Private Security in Africa: From the Global Assemblage to the Everyday ed. by Paul Higate and Mats Utas (review)

This slim edited volume brings a new perspective to the provision of coercive services by non-state intermediaries in contemporary Africa. The specific new perspective in question is Abrahamsen and Williams’s (2013) model of the “security assemblage,” which is in turn a refinement of Sassen’s (2006) model of the “territorial assemblage.” Sassen’s core thesis is that the authority-monopolizing Weberian state is only one of a variety of potential frameworks of interconnected rules concerning territory, authority, and rights; and that nation-states are less of a default state for large collectives than they are just one highly particular and historically contingent configuration within which the dilemmas of governance can be resolved, or at least framed for study once the endogeneity of assuming the state is controlled for.

Abrahamson and Williamson, and in turn the authors collected in this volume, are specifically interested in the elements of Sassen’s formations and assemblages that focus on security, broadly considered. Consequently, the security assemblage perspective adds two sub-theses to Sassen’s model. The first of these is that the provision of private coercion within a specific public space need not represent a failure of state power or a shortfall of state capacity as such, but perhaps rather a novel form of territorially and institutionally informed hybrid governance within that space. The second sub-thesis is that, given the deep contingencies identified by Sassen as the sources of assemblages, a close ethnographic reading of the forms of security and insecurity experienced and reproduced under a particular security assemblage is both instructive and indeed necessary for the would-be analyst. In large part, each of the volume’s eight chapters is concerned with a field test of these two theses in a different African case.

The cases presented by the authors cover an ambitious and diverse range of types of assemblage, from the more-or-less formally deputized intermediaries represented by South African private armed response companies to groups with a much more problematic relationship with the state, such as Kenya’s Munguki groups, and from contexts in which conflict intensity is extremely high and geopolitically fraught (such as Somalia) to contexts in which it is more endemic and communal in focus (such as Tanzania).

Given this diversity of cases, the degree to which any given chapter’s conclusions can be directly compared with each and every one of the others is limited, but patterns linking one chapter to at least a handful of others are nonetheless visible both to the reader and in the overview provided by the editors. For example, and addressing the volume’s first thesis, the neopatrimonial instrumentality of ceding, or appearing to cede, coercive monopolies to non-states is well echoed by the findings of comparable cases (e.g., that intermediaries can provide ideological buttresses to coercive strategies that the state is not precisely unable, but more often unwilling, to provide). Likewise, and addressing the volume’s second thesis, multiple chapters examine how the inclusion of secret societies or communal institutions (e.g., Poro in Sierra Leone, Sungu-sungu in Tanzania, Mungiki in Kenya) in post-conflict security assemblages do not merely reassert but rather fundamentally reconstitute the dynamics of security in these societies.

One chapter that stands out from the others is Christensen’s treatment of Sierra Leonean ex-militias who have shipped out to Iraq to provide security in the context of the global securitization efforts following the September 11 terrorist attacks (chapter 4). It stands out because, although it shares the other chapters’ focus on the interplay between global and local security assemblages, it specifically considers subjects who, as a result of this interplay, have found themselves not only on the receiving or experiencing end of the global market for coercion, but also on the supplying end, providing African human resources to enable the operation of a security...