logistical support for its forces, and who are often directly integrated into the operation of key weapons and intelligence systems (Avant, 2005). Nowhere is this more the case than in Iraq, where many PMCs are both heavily armed and combat-active. In a striking illustration of US dependence on private contractors, the controversial company Blackwater recently had its contract to provide security for US diplomats in Iraq renewed for another year, despite its guards having killed 17 Iraqis at a Baghdad intersection in September 2007. As the Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy, admitted ‘we cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq. If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq’ (Risen, 2008).
The exact number of private security personnel in Iraq is difficult to ascertain, but most estimates place it somewhere around 30,000, making private soldiers the second largest component of the ‘coalition of the willing’. A large contingent is South African, many previous elite soldiers from the apartheid era's Special Forces, but also including post-apartheid police officers tempted by the prospect of making as much as $10,000 a month, or about ten times their normal salaries. The largest South African involvement in Iraq is in all likelihood through Erinys International, a company originally founded by Sean Cleary, a former military intelligence officer of the apartheid state, but now registered as a British security company with several subsidiaries. In a contract worth between $80 and 100 million, Erinys was tasked by the Coalition Provisional Authority to recruit and train an Oil Protection Force to guard Iraq's oil installations. Given that South Africa has what is commonly regarded as one of the world's most stringent anti-mercenary legislations, it is not surprising that the extensive involvement of South African security personnel in Iraq has been highly controversial. By the same token, the failure to stem the flow of personnel from South Africa to Iraq is a telling illustration of the difficulties of regulating private military activities (see Taljaard, 2006).
Although there may now be signs that growth in the private military sector is slowing and perhaps even reversing, this process has resulted in the establishment of a number of well-resourced PMCs whose activities extend well beyond the war-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan and are increasingly prominent in Africa and other parts of the developing world. The presence of private security actors in military assistance projects, security sector reform programmes, and post-conflict reconstruction can be seen across Africa, and the role of PMCs in logistics provision and their long-standing expertise in tasks such as mine-clearance has made them increasingly central to a number of interventions. There is also a strong lobbying effort to expand their involvement in peacekeeping operations (see Leander & van Munster, 2007). The private security industry has long played a key role in US postconflict policies; as Deborah Avant (2006) has pointed out: ‘Every single international civilian police officer the U.S. sent abroad in the 1990s was a DynCorp employee’.
In this Special Issue, the evolving role of private companies in the military sector in Africa is explored by a number of contributors. DynCorp's role in rebuilding the Liberian military forces is discussed in a Briefing by Sean McFate, one of the architects of the reform programme. The extensive role of PMCs in US military training programmes on the continent is further analysed by Kwesi Aning, Thomas Jaye and Samuel Atuobi, while Stig Hansen shows the complex relationships that have existed between private security providers and the various state-like entities of Somalia, Somaliland and Puntland. Taken together, these contributions document not only the significant change that has occurred in private military involvement on the continent since the days of Executive Outcomes, but also the very different political challenges that arise from the contemporary relationship between public and private actors. We return to some of these issues towards the end of this introduction.
While the private military has received considerable attention in discussions of security privatisation, the growth in the non-military sphere has gone largely unnoticed.1 Politically, however, it is no less significant. In both developed and developing countries, the privatisation of everyday forms of security provision in non-conflict environments has expanded markedly, constituting what two prominent analysts have called a ‘quiet revolution’ (Shearing & Stenning, 1981). Private security personnel now frequently outnumber the public police by considerable margins; in the UK, the ratio is almost two private security officers per one public police office; in the US, it is almost three to one; in Hong Kong, five to one, and in some developing countries, it has been estimated as high as ten to one (Mancini, 2006). By far the largest private security sector on the African continent is found in the Republic of South Africa, which as a percentage of GDP has the largest private security market in the world. Currently, there are 4,898 registered private security companies (PSCs) in South Africa, employing 307,343 active security officers (PSIRA, 2007). By comparison, the South African Police Service has 114,241 sworn police officers (de Lange, 2008). In the nine years from 1997 to 2006, the number of security guards grew by over 157 per cent (Ibid.), and as South Africa prepares for the 2010 World Cup, this figure is set to increase yet further.
Exact figures from other African countries are difficult to obtain, and often there is no register of PSCs, and no laws pertaining to their regulation and operation. Estimates, however, suggest that in Kenya there are approximately 2,000 PSCs, employing nearly 50,000 people, while in Nigeria the sector is said to include between 1,500 and 2,000 companies, employing approximately 100,000 (Wairagu et al., 2004; Keku, 2003). In Senegal, there are some 150 companies, employing 25,000-35,000 people (O'Brien, this issue), while Sierra Leone has seen a rapid expansion of its private security sector following then end of the civil war (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2005a). Although most PSCs are small to medium-sized local companies, a number of large international companies have a presence in Africa. For example, Group4Securicor alone employs over 98,000 people across 21 African countries, and is according to some accounts the continent's largest private employer. A number of South African companies also have operations across the continent, while several Kenyan PSCs are present throughout East Africa.
In the same way as the uniformed guards of private security companies have become a familiar part of the African social landscape, so too have a host of more informal non-state security actors. Urban vigilantes, neighbourhood watches and rural community police have proliferated in recent years, and while frequently derided as criminal and violent, such groups are often important security providers. In this Special Issue, the expanding role of PSCs is discussed by Hamilton Simelane and Cyrus O'Brien, while Bruce Baker and Lars Buur analyse informal non-state policing. These contributions draw attention to the complex political implications of various types of private security, and also the extent to which their emergence is linked to broader transformations in political economy.
The Political Economy of Security Privatisation
Relatively little research has been undertaken on the international political economy of security privatisation, and even less on its evolution in Africa. Most explanations of military privatisation revolve around a combination of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, where the downsizing of bloated Cold War military establishments is seen to have resulted in surplus personnel and equipment (Avant, 2005; Lilly, 2000; Musah, 2002; Singer, 2003). In Africa, this dynamic was further reinforced by the fall of apartheid, when large numbers of ex-military and ex-police personnel entered the private security sector. To these ‘push’ factors most authors add the ‘pull’ of escalating African conflicts at a time when Western powers suffered from intervention fatigue or were preoccupied with strategically more important parts of the globe.
This focus on dynamics in the military sector illuminates a number of key issues, but the process of security privatisation also needs to be located in the context of broader transformations in the political economy of security. For this, it helps to turn to the discipline of criminology, where the connections between the re-emergence of private security and political economy have been the subject of extensive investigation and debate (see Johnston, 1992; Johnston & Shearing 2003; Garland, 2001). Although these treatments tend to remain confined to individual countries in the North and lack a focus on the specific features of Africa or on global dynamics, they provide an important foundation for further analysis.
The political economy of security privatisation is to a large extent the story of neoliberalism and post-Fordist, or post-Keynesian, trajectories, and one highly influential account dates the origins of the contemporary resurgence of private security to the ‘fiscal crisis’ of the Keynesian state that gathered force in the late 1970s (Jones & Newburn, 1998). According to this argument, as the state's capacity to fund public services decreased (whether through economic necessity, political design, or both), the private sector expanded to fill the various the ‘gaps’ that ensued – including in the area of security. Unsurprisingly, appraisals of this shift differmarkedly. From a ‘liberal’ or ‘pluralist’ position, the new policing division of labour was a rational development in which private enterprise could provide efficient protection for its clients (and even take on some state services, such as prisons and prisoner-management) while at the same time freeing public police for more pressing duties. Private security is here seen as a ‘junior partner’ supplementing but not supplanting the public police. From a more critical perspective, privatisation marked the erosion of the public good of security, allowing those with enough resources to insulate themselves from the ever-more economically and socially divided, and often increasingly violent, world of neo-liberalism. Mike Davis’ (1990) memorable characterisation of Los Angeles as a ‘City of Quartz’ – of glittering hard surfaces of private wealth protected by private security from increasingly denuded public spaces, is one of the most well-known accounts.
There is little doubt that neo-liberalism and the retreat of the state have been key elements in the increase of private security. However, there are a number of areas where the fiscal crisis interpretation falls short. First and most importantly, while it is certainly the case that under neo-liberal policies many areas of public spending have decreased, it is difficult to make this case for the security sector. Indeed in many countries in the North, spending on the public security sector (both military and policing) has increased at the same time as the private security sector has grown. The idea of a ‘gap’ filled by private security cannot therefore be understood as an automatic result of the retrenchment of public capacities. Secondly, the policies of outsourcing did not represent a simple retreat of the state from security provision, but rather were part of a crucial relocation of its place within such provision. In fact, a broader and more complex process than mere ‘fiscal restraint’ has been underway, one that involves both the commodification of security and increased attempts by the state to make social actors of all kinds – individuals, corporations, communities – responsible for a greater involvement in their own security (Garland, 2001). The increased role of private security, in other words, is part of a general intensification of security activity across societies – a process abetted by the state and, in many countries, drawing power from an increasing demand for security from other sectors of society. What has evolved can be described as ‘networks’ of security governance that are ‘hybrid’ and ‘pluralistic’, crossing public-private boundaries and governing through devolved, responsibilised actors instead of resembling a hierarchical structure of state authority (Johnston & Shearing, 2003; Abrahamsen & Williams, 2007a).
In Africa, the situation is clearly somewhat different. Although military spending in sub-Saharan Africa has remained more or less constant in the period from 1988 to 2006, there is a much clearer case of the retreat of the state from public security provision.2 The neo-liberal order, reinforced by the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and the World Bank, has had particularly harsh consequences and although the impacts vary from country to country, the main effect has been a drastic reduction in state expenditure on social welfare, education and capital investment. While the new aid modality of post-conditionality and poverty reduction may have gone some way towards reversing this trend, the consequences for security are still apparent. Many police forces have become increasingly under-resourced and under-paid (and sometimes not paid at all and certainly not on time), leading to a lack of efficiency and also intensifying the temptation towards petty corruption and predatory activities. In this sense, the ‘fiscal constraint’ perspective holds considerable insights when applied to the African context, and there is little doubt that the expansion of private security coincided to a large extent with the rise to prominence of neo-liberal economic policies. On the other hand, this argument is sometimes put too simplistically, revealing an underlying functionalism whereby the private inevitably fills the vacuum left by the public. On closer inspection the situation is somewhat more complex, and the ‘fiscal crisis’ argument needs to be tempered by political, sociological and historical factors.
Key among these is the preoccupation of many African security forces with a narrowly defined regime security. As Alice Hills argues, policing in Africa has generally been preoccupied with ‘the enforcement of order on behalf of a regime’ (2000:162) rather than with crime prevention and public protection. This preoccupation with regime survival finds its historical roots in the colonial origins of the state and its police forces, and has been further reinforced by the lack of popular legitimacy of many governments. As the period of neo-liberal restructuring alienated ever larger sections of the population, the need for regime security intensified. During this period then, the state was not only weakened in terms of its (economic) ability to provide for citizens, but also to a certain extent privatised by political elites concerned primarily with their own survival. There are of course important variations here, and while all policing and law enforcement is inherently political and defends a particular socio-economic order, the direct ability of political leaders to influence police operations significantly diminishes the public accountability and democratic control of many African police forces. The behaviour of the Kenyan Police in the wake of the December 2007 post-election violence is a case in point. In such cases, an ostensibly public police force acts primarily for private purposes, significantly problematising any simplistic public/private distinction.
This tendency towards the privatisation of public violence, although by no means uniform, needs to be factored into any explanation of why people turn to non-state solutions for their everyday protection. Given that the military in many African countries is also frequently used for internal security purposes, any automatic assumption that there has been a decline in the ability of the state to provide security needs to be treated with caution. It may be the case in some countries, but not in others. It may indeed be that the state's coercive apparatus retained its powers, but that its priorities shifted. Hamilton Simelane's careful analysis of the emergence of private security in Swaziland is a useful illustration here, and shows the interaction of economic decline, political concerns with regime survival and citizens’ subsequent turn to private security. Importantly, as Baker, Buur and Simelane document in their contributions to this volume, the absence of public forces does not necessarily mean the absence of security. In fact, as Baker and Simelane show, traditional modes of policing may be more effective, while as Buur demonstrates, vigilantism is more complex than simple extortion or predation and is intimately related to locally specific moral and ethical frameworks of identification and belonging, and may act to reinforce or renegotiate these at times of social uncertainty and transformation.
Explanations focusing on fiscal constraints also need to be complemented by an appreciation of the broader social transformations that have accompanied the liberalisation of the economy, such as increased urbanisation, unemployment, inequality, crime and general lawlessness. It is important to stress, however, that poverty and increased socio-economic inequality cannot be linked to rising crime by any direct causal mechanism. As Teresa Caldeira (2000) has observed in relation to Sao Paulo, economic crisis, urbanisation and declining state expenditure on security cannot alone explain contemporary crime and violence. Instead, the rise in crime is expressive of a complex combination of factors, at the heart of which is a highly politicised justice system that lacks respect for the rights of the poor. In Africa, as in other parts of the world, the everyday practices of the police and the institutions of law and order, the continuing excessive use of force, the disrespect of civil rights, and the failure to reform the police along more democratic lines are key elements of any explanation of crime and insecurity. But as Buur's article vividly illustrates, the connection between rights and security is far from straightforward, and requires careful empirical investigation.
Politically, private security raises important questions of equality, legitimacy, and social cohesion. The extent to which the availability of private security for the rich entails an increase in insecurity by the poor, and cements and reinforces existing inequalities is a key issue of concern. Clearly, only the relatively well-off can afford the services of commercial security companies, leaving large section of the population with a choice between an often inefficient and oppressive public police force and local non-state initiatives. It is thus tempting to interpret the contemporary return of private security in all its various forms as a form of ‘neo-medievalism'; a fragmented social world of competing loyalties and authorities where gated communities and urban vigilantes are the modern day equivalents of the fortified towers and warring cities of fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy. In this dystopia, society fragments into a series of private domains and the power and authority of the state is supplanted by the private. To be sure, the phenomenon of gated communities is spreading throughout the world; it has been estimated that over two million Americans now live in some form of gated community (Low, 2003), and in many African countries the wealthy are also retreating to increasingly fortified enclaves of private safety (Lemanski, 2004). The proliferation of massive shopping malls provides another type of social exclusion of ‘undesirable elements’ through the promotion of consumer citizenship in what has been aptly characterised as ‘mass private property’ (Shearing & Stenning, 1983). Similarly, in less wealthy areas, informal, non-commercial forms of security provision be they in the form of traditional policing, neighbourhood watches or so-called vigilantes wield significant power and authority and command strong loyalties, while resource extraction frequently relies on a host of private security experts securing the operating site from the surrounding populations.
The medieval analogy, however, only goes so far, and for all its superficial similarities this interpretation fails to capture a crucial aspect of contemporary security privatisation. Unlike in the medieval period, when private authorities reflected the lack of a political unit capable or willing to centralise power, today's private actors often operate alongside and with the active endorsement and encouragement of state authorities. Both PMCs and PSCs are frequently integrated into state programmes and polices, with most private security actors operating with the authorisation of the state – often receiving the large part of their business and profit from government outsourcing and public contracts. Similarly, many forms of informal policing are integrated into state structures and promoted by governments as part of strategies of partnership policing and responsibilisation. Even initiatives operating at the boundaries of legality may receive the tacit approval of state officials, as shown by both Buur and Simelane in their contributions to this volume.
As such, it is often misleading to approach private security from the perspective of a process of ‘enclavisation’ or state withdrawal. In most settings private security exists in complex relations of cooperation and competition with public security actors and with the state. A telling example can be found in the city of Cape Town, which operates a ‘partnership policing’ programme that involves the extensive interaction of public and private officers as well a significant role for private security agents in patrolling public spaces (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2007b). Rather than a fragmented neo-medievalism or a simple decline or retreat of state power, we see the contours of a changing public/private relationship, where this very distinction is being reconfigured, gradually losing its conceptual and empirical validity. The contemporary security landscape is better described as a complex and fluid set of structures where public and private agents interact, cooperate, and compete in numerous interactions. Instead of a withdrawal of the state, we are witnessing a re-articulation of the public/private divide. Importantly, this re-articulation cannot be understood with reference only to the local or the domestic, but requires an appreciation of the dynamics of global capitalism. Of course, this is by no means unconnected to the idea of the fiscal crisis of the state, since in many eyes the increasing transnational mobility of capital has been a key component of that crisis as more fluid forms of capital have moved beyond the confines of states. This mobility, along with the opening of global markets, can also be seen as a key aspect in the expansion of private security, although to date the international political economy underpinning this expansion remains largely unexplored.
Global Capitalism & Private Security
There is, as indicated above, nothing natural about the public/private distinction, nor is this a neutral or purely technical/managerial division. Instead, it is historically constructed, reflecting particular social interests and power relations at particular points in time. As such, different markets or economies can be seen to have their own public/private distinction, at the heart of which is the construction of a sphere of economic activity perceived to be private and by implication, non-political. At the present moment, the sphere of the private is expanding, both locally and globally, constituting more and more areas of life as ‘non-political’.
As Saskia Sassen (2006:144) has recently observed, the organising logics of the current global era are in part the result of realignments inside the state and, thereby, between the public and the private realm. Generally, these institutional shifts within the state have redistributed power in favour of those institutions directly embedded in global structures, such as finance ministries, elements of the judiciary that deal with international regulation, and the executive branch in general. A key feature of these agencies is their endorsement of a neo-liberal normative order that privileges global competitiveness. ‘Private logics’, as Sassen (2006:195) puts it, ‘circulate through public institutional domains’, and these public domains become powerful agents for globalisation, often operating in complex interaction with private and transnational actors. In the case of private security, it is for example notable that the World Trade Organisation now includes private security in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), thus providing a strong incentive for member states to allow free and fair competition in security services. China's decision to open its private security market to foreign investment in advance of the 2008 Olympic Games is accordingly reported as being in part a response to its WTO obligations (People's Daily, 2007), and many embassies regularly advertise their security sectors as lucrative markets for foreign investors. The normativity of the competitive state, in short, works to promote globalisation, and with it the global reach of private actors. Indeed, Claire Cutler (1997) has argued that the dissolution of the public/private distinction and the coming together of public and private institutions and activities are crucial moves in the consolidation of contemporary global capitalism. This is also the case with private security.
As capital has become more transnational, its security needs have widened. The fragmented and spatially dispersed operations of transnational capital, with its flexible and global sourcing and production structures, increase potential risks and may involve engagement in environments that are unfamiliar or insecure. Private security provision allows transnational corporations to exercise a degree of control over their own security, to put in place procedures that are standardised across large organisations, and to engage with local security agencies from a position of expertise and resources. As O'Brien documents in this Issue, the presence of international corporations and organisations is a key driver of the expansion of the private security sector in Senegal, and in no small part, the continent-wide expansion of the sector is linked to the presence of international corporate activities and development personnel and their increasing awareness of risk and insecurity (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2007a). Risk society, to use Ulrich Beck's term (1992), thus to a significant extent comes to Africa through its incorporation into the global economy. This is not only an issue of insurable risk, although this plays a major role in insecure environments, but also of risk as a way of thinking, as a more subjective sense of insecurity. As consumers of security services, individuals become increasingly conscious of their potential insecurity and vulnerability. Private security companies, of course, play a role in reinforcing this process as their own survival and profit depend to a significant extent on society's sense of insecurity.
The increasingly global needs of transnational corporations provide a competitive advantage to PSCs that can offer a complete and integrated spectrum of services – from intelligence and risk analysis, to satellite tracking and multiple forms of response services – that is, to those companies that can claim a capacity as global providers to global clients. The needs of globalisation have thus contributed to a remarkable process of mergers and acquisitions that has seen a decrease in the overall number of larger companies and the evolution of a few security companies with a truly global reach. The world's largest PSC in terms of geographical reach, Group4Securicor, has 530,000 employees, annual turnover of approximately $9 billion, and operations in 115 countries. It is also the largest employer listed on the London Stock Exchange, and recently entered the FTSE 100. The second largest PSC, Securitas, operates in more than 30 countries, and employs over 250,000 people. Listed on the Stockholm stock exchange, the company has an annual turnover of $10.4 billion. Prosegur, a Spanish company, is the third largest and has significant operations across Europe and South America. Other global PSCs are part of even larger transnational corporations. Chubb, for example, is part of United Technologies Corporation, a $43 billion, NYSE-listed global corporation, whereas ADT Security Systems is incorporated into Tyco International, providing security services to five million homes and two million commercial buildings worldwide.3 Globally, the private security industry is now estimated to be worth approximately $139 billion (Securitas, 2007).
PSCs have thus themselves become a form of global capital, and as core markets in the developed world have matured, they increasingly seek to expand their operations by focusing on the developing world. Today, North America and Europe account for approximately three-quarters of the global private security market, but the fastest growing markets are in developing countries. By 2015, Latin America and Asia alone are expected to account for 37% of the global guarding market (Securitas, 2007). Similarly, Africa is increasingly regarded as a golden opportunity for market expansion, be it for PSCs, PMCs, or the private prison companies explored by Andrew Coyle in this Special Issue. This expansion in turn raises a series of important questions in relation to local African companies and general economic growth. Local PSCs may struggle to survive in competition with well-resourced global giants, something that has been the source of controversy in both Kenya and South Africa (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2005b & 2006). Another important issue relates to labour rights and pay, and the possibilities that local labour may struggle to have their demands heard against such powerful global employers. The campaign by the Alliance for Justice at Group4Securicor (G4S) is a case in point. The campaign brings together workers at G4S and their unions across the globe in a demand for living wages, social protection and freedom to join unions (see www.focusong4s.org). The fear that global PSCs may be able to ride roughshod over local rights, pocketing growing profits while exploiting local labour is a legitimate concern, though it also highlights the unfortunate fact that local companies cannot generally claim any moral high-ground in terms of pay and labour conditions. As the private security sector is currently one of the continent's few sectors of employment growth, the fact that it is an almost uniformly poorly remunerated sector with poor labour conditions is pause for thought as well as concern.
Private security of course also facilitates access to Africa's resources, most notably, but not exclusively, in conflict zones such as the Niger Delta, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan. As such, it is in many ways contributing to a re-emergence of the French colonial separation between Afrique utile and Afrique inutile, between a useful/useable and a non-useful/expendable Africa (see Reno, 1999). Reno's account of ‘warlord politics’ provides one of the most well-known assessments of the relationship between transnational capital, private security and African states (Reno, 1999 & 2001). In this insightful account, neo-liberal policies and structural adjustment programmes are seen as having eroded the structures and practices of the neo-patrimonial state, and with it also the ability of elites to buy off and co-opt rivals and oppositional elements. Acute insecurity of office often means that power is increasingly privatised. Importantly, Reno's analysis stresses that security privatisation does not necessarily represent a simple erosion of state power (as is often assumed) but arises from a sequential process of its erosion and re-articulation – a process intimately linked to the global political economy. State sovereignty allows local elites to access global capital, resources, and markets, often for illicit goods, and thus supports their activities and leads in some cases to the continuation of conflict and the erosion of central authority. Private military companies, as in the case of EO in Sierra Leone and Angola, provide external allies in struggles with internal competitors, while global capital that provides its own security allows for the extraction of resources in the absence of a public security apparatus. As Musah puts the argument, ‘Transnational corporate greed’ often leads global capital to form alliances with state elites to ensure access to mineral wealth such as diamonds (2003:924).
Seen from this perspective, the core feature of sovereignty for many weak African states is not the actual control of their territories or the monopoly of the means of violence, but instead the ability to provide contractual legal authority that can legitimate the extractive work of transnational firms (Reno, 2001). In other words, private security actors and their foreign, financial backers (often mining companies) enable weak state rulers to extend and maintain their non-bureaucratic, personal control within the commercially viable parts of their countries. As for the other parts of the country, and the vast majority of citizens, they matter less and less in a weak state where power is increasingly privatised.
The continuing insights and relevance of this analysis are clearly evident in Stig Hansen's contribution to this volume, while an investigation of private security in parts of the DRC, for example, might well reveal similar dynamics. The danger, however, lies in the application of Reno's particular interpretation to security privatisation in general. Reno's analysis focuses on a particular set of states, in a particular period of time, primarily that of West Africa in the late 1990s. Its insights might be generalisable, but we cannot assume that the relationship between transnational capital, states and private security companies are always and everywhere the same; actors, interests, structures, practices and discourses may evolve and differ in time and space. Interpretations derived primarily from the experiences of Sierra Leone, Angola and Nigeria may not be ideally suited to capture the dynamics of private security in contemporary Kenya, Senegal or South Africa. In particular, interpretations derived from the experiences of ‘weak’ but resource-rich states may lead too easily to assumptions of resource enclavism, i.e. highly secured sites where externally traded commodities such as diamonds or oil are extracted for the benefit of elites and their transnational allies, bypassing the surrounding communities. While such enclaves do exist, privileging their ‘enclave’ nature risks overlooking the more complex and extensive links between state, security, and market. In most settings, including resource extraction, private security actors are, as we mentioned above, located within complex and highly politicised public/private, global/local security structures, and an understanding of their political and social significance needs to take account of this embeddedness.
By the same token, generalisations derived from the 1990s’ experiences of mercenary interventions and ‘weak’, war-torn and resource-rich countries risk underestimating the impact and extent of security privatisation in its more mundane, everyday form. As we have argued, and as this Special Issue demonstrates, the impact of private security goes far beyond merely strengthening the private power of weak rulers or more or less criminalised ‘shadow states’, and relates to a much more foundational transformation in global governance that have implications both for the functioning and maintenance of state authority and the operations of global capital.
Conclusion
The way in which the public/private distinction is currently being re-drawn both globally and on the African continent reflects significant transformations of power. One of the consequences of these shifts is the growing capacity and legitimacy of non-state actors to operate at the transnational level and as part of global systems for governing a broad range of activities and issue areas. Be it in trade, finance, international law, environmental regulation or development, private actors are now often an intrinsic part of global governance (Cutler et al. 1999; Hall & Bierstecker, 2002; Callaghy, Kassimir & Latham, 2001). Security privatisation in Africa needs to be situated in this context. It is insufficient to explain the rise of private security on the continent with reference only to the ‘weak’ or ‘failing’ state, as if this state was entirely domestically produced and unaffected by the interventions of global capital, other states and the discursive practices of neo-liberal reform. Instead, an analysis of private security on the continent must be situated within an international political economy that takes account of the new geographies of power brought into being by the devolution of authority to private actors. In these new geographies, absolute public/private distinctions and national/international divides are poor guides for political analysis and understanding.
A key effect of the public/private distinction is to construct one sphere (the economy) as apolitical – a move which of course has important political implications. The increasing role of private actors in one of the core spheres of public authority – security – is thus an issue of no small significance. As we have suggested, it is vital to understand the processes through which these transformations are taking place in order to grasp their political impacts and the challenges they present. The effect of the commodification of security is to de-link it from local issues of justice and politics, making it a commodity that can be bought and sold on the free market and a technique that is universally applicable everywhere. Thus constituted, the political effects of security privatisation are obscured. Nevertheless, the power and authority conferred on private actors can alter the political landscape and have clear implications for who is secured and how. The privatisation of previously public functions such as security can also remove these activities from public scrutiny and accountability, with important implications for democratic control and oversight. The issues at stake are thus both enormously complex, and of ever-increasing significance in contemporary Africa.