Security beyond the state: private security in international politics, by Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 272 pp., £19.99, ISBN 9780521154253
This is an extremely well written book on the political economy of private security and sovereignty in a globalised world, with four excellent and well-crafted case studies from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Africa. The book draws explicitly on sociology, criminology and international relations besides various takes on neoliberalism and globalisation and perhaps less explicitly on post-structuralist theory, to develop its perspective and analysis. The books starts out by demystifying the issue of private security, which has often been conflated with spectacular events from the frontlines in Iraq and the deeds of infamous private military companies like Executive Outcomes in Africa. Instead of the spectacular they zoom in on the incredible growth, multidimensional relationships to the state and overlooked pervasiveness of private security companies as the sector more broadly gains prominence, linked to changes in international politics, corporate organisation and global governance. The book traces the emergence and expansion of the truly global industry from its primarily northern European moorings to the various corners of the African continent in a detailed while still clear and concise manner.
Theoretically, the book has several errands that are explored in greater detail in the case studies, which focus on protection of natural resources and oil extraction in Sierra Leone and Nigeria and everyday security provision in urban South Africa and Kenya. As has become rather common, Abrahamsen and Williams in part abandon the Weberian notion of the state as defined by its monopoly of legitimate violence – but, in contrast to many studies, they do so without losing track of how the pervasiveness of private security becomes intertwined with and allows for state authority and power to become reconfigured and even bolstered in some cases. This is a great advantage, as by adopting Bourdieu's analytical lens they can explore the different configurations of authority and power in the form of symbolic and cultural capital through an analysis of the fluctuating power dynamics at different scales and levels (global/local) as well as between the state and non-state actors like private security companies. In other words, their perspective allows for an analysis of private security provision that captures the ‘multiple forms of power available to the participating actors’ (88) without making it a priori antithetical or adverse to state authority. As they show in the case studies, the newish security configurations that emerge as a consequence of the changes to national and global governance allow African states to bolster their authority, whether in practice or symbolically, despite challenges to their sovereignty, whilst yet catering for a profound enmeshment of the public/private and global/local.
Conceptually, Abrahamsen and Williams develop the idea of ‘global security assemblages’ that are ‘simultaneously global and local and that treat public and private as relational, not opposed, categories’ (13). Using Bourdieu's analytical lens once again – this time his field perspective – they emerge at the notion of such global security assemblages as ‘boundary fields’ constituted by and operating through diverse forms of power which are neither purely ‘private, nor public, neither local, nor global but mark analytical spaces that lie between these common distinctions and require their own empirical investigations’ (218). Drawing on the concept of assemblages, which today has become one of the most hip concepts, is highly interesting and works despite – or maybe because – the authors never really define it as they do with all other key concepts used in the book. Instead the concept is used mostly as a ‘descriptive term’ (95) to capture effects of ongoing processes of state disassembly and reassembly, where private security creates ‘complex hybrid structures’ assembling actors, knowledge, technologies, norms and values that draw on but cannot be reduced to dichotomies like global/national and public/private (ibid.). Thereby the authors avoid being theoretically camped in the rather limited post-structuralist and post-colonial parts of the social and political sciences normally associated with the concept of assemblage, either through the Latourian science and technology studies or the older Deleuzian work on agencement. Key here is that Abrahamsen and Williams still derive the main benefits from (at least) the Deleuzian version, emphasising the constant processes of arranging, organising and fitting together implicated by global security assemblages instead of the static terms usually applied to the field of private security.
This allows the authors to move beyond analysing security through conventional institutions like the police, military and justice without throwing these institutions out with the bathwater. Through the concept of global security assemblages used as a heuristic device, Abrahamsen and Williams manage with great veracity to work across the different case studies while still making key theoretical claims and providing new conceptual tools for engaging with the remarkable rise in private security provision globally as well as in Africa in particular. This process seems to be even more pronounced due to changes in the global political economy during the past five years that have made it highly profitable for foreign companies to develop Africa's vast natural resources. As Africa now finds itself in the midst of a substantial extractive industries boom, Abrahamsen and Williams' book provides scholars with key tools for analysing security beyond the state and maybe even beyond security, and this is no small feat.