If you happen to be visiting the University of Khartoum, you will now find few Western academics working there. While some external links remain, their paucity underscores the feeling of abandonment among the liberal-minded Sudanese that remain. Two decades after independence, in the pre-aid invasion years of the 1970s, many Europeans and Americans were employed at the University. For some, it was a first step on the academic ladder; others were on permanent contracts, departmental exchange schemes, studentships or completing sabbatical research projects. A physical Western presence, however, was not confined to the University or even Khartoum; expatriates filled a variety of commercial and technical positions across the country. In Darfur, the World Bank-funded Western Savannah Project supported numerous rural development specialists. In Khartoum, there were several expatriate clubs, including the celebrated Sudan and American Clubs, with their family-friendly swimming pools, bar-restaurants and social activities. Major European airlines still had regular flights and maintained city-centre offices. Apart from the much-reduced ranks of international aid workers, who keep out of sight anyway, this once visible Western presence has all but gone; the Sudan Club is boarded up and dust-blown.
An absence of Western academics is not confined to Sudan. It is mirrored in Africa's other once-renowned academic institutions such as the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Uganda's Makerere University and Amadu Bello University in Nigeria. Numerous factors underlie this development. Apart from reduced terms and conditions, an Africa experience, especially for young academics, no longer meshes with the increasingly benchmarked career paths of the neoliberal university (Canaan and Shumar 2008). Once seen as a widening experience, any unaudited sojourn would now, at best, be regarded as being professionally suspect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, African Studies, as an area and history specialism, is in its twilight years (Wiley 2012). While changing organisational capacities and expectations are important, this essay treats Westerner absence as a proxy for a wider world-historic change. Ground truth has little relevance for neoliberalism as a vector for strategising and projecting power. As can be seen, for example, in the growing commercial reliance on algorithmic simulations of consumer behaviour culled from Internet and telecommunication habits (Pirlot 2014), being in the world is no longer a requirement for developing knowledge of it (Maybury 2010). In helping unpack this singularity and introduce the essay, Peter Sloterdijk's (2013) recent book In the World Interior of Capital is useful.
As the force field of world history, globalisation, Sloterdijk argues, began with the first circumnavigation at the beginning of the sixteenth century and drew to a close some four hundred years later during the latter half of the twentieth century. Finishing where most begin, this periodisation sees the prime mover of globalisation as the uninhibited exercise of one-sided political action, undeterred by risk or consequence, by the competing ocean-based powers of Old Europe. World Interior provides an overdue philosophical reflection on the politically uninhibited will to explore, map and conquer that was necessary to cognitively shrink the globe and bring the modern world into a governable existence. This domain of action is either ignored through post-colonial anxiety or abandoned to right-wing revisionists.
Working through different registers and speeds, one-sided globalisation drew to a close between the end of World War Two and the collapse of the cold war. For Sloterdijk, it marks the beginning of the global age (2013, 12–13). For the purposes of this essay, this has two interconnected components: the rise to dominance of territorial risk avoidance and political inhibition and a countervailing electronic colonisation of the atmosphere. Rather than risk taking, the contemporary terrestrial condition is one of demobilisation and a preference for political multi-sidedness, especially in Old Europe. This retreat has been cushioned, to use a phrase of Paul Virilio's, by the emergence of the electronic atmosphere as a new meta-geophysical dimension (Virilio 2005, 8–9). This all-encompassing computational global medium continues to offer the possibility of one-sided, unregulated and disruptive political and economic action.1 Having origins in the spread of wireless radio broadcasting, it deepened in the 1960s and 1970s with earth-orbiting satellites and is now achieving new levels of de-spatialisation with the tele-present Internet. While these technologies have origins in past terrestrial wars, they are already fully committed to governing and policing the new frontiers of global uncertainty and surprise.
By the middle of the twentieth century, one-sided globalisation had produced a fully mapped terrestrial globe, with all the connotations of unequal power and moral right that defining ground truth brings. Since the end of the cold war, terrestrial weakness and inhibition has seen the emergence of a new confidence-sapping phenomenon. Resulting from what has been variously called state failure, internal war or political push-back, for which the shrinking of humanitarian space serves as a proxy (HERR 2011), new cartographic white spaces have appeared on the ground in what was once a mapped world. International no-go areas and ethnographic voids have begun to open up and expand within the urban insurgencies and denied areas of the Global South (Kilcullen 2013). As a terrestrial cartographic project, globalisation has gone into reverse. Seamlessly, however, in a direct response to the loss of ground truth, these new white spaces are being digitally remapped and simulated to ever greater specification from the electronic atmosphere (UNOCHA 2013). Rather than critically interrogate the loss of ground truth, science normalises our remoteness from the world by providing a workaround to recoup distance digitally. In so doing, what Hannah Arendt has called world alienation is being vastly augmented (Arendt 1998).
Drawing on my own engagement with Sudan2 since 19733 to inform an extended case study, the essay begins with an overview of the struggle within UK universities at the end of the 1960s over the meaning of knowledge; in particular, the rivalry between a Marxist perspective, which saw knowledge in relation to the political struggle for a better world, versus an accommodationist position based on the selective abstraction and instrumentalisation of ‘facts’ in the service of capitalism. Informed by a materialist interpretation of politics, the nature of ethnographic method during the 1970s is considered as the art of being in the world, outside the bunker, without a phone. Limited external communication meant local immersion, learning the language, making friends and trusting people. The aid invasion of the mid 1980s created the technological and epistemological conditions necessary for downgrading solidarity and the subordination of area expertise in favour of generalisable aid policy. By the 1990s, aid policy had morphed into a self-referential world interior where it was possible to interchange its constitutive parts without dissonance or incongruity. During the 2000s, this world interior significantly deepened with the physical retreat of international aid workers in Sudan, as elsewhere, into secure gated complexes. This withdrawal is also reflected in the growth of research-related risk aversion within UK universities. The external world has become a challenging environment, that is, a place that aid workers, or researchers for that matter, no longer feel safe in. Remote methodologies that attempt to recoup distance digitally and simulate behaviour algorithmically are rapidly occupying the methodological foreground (Hanchard 2012).
Growing remoteness and the shift to computational recoupment has not been a linear process. It has been punctuated by a number of ruptures that tend to occlude earlier truths so as to normalise the new dispensation. The effect is like a thief in the night that takes something and then artfully rearranges the room to appear undisturbed. After a number of visits spread over time, you end up living in a much altered condition without realising it; hence the need to unpack how we have reached this predicament.
Theoretical practice
Compared to the absence of academic autonomy today, the anarchic radicalism of Britain's public universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s belongs to a different age. It was the high point of upward mixing and singular social mobility. Using the grant system, unprecedented numbers of working-class youth entered higher education, leaving the prospect of factory work and office jobs behind. Although having it good by today's reduced standards, a rebellious anti-capitalist and rejectionist current ran through university life. Expressing solidarity with the worker struggles then common outside the academy, within universities this radical turn targeted sterile intellectualism and its associated systems of degree-based conditioning (Buchanan 1973). Campus radicalism turned a working-class aversion to working-for-the-man into a rejection of the planned conformity of welfare Fordism and the alienation of its 9-to-5 horizons. Driven by a creative autonomy, the radical turn informed a Utopia that dreamt of a better world beyond the internal boredom landscapes that the external violence of contemporary capitalism sought to maintain. Nothing was good enough; everything had to change.
By 1968, there were two main ideologies competing within the university system. One claimed to embody the disinterested discovery and dissemination of value-free knowledge that, in practice, was linked to a system of class advantage and exploitation. The universities were training academic elites in the use of intellectual labour power to transform knowledge into saleable commodities and tools for exploitation by the private sector and the state.
The other ideology – which is winning in Vietnam and other theatres of war – and which is even gathering strength in the universities and elsewhere in our society, takes the position that there can be no freedom in the universities or anywhere else, while class privilege and exploitation exists. It produces and makes use of knowledge unashamedly in order to end oppression of all kinds. (Girling 1973, 2)
The revolutionary knowledge interrogated the academic literature through the experience gained from direct engagement and solidarity with national liberation, anti-racial and worker struggles. Compared to the policy products of so-called value-free knowledge, theoretical practice emerges from the political contestation of the present. Reflecting its contingency, the hallmark of revolutionary knowledge is its transitory nature. Keith Buchanan (1973) expressed this in terms of seeing the intellectual as ‘a guerrilla deeply involved in the struggle for human solidarity … a fighter in the struggle of ideas against things’ (35). As a contingent subject, the intellectual as a guerrilla would be transcended and disappear when the ruling classes are defeated. This eschatological and essentially Utopian vision saw social death as a precondition for the political rebirth of good times. It stands in contrast to neoliberalism's nihilistic catastrophism which, rather than transformative rebirth, offers the masses the political debased life of resilience, that is, the deathless life of endless adaptation to uncertainty (Evans and Reid 2014).
Reflecting the radicalism of the times, for European and American area specialists the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Vietnam attests, was open season on cold-war foreign policy. Radical academics created networks and journals to express solidarity, support national liberation and oppose Western political and corporate interests in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (Wiley 2012, 147–149). While academic activism regarding Africa also emerged at the end of the 1960s, it was not until the late 1970s that a unified voice emerged in the US. The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars and the African Studies Association, for example, mobilised against US policy in southern Africa. In the UK, the first issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) came out in 1974 (ROAPE 1974). Reflecting the academic autonomy of the time, ROAPE was created to counter the view that chronic poverty is an internal problem amenable to more effective capitalist development under international guidance. While ROAPE sought to provide a forum to sharpen analysis, ‘questions of tactics and strategy can be answered finally only by those struggling in Africa itself ’ (1).
The widespread confidence at the time that social and revolutionary knowledge would eventually triumph over its effective privatisation was clearly misplaced. Following the neoliberal counter-revolution that finally broke cover at the end of the 1970s, not only has the private appropriation of knowledge been victorious, its political and academic auxiliaries have routed all opposition (Mirowski 2013). The very problem that ROAPE, for example, sought to mobilise against 40 years ago not only remains, in the world interior of aid policy and academic research, it has consolidated its grip. At the time of writing, through a combination of changes in how academic research is funded, publications vetted and scholarly worth measured, the neoliberal university is effectively eliminating any residual sites of academic autonomy.
One thing that connects the post-war radical phase and the neoliberal counter-revolution is the strategic position that both accord the Global South. Regarding the former, the national and anti-capitalist struggles of workers and peasants in the erstwhile Third World was the inspirational spark that, helped by the theoretical practice of the intellectual guerrilla, would ignite a worker-led revolution in the First World. Compared to this positive vision of capitalist negation, however, neoliberalism has epistemologically turned the Global South on its head. Regarding the future, the South now plays a precautionary and negative role. It has been reconfigured by the forces of nihilism and Dystopia as the ultimate epicentre of global concern. The South is where the bad times kick off: it's where chronic poverty concentrates; global warming hits hardest; health pandemics find their favoured breeding grounds; where internal corruption is rife and border controls weak (Oxfam 2009; WEF 2013). Moreover, it's where the littoral feral cities are located that will define our future (in)security (Kilcullen 2013). Faced with the imminence of such pulsing threats, gaining public support for building the exclusionary asylum and immigration regimes has been relatively easy. In terms of our growing remoteness from the world, except for gated aid facilities or tourist enclaves, the Global South is now a place of uncertainty where solidarity, at best, is reduced to charity and the affirmation of faith.
Immersion in Sudan
I arrived in Maiurno, in Sudan's old Blue Nile Province, on 16 January 1974, where I would live for the next 13 months. For anthropology students, it was then expected that you'd adapt to local conditions, live modestly, learn the relevant language and spend at least a year in the field to observe a complete seasonal cycle.4 Within reason, the object was to fit in. Apart from the advice of supervisors and friends, there was no formal methodology training, upgrade requirements, risk-assessment procedures or, as now, ethical committees to satisfy. As soon as the grant arrived, you struck out regardless. It was then relatively easy to get security clearance for internal travel within Sudan. Anthropological fieldwork was very much a sink-or-swim exercise. You learnt, for example, that aspirants who failed to leave Khartoum within a month of arrival would probably never do so.
Maiurno lies about 200 miles south of Khartoum on the Blue Nile. In the 1970s, a metalled road only went as far as Wad Medani, which is just over halfway. At the best of times, getting to and from Maiurno was an uncomfortable day's journey. It was especially difficult during the rainy season when off-road conditions deteriorated. Maiurno was then a large, predominantly mud-built village (see Duffield 1981). Apart from a handful of compounds belonging to leading mercantile and faki families, there was no electricity. Water was drawn directly from the river, transported by donkeys and sold by the jerrycan. Immunisation against the likes of yellow fever, polio and typhoid was normal for research students. However, rather than endless prophylactics or sterilisation procedures, the advice was to strengthen one's personal immunity by opening to the host environment. Consequently, the food was eaten and the water drunk. Native clothes were cheap and helped with acclimatisation.
No telephone was available. Even if there was, in the UK neither parents nor my girlfriend had access to one. Maiurno was irretrievably at the end of a three-week letter cycle. The only way to send and receive was to open a post-office box in Sennar, about 12 miles north and the best part of an hour by lorry. The flimsy one-page aerogramme was the main means of international communication. Even for friends in Khartoum, you kept in touch by letter. Since it took half a day to post letters and check the box, the journey into Sennar became a weekly routine. Letter writing was therapeutic and opening the box never failed to delight or surprise. However, any problem mentioned in writing would have either disappeared or been resolved by the time a reply arrived. What Peter Sloterdijk (2013, 13) has called the dignity of distance, a quality properly associated with the days of ocean navigation, still had a legacy existence in the mid 1970s. It allowed for a level of cultural immersion that would be difficult in today's conditions of global interconnectivity and remote oversight. If you were going to stay, you had to learn the language, make friends and trust the host society. Moreover, immersion and dependence were central to the materialist conception of the world that informed the method of ethnographic participant observation then practised. You were in the world, outside the bunker, without a phone.
The advice was to take gifts. A box of fragrant soap, cigarettes, photocopies of local historic documents, and a Polaroid instant camera5 was my attempt. As a methodology, the aim of participant observation was to put a materialist understanding of knowledge and social structure into practice by getting to know, through extended conversations, a social cross-section of the active host population: poor farmers, rich farmers, lorry drivers, merchants, fakis and teachers, from the highest to the lowest, the educated and the illiterate. The ethnographic method offered a way of finding how dialectical patterns of alliance, dependence and exploitation emerge and change, and how some socio-economic groups rise to dominance while others decline (Duffield 1983). Moreover, since capitalism is an international force, driving dispossession and exploitation across geographical boundaries, it also creates opportunities for solidarity. Culturally barred from women, especially married ones, there was an inevitable gravitation to the world of men, spending hours in the fields, among artisans, market traders, lorry drivers and fakis.
Participant observation cannot be rushed. Ideas and conjectures grow at walking pace, and secrets worthy of the name reveal themselves slowly. The daily routine involved the patient circulation between informants and friends, writing up notes and keeping a daily diary. Writing was by hand in duplicate books. The carbon copies were saved as an original record, while the top copies allowed a certain degree of sorting and classification. The regular recording of observations, casual conversations and interviews helped to refine questions and uncover the knowledge lacunae that would form the basis of future expeditions into the life of the village. In the process of uncovering and discovery, some informants became friends and some friends turned into confidants and soulmates. Besides companions for adventures within and outside Maiurno, participant observation also involved memorable, and mutually enjoyed, evenings of card games, friendly banter and sometimes riotous camaraderie. At that point, participant observation as a methodology blurs into and becomes indistinguishable from living itself.
An influential critique of developmental discourse is that the monograph style of writing and dissemination frames life as if it were an objective picture. The monograph, it is argued, represents an attempt by the participant observer to enframe reality in order to make sense of it. This sense-making enframing, moreover, inevitably makes use of European experience and categories.
What emerged was a regime of objectivism in which Europeans were subject to a double demand: to be detached and objective, and yet to immerse themselves in local life. (Escobar 1995, 7)
For Arturo Escobar, the participant observer experiences life as if he/she was set apart from the physical world. The double demand of being objective while immersed is resolved by the methodological trick of eliminating the participant observer from the picture and, in so doing, concealing the European values and assumptions used in its enframing. This influential position, however, does some enframing, or rather, enthroning, of its own.
At that moment in the closing stages of globalisation when the victims of world history begin to talk back to the perpetrators (Sloterdijk 2013, 14), it marks the arrival of post-colonial anxiety. The hallmark of this anxiety is the inhibitory and demobilising fear of Eurocentrism. Based on the assumption that Europeans are bounded by their cultural prejudices, this fear has normalised the existential distancing of the Global South while undermining the possibility of political solidarity. From a Eurocentric sensitivity, the already-mentioned absence of Western academics in Khartoum University, for example, appears unproblematic, if not a good thing. After all, as perpetrators, what authenticity can they offer? This existential distancing has gone on to reach new levels. Escobar's double demand that Europeans be detached while being territorially immersed, for example, no longer actually holds. Owing to political correctness and risk avoidance, Westerners now rarely immerse themselves except as Internauts venturing forth atmospherically from their cyber-bunkers. Even then, security cannot be guaranteed.
The fantastic invasion
After Maiurno, I was next in Sudan from 1976 to 1979 teaching at the University of Khartoum. The game-changer in terms of existential distancing, however, was the three and a half years from the end of 1985 to early 1989 when I again returned, not as an academic, but as Oxfam's Country Representative based in Khartoum. The 1980s saw a fundamental change in world-view as the erstwhile political Third World mutated into a relational Global South complete with new essential truths and different rules of engagement (Duffield 2001). With the exception of South Sudan, where aid agencies initially appeared following the end of the first civil war in 1972 (Tvedt 1998), there were few non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in north Sudan before the Sahel famine of 1984. Within a couple of years, at least on paper, over a hundred had rapidly appeared. By 1985, Sudan had become Oxfam's largest overseas aid programme. While modest by today's standards, it had an annual budget of over £1 million and employed around two hundred people, about 90% of whom were Sudanese. Benefiting from the publicity and increase in public donations that the famine attracted, what started as a small grant-based development programme grew quickly into a major relief operation, especially in Darfur and the Red Sea Hills (Walker 1987). This expansion, however, was just one small part of the fantastic invasion 6 of international aid agencies that occurred in the mid 1980s.
From theoretical to humanitarian practice
The fantastic invasion occluded and sidelined the materialist intellectual tradition that preceded it. This tradition, for example, continued to interpret the famine conditions of the 1980s in terms of the expansion of commercial agriculture in Sudan and its powers of dispossession and exploitation (Mohamed Ahmed Ali 1989; O'Brien 1985). The aid industry, however, saw things differently. Dispossession became vulnerability and exploitation just one of a wide range of social, economic and environmental factors that together defined the choice-reducing condition of underdevelopment. Rather than solidarity against a common enemy, the onus now fell on the vulnerable to seek their own salvation in entrepreneurial self-reliance. In this respect, Georgio Agamben (Agamben 1998) is right in a generic sense to argue that the firewall that a neutral humanitarianism places between itself and politics has produced an international aid industry that maintains ‘a secret solidarity with the very powers [it] ought to fight’ (133). However, under certain historic conditions, it can be said that international aid's hidden symmetry with sovereign power, or its default setting, becomes exposed and open to attack. In the closing years of the cold war, Sudan was such a time and place.
During the latter half of the 1980s, Western donors, diplomats and UN agencies were politically aligned to the Sudanese state. Still in the thrall of cold-war thinking, they were complicit with the efforts of the military and security services to blockade the South and starve the rebels into submission (Keen 1994). The progressive hollowing-out of old international political realities, however, created a new, if transitory, mix of unbounded autonomies and unpoliced opportunities. Aid workers, especially non-governmental ones, found themselves temporarily empowered in new ways. This was the heady 1980s medium in which an earlier materialism was transformed into an active humanitarian practice. In targeting the anti-humanitarian complicity between donor governments, UN agencies and the Sudanese state, this practice offered a brief refuge for Buchanan's (1973) intellectual guerrilla.
Compared to the comprehensive security protocols and risk avoidance that characterise the present aid encounter (Collinson et al. 2013), during the 1980s international NGOs enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy and travelled relatively freely within Sudan's famine and war zones. NGOs managed, for example, a low-key cross-border operation into the rebel areas of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea (Duffield and Prendergast 1994). Oxfam ran its own ground-based monitoring missions into these areas with international staff travelling in a Land Cruiser that had been hand-camouflaged as putative protection against Ethiopian Migs. In several besieged government towns in South Sudan, aid agencies ran relief operations for war-displaced populations. Surrounded and periodically under threat of being overrun, getting in involved privately chartered light aircraft corkscrewing vertically down from over 6000 feet above the runway to minimise the threat from ground-to-air missiles. These flights continued even when aircraft were occasionally brought down. While less than 30 years separates now and then, such direct action is inconceivable in today's culture of inhibition.
The significant public fund raising by Band Aid in the mid 1980s on the back of the Ethiopian civil war and the Sahel famine meant that, for several years, NGOs had access to sizeable amounts of independent venture capital. Controlling humanitarian infrastructure, having people on the ground in disaster zones, access to independent funding, links with the media and, importantly, collecting and analysing their own information gave international NGOs a major political advantage over donor governments. With one or two notable exceptions, donor representatives and diplomats, even at this stage, had no field presence. Under these conditions, the latter half of the 1980s was a high point of NGO-led humanitarian practice in Sudan. NGOs were able to play donors off against each other, embarrass governments through independent action, use information and the media to augment their position, and expert pressure on uncooperative UN agency heads.7 As Hugo Slim perceptively pointed out, humanitarian practice and the art of war have much in common (Slim 2004). Feeding and sheltering disaster victims by confronting the hidden complicity between international and state perpetrators reflected the underlying solidarity that drove humanitarian practice in Sudan.
The demise of area expertise
The weakness of humanitarian practice, as with any area of relative autonomy that opens up, is the susceptibility of autonomy to capture and recoupment by the apparatuses that it threatens (Agamben 2009); in this case, the Sudanese state and the international aid industry respectively. Regarding the former, the Islamist revolution in 1989 gave the state sufficient cohesion to assert its control over the terrestrial humanitarian infrastructure that the fantastic invasion had created (Karim et al. 1996). From the 1990s onwards, this infrastructure provided an important site for indigenous private sector expansion at the same time as being transformed into an intrusive security apparatus operating at the level of camp and community (Hale 1999; de Waal 2004). Capture by the aid industry took the form of the UN's Operation Lifeline Sudan (1989–2005). NGOs were drawn into a formal negotiated-access humanitarian programme (Karim et al. 1996). Autonomy was traded for access to funding and logistics. This reassertion of managerial control was tantamount to the reappearance of the aid industry's default complicity with the state. Based on local autonomy, humanitarian practice is an adjunct of area expertise. As a contingent form of local politics, it is grounded in the complexities of the actually existing conditions on the ground. Other than as slogans, such as Responsibility to Protect, it does not readily translate into the reified and standardised world of aid policy.8 There is a tension between autonomous, locally informed humanitarian practice and the centralising tendencies that underpin aid policy as a world interior, even when it disarmingly claims decentralisation, capacity-building and community self-reliance as its purpose.
At the end of 1985, my job description was to scale back the relief operation as part of creating a more conventional, self-help, community-led development programme. Owing to ongoing war and food insecurity, this never really happened. While disasters are good for business at one level, they also conflict with donor and agency HQ managerial concerns to control expenditure and limit commitments, especially in situations of permanent emergency. This creates room for antagonism with relatively autonomous field offices. My original Oxfam job title was Field Director. Within months, as part of a wider international name change, this became Country Representative. There is a difference between these two titles. The first suggests a certain independence of action, the second a more auxiliary function. The will to assert HQ control over field operations implied in this title change, buoyed by demobilising Eurocentric anxieties, represented a further existential deepening of remoteness from the field. In practice, it involved breaking the field office's monopoly of information and the devaluing of area expertise.
In the mid 1980s, Oxfam had been in existence for around forty years. Its first Africa grant was made in 1953 and, until the mid 1960s, it mainly worked with colonial administrations, especially in southern Africa (Black 1992, 76–77). The Field Director title reflected a system that gave the person on the ground significant programme decision-making powers. Area expertise or prior experience, such as my Sudan PhD fieldwork, was valued.9 This relative autonomy, however, was also a function of the high levels of ground friction embedded in the pre-World War Two international communication technologies still in use. Externally, this included telegrams, air mail, the international telephone network and Telex. Internally, short-wave radio predominated. In 1985, for example, NGOs based in Khartoum still relied on Telex10 to communicate with their HQs. The only reliable link was through a city-centre hotel that maintained privileged access to the main Post Office telephone exchange.11 Convenience and security improved in 1986 when Oxfam got its own office Telex line. However, communications remained subject to Sudan's decaying terrestrial infrastructure and kick-back culture. This dependency was partly offset by the now-closed Portishead Coastal Radio,12 which allowed overseas terrestrial short-wave transmitters to patch into the UK landline telephone network. Portishead, however, was insecure as third parties could eavesdrop on the station's open-channel broadcasts.13
The switch to Radioteletype (RTTY)14 in 1988 was decisive in breaking free of Sudan's terrestrial telecom infrastructure while improving the effectiveness and security of communications. It was also instrumental in increasing the authority of the home HQ over the agency's in-country field offices. Using short-wave radio to link teleprinters in dispersed global locations, RTTY overcame the need for wired connections. In Sudan, this technology was installed in regional sub-offices as well as the Khartoum country office. Because of the dependence upon Sudan's wired infrastructure, Khartoum had previously been the focal point for all external communication. With RTTY, the home HQ could now communicate atmospherically with all in-country offices equally. The communication centre of gravity shifted from inside to outside Sudan.
Improved communication helped hasten the demise of area expertise and autonomy, together with the local humanitarian practice that they made possible. The drawing inward of selective global experience to furnish the comparative and increasingly electronic world interior of institutionalised expectation lowering, or poverty relief, was facilitated.
The autonomy of in-country field offices has continued to decline with the spread of satellite phones, mobile phones and, not least, geospatial imagery and the revolution in computer-based information technologies. Existential distancing has reached a point where Westerners with area expertise now appear abnormal, even threatening, to a bunkered aid industry increasingly dominated by a comparative world interior that has digitalised and become interactive.15 Rather than language or area skills, today's applicants for international aid jobs, which are now usually short-term positions, are typically required to demonstrate computer-based data competences, report writing or PR skills (Pupavac 2012).
Terrestrial retreat and atmospheric recoupment
After an absence of nine years, in 2008 I was back in South Sudan as part of a UNHCR programme evaluation (Duffield, Diagne, and Tennant 2008). When compared with the aid situation in the 1990s, this trip made an unexpected and striking impression. Despite the ending of the civil war three years earlier, the widespread withdrawal of UN agencies and larger international NGOs from the field and their congregation in gated aid complexes was hard to miss. At the end of the 2000s, such compounds typically had strengthened double gates and inner and outer walls or fences topped with razor-wire, and enclosed a combination of offices, accommodation and support facilities. For international staff, movement outside of these defended structures was restricted and hedged with security protocols. The rapid spread of the gated aid complex in South Sudan was especially noticeable since it had occurred at a time of ostensible peace. During the war, as already remarked, international aid workers had moved around relatively freely. Managed from Kenya, this circulation was facilitated by the rapid spread of bush airstrips, almost all of which had appeared within the first four or five years of the creation of Operation Lifeline Sudan in 1989 (Duffield et al. 1995, 172–175).
The irony was striking. While international aid workers were able to circulate during wartime, peace brought segregation and restriction. South Sudan has relatively little material infrastructure. The first peacetime building programme was mainly geared to housing the increased presence of the international aid industry. However, rather than being celebratory structures aesthetically oriented to new beginnings, they had a defensive and intimidating military appearance. They were buildings that had been quickly thrown up against a world that was now uncertain and unknown. Justified by the War on Terror, the physical bunkerisation of the aid industry during the 2000s was both justified by, and built upon, the processes of distancing that, politically, existentially and epistemologically, had been under way for decades. Physical retreat has deepened the hothouse feel of aid policy as a self-referential world interior. As the antithesis of area expertise born of being in the world, by the end of the 2000s the aid industry's must-have transnational knowledge had become field security (Bruderlein and Gassmann 2006; ECHO 2004; Van Brabant 2001).
Care-of-the-self
Being operationally reliant upon secure-gated aid complexes is something relatively new to the aid encounter. While aid agencies have always had their own compounds, even in isolated rural areas, in the past they were usually open and accessible (for Ethiopia in the 1980s, see Winer 2008). Getting international aid managers to accept physical separation from the field required a determined industry-wide effort. Apart from the codification of inhibiting rules and regulations, it has necessitated the widespread training of aid workers to view the world not as a place of chance and opportunity, but as unpredictable and dangerous. As a disruptive act of cognitive reformatting, the success of training is measured in the extent to which it transforms restrictive and inhibiting security protocols into requirements that ‘professional’ aid workers internalise as essential for the safety and well-being of themselves and others. In other words, training is successful if it creates new and compliant subjectivities. Although the question of how, or under what conditions, aid work is dangerous remains subject to debate (Collinson and Elhawary 2012; Fast 2010; Stoddard, Harmer, and DiDomenico 2009), field security training allows no room for ambiguity or conjecture. It adopts an uncompromising Dystopian view of the external environment: aid workers need to be constantly vigilant as they now face pervasive and unpredictable danger (for fuller discusion see Duffield 2010). The onus is on the aid worker to make the right choices. Staying safe requires constant environmental vigilance, avoidance of routine and endless risk calculation (Van Brabant 1999). In terms of cognitive reformatting, the effect of field-security training is to privilege isolation and risk avoidance while normalising remoteness and bunker life.
During the 1970s, ethnographic fieldwork embodied an immersive art of being in the world. Issues of stress or isolation were played out in relation to an older liberal tradition of strength of character and fortitude (O'Malley 2010). By the end of the 2000s, inhibition and risk avoidance, as measured in growing physical remoteness, had radically transformed presence on the ground from a knowledge opportunity into a potentially dangerous, physical and, importantly, psychological experience. If an uncertain and threatening external environment is to be successfully navigated and managed, strengthening the subjective inner self has been integral to field-security training from the beginning (Van Brabant 1998).
Following its introduction to the military and emergency services (O'Malley 2010), personal resilience training is now an expanding area of expertise within the aid industry (Blanchetiere 2006; Comoretto, Crichton, and Albery 2011).16 It reflects a move away from trying to cure post-traumatic stress disorder to preventing it from happening (Howell 2012). Advocates liken learning resilience to putting on ‘mental armour’ or helping the body's natural stress management mechanisms.17 Through learning how to recognise and avoid stress in oneself and others through healthy living, developing social networks and avoiding negative thought patterns, care-of-the-self embodies a psychological distancing that justifies the physical walls of the fortified aid compound. The fortified compound becomes more than a defensive structure against external uncertainty; it's a therapeutic architecture providing a refuge for regenerative recuperation. It offers a narcissistic consumer opportunity for time-out, relaxation and keeping up with one's remote friends on social media. The bunker is a space for the therapeutic necessity of being somewhere else. We have reached the antithesis of fieldwork as the art of being in the world.
The rise of remote methodologies
While academic researchers and aid workers are functionally different, they now occupy the same digital world interior. Beginning in the 1980s, and completed with the post-cold war advent of UN-led negotiated access and integrated disaster programming, area studies has collapsed into aid policy. As reflected in the changing nature of research funding and views of academic impact, academic research is now dependent upon the patronage of policy makers. Moreover, regarding the inhibiting climate of terrestrial risk avoidance, there is a clear overlap between the retreat of international aid workers and the increasing difficulty of fielding research students beyond Fortress Europe (or Fortress America or Australia for that matter) (Adams 2009; Wojtas 2007). The increasingly decisive role of insurance companies and ethical committees means that obtaining university agreement for Africa-based research, for example, is increasingly problematic. Gaining consent often involves demonstrating researcher inclusion within the inhibiting security and logistical systems of a collaborating aid agency. Given this closed-world blurring between aid and research, similar changes in the restrictive deployment of international aid workers and academics reflect a convergence in how fieldwork is viewed and conducted.
UN agencies began to use commercial satellite imagery in disaster management toward the end of the 1990s (for overvew, see Duffield 2013). In Sudan, remote methodologies made their first significant appearance with the onset of the Darfur crisis in 2004. Since then, Sudan has been a public–private laboratory for the digital recoupment of distance and the simulation of disaster-behaviour patterns. Besides interactive mapping and the supply of visual-logistic management tools to the aid industry, by the end of the 2000s, for example, scientists had developed algorithms that could accurately measure in near real time the fluctuating size of the internally displaced population in Darfur without the need for ground truth (Kemper et al. 2011). The Darfur crisis was also the object of Google Earth's first ‘Global Awareness’ layer (Parks 2009). In partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this initiative enfolds geo-referenced photographs, video and text from a variety of sources into a digital satellite map of the region. As an educational tool, the Global Awareness layers purport to allow the remote viewer to experience ‘first-hand’ the plight of the displaced. Similar claims are made for a couple of online computer games that simulate the life choices that displaced Darfuris have to make (MIT Game Lab 2013).
The rise of remote methodologies in Sudan is directly related to the retreat from the field as a result of access denial and growing agency risk avoidance (Sulik and Edwards 2010). Human rights advocacy groups, such as Amnesty International, for example, regularly book commercial satellite time as a way of documenting human rights abuse in places now judged unsafe for ground monitors (Prins 2008). It is now possible to produce credible reports on anything from resource-based ethnic clashes in northern Darfur (Ismail and Kumar 2013) to how pirate ransoms are being spent in coastal Somaliland (Shortland 2012) without leaving the office. Given the complicity between travel restrictions imposed by the Sudanese state and aid-agency risk avoidance, consultancy work, for example, is now routinely completed remotely. Despite the loss of context and visual clues provided by field visits, consultants conduct interviews by telephone or, alternatively, local aid workers or subcontractors travel to Khartoum for debriefing. Evaluating aid impact in international no-go areas such as Darfur typically involves first flying local research subcontractors to Khartoum for methodology training by external consultants. Once the fieldwork has been completed, they return to Khartoum for debriefing.18 Since it overcomes ground friction and reduces risk, combining remote-sensing and data-mining with supplementary arm's-length interviewing looks set to expand and embrace academic research as well.
As an indication of the convergence taking place, since 2012, UNHCR in South Sudan has been sponsoring the biometric registration of its refugee caseload and the integration of the resulting databases with satellite imagery, geo-referenced mapping and text-messaging data to create an integrated refugee management tool (jlevy 2013). This tool seeks to simulate and predict refugee behaviour as a way of improving refugee management. This is similar to the UN's Global Pulse programme, operating in other parts of the Global South. The algorithmic analysis of electronic metadata culled from mobile telephone usage (Big Data) is used to model how the poor respond to environmental and economic shocks (UNGP 2009). Reflecting the dual use of these technologies, in terms of the techno-science, mathematics and data input involved, there is no significant difference between the developmental Global Pulse programme and the US Army's Nexus 7 platform as used in Afghanistan to model conflict dynamics and predict adversarial behaviour (Belcher 2013). As the development–security nexus digitalises, whether you get a small cash transfer or a Hellfire missile is a matter of operational choice.
Since the end of the 1990s, disasters have become laboratories in the development, growing sophistication and increasing convergence of remote technologies seeking to simulate the material world (Hanchard 2012). Rather than complementing terrestrial relations and infrastructures, however, remote surveillance and electronic methodologies, especially the algorithmic mining of telecommunication metadata, constitute a paradigmatic break. They provide near real-time information on events and network relations that are not available to people on the ground. Given that metadata is privately owned, the rise of remote methodologies has also brought a swathe of new commercial and technical players into domains once dominated by terrestrial researchers and aid workers. The new atmospheric players have even less area expertise than the bunkered, in-country aid workers they are replacing. This essay has charted the existential, emotional and physical distancing from the field that has been deepening since the 1980s. The drawing inwards of that which was autonomous and outside to form a self-referential world interior has been augmented by the simulation of the now-distant world. The political issues behind the retreat from the world and the corresponding commercial colonisation of the electronic atmosphere need urgent address. Without a critical footing, it is likely that the future methodological debate will revolve around how accurately distance-recouping models and simulations reflect the material world, and how a now subordinate social science (Small Data) can belatedly deny its irrelevance by trying to improve matters (Crawford 2014).
The new terrestrial Dark Age
My last visit to Sudan was in January 2014. It left the impression of being part of the stage set for a new terrestrial Dark Age. As reflected in the absence of Western academics in Sudan's universities and the rise of remote methodologies, international and area studies are losing ground truth. This loss is occurring, paradoxically, at a time when data flow in the electronic atmosphere is growing exponentially. Regarding Sudan, two opposed but secretly complicit security assemblages are involved in a process of terrestrial pulling-apart and closing-off. One of these is the Western existential distancing and accompanying risk avoidance that shape aid work and academic research in the Global South. The other assemblage is Sudan's opposing but reinforcing security state. As the means of international communication have progressively broken free of terrestrial infrastructures, the state's willingness to increase ground friction through the control of movement has increased. Together with visiting squatter and displaced settlements in Khartoum, government travel restrictions now make it difficult, if not impossible, especially for international aid workers, consultants or researchers, to travel outside the Greater Khartoum area. Sudanese academics are also subject to their own forms of restriction. Starving the public university system of funds has led to a disabling collapse of academic salaries. Wages are so low that it is now necessary for academics to have two or three jobs, including consulting for aid agencies, in order to stand still. Aside from political censure, this undermines serious academic endeavour.
Return to Maiurno
Against this background of complicit security assemblages that conspire against being in the world, my return to Maiurno appears anomalous. While planned for several years, the regaining of some autonomy following retirement, together with the ability to self-fund, was decisive. There was no need to negotiate a burdensome rearrangement of academic duties, or enter the competitive and small-project-averse world of Full Economic Cost research. It was also unnecessary to submit to the inhibiting regimes of university risk and ethical policing. It was possible to travel when the opportunity presented itself. Long-standing face-to-face links with the University of Khartoum meant I had help in getting an entry visa. A letter of invitation from a supporting institution is now a necessary requirement. Help with getting a travel permit was also available. Once in Maiurno, my acquaintance with the principal personalities, in some cases having been a friend of their father, or having known them as teenagers, meant I was spoken for as far as the noticeably increased number of local security personnel were concerned. The anomalous nature of my return left a feeling of having found a hidden back-door entrance to world that is now increasingly closed off.
When I first arrived in Maiurno in 1974, my hometown of Dudley, in what was then the industrial West Midlands, was a thriving Black Country municipality. Besides several well-known department stores, its high street offered a good range of shops and services, including a busy outdoor market. The surrounding factories and businesses meant employment levels and earnings were high. Compared to the predominantly mud-built and electricity-less Maiurno, a palpable development gap existed. Forty years later, things are not so clear. Dudley has declined markedly, factories have closed and businesses relocated. Much of the high street is now either given over to thrift shops and fast-food outlets or boarded up. The well-known stores left years ago. Poor education, job insecurity and benefit dependency mark the town's remaining population. In the 1970s, inequality levels in the UK had reached an historic low; they now vie with Victorian-era disparities. Excluding the Greater London hothouse, Dudley has joined much of the rest of Britain in Poundland.
Over the intervening years, Maiurno has also changed. It has gone from a large mud-built village to a small brick-built town. A metalled road connects it to Khartoum, the five-hour journey being made in the comfort of regular air-conditioned coaches. Virtually all compounds are now connected to the national electricity grid, and drinking water is pumped from the ground. Care of Asian capitalism, cheap satellite TV sets, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and other white goods are ubiquitous. The market has also grown. While many old trades, such as tailoring, have declined, new services and a wider range of consumer outlets have appeared. Not least, there has been a distance-collapsing telecommunications revolution. Still mainly 2G and 3G technology, practically everyone now has a mobile telephone. The telecom masts are more numerous and stand taller than the minarets. Overall, there has been a visible improvement in the material standard of living.
There has also been a relative liberalisation of gender relations. Improvements in education and the material standard of living have been accompanied by a more visible and active presence of women. In Khartoum, women students are well represented in the universities and commercial and government offices are wholly dependent upon their labour. To support Sudan's emerging consumer economy, within the capital two-income families are now the norm. Over the last decade, to accommodate this shift, a swathe of new family-oriented restaurants have opened in Khartoum. Within Maiurno, women are visible and approachable in a way that was not seen 40 years ago. Even women's fashions have changed. While still reserved for formal occasions, the rather impractical one-piece tobe has given way to the more functional Egyptian-style long skirt, blouse and headscarf.
If a development gap separated Dudley and Maiurno in 1974, 40 years later it feels narrower, less certain and more difficult to locate. Within the UK, the neoliberal counter-revolution has emphasised choice and responsibility while problematising social solidarity and exceptionalising public provision. The withdrawal of state responsibility has seen a growing role for voluntary and private agencies in service delivery. With the appearance of food banks in the UK, the overlaps with the stripped-down, self-help welfare models operating in the Global South are now compelling. The blurring of the material gap between Dudley and Maiurno is the result of large parts of the Global North, especially outside the hyper-cities, being propelled southwards, as it were. At the same time, rather than international aid, the material improvements evident in Sudan are the results of actually existing development (Duffield 2002). That is, developments arising not as a result of international help but as a form of economic catch-up that has emerged despite, against or in defiance of such aid. Since the end of the 1980s, following the Islamist-backed military coup, Sudan has been subject to various Western sanctions and embargos. The actually existing development evident in Maiurno, indeed the central Niles area generally, has largely resulted from the modernising efforts of the Islamist regime, oil revenues and the orientation of the economy towards the Middle East and Asia.
The neoliberal propulsion of large parts of the Global North southwards, together with a resistant actually existing development, blur together in the new atmospheric space created by the revolution in distance-collapsing information technologies. This emergent and contested electronic ocean is rapidly being colonised by the commercial sector and digital corporations (Zuckerberg 2014). Forty years ago, international communication took the form of a three-week letter cycle. Armed with a USB dongle, as soon as you arrive, it's now possible to connect to the Internet via a private Sudanese service provider. The paradox is that the digital collapse of distance has been accompanied by a terrestrial pulling-apart. While the spread of smartphones and laptop computers, unlike basic mobile telephones, is still patchy in Maiurno, it is doubtful that the degree of immersion that was both possible and necessary 40 years ago could be achieved today. Qualifying this distancing, however, and despite the many changes in Maiurno over the last 40 years, the single most important continuity is the friendships that were made in 1974. The power of friendship is greater than that of uncertainty. Reflecting the blurring of the former developmental gap, that we now face similar political problems is evident. For example, concerns over large numbers of aspirant but precariously employed youth vie with the demoralisation of being saddled with bankrupt political elites unable and unwilling to tackle root problems or initiate progressive change. It is only through ground truth that we can recognise that which unites rather than separates and that in facing collective problems, we are better together than apart. A reliance on compensating remote methodologies and simulations, however, seems designed to make matters worse, rather than better.
The abiding paradox of the corporate Information Age is that it is more readily defined in relation to delusion, rumour and xenophobia than enlightenment. The information revolution and our growing remoteness from the material world appear to be mutually implicated in each other. There is now much at stake. As became clear in the War on Terror, blow-back, in ever mounting waves, is the sure outcome of using atmospheric technologies to control a world that is no longer understood. In the hand-to-hand struggle with the technologically driven apparatuses of capture and subjectification that are creating this future, we have to regain that which has been taken and made distant (Agamben 2009). A new political ethnography that values ground truth and within which we can reclaim our humanity and political subjectivity is essential.