Abstract
Forty years ago, development aid programmes in the ‘Third World’, if colonial in thrust and often imperial in economic purpose, were at least usually recognisably different from war, conflict and internal repression. And the respective roles of metropolitan governmental departments and private companies, national governments and international NGOs were clearly delineated. But today, with neoliberalism breaking down the distinctions between the public and private, the war on terror conflating risk into security and pushing towards a pre-emptive geopolitics, the shape of development is changing. Innovation in areas such as border control and transportation systems, still marketed as development, are better analysed in terms of biopolitics (as conceptualised by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and others). Using this framework and that of pre-emptive securitisation the author unpicks some of the ‘aid’ programmes of one German agency – the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and South Africa over the last fifteen years.
Keywords
The primary executor of German development policy is a private enterprise wholly owned by the Federal German government, the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). 1 It operates mostly through contracts issued by the Federal Ministry for Cooperation and Development (BMZ). With a yearly revenue of over 2 billion Euros as of 2011, a presence in 130 countries and a workforce of roughly 17,000 people, the GIZ is the biggest agency of its kind in Germany. 2
In summer 2009, the Saudi Arabian government announced it had awarded a contract worth billions of dollars to the multinational company EADS to secure the Saudi borders with a virtual high-tech fence. 3 This, in the light of a continuing rise in global spending on homeland security, was not particularly surprising. In fact, EADS, the second largest European arms company, had already secured a contract to install a security system on the country’s northern border with Iraq. What emerged afterwards, however, raised more concern. It transpired that, as part of the deal, German police were responsible for training Saudi border guards in the use of the security and surveillance systems installed by EADS, and beyond that, in basic skills such as searching suspects and handling long-range missiles 4 – thus blending the interests of the partly German-owned arms giant and the German government. Criticism grew when it became clear that it was the GIZ that was in charge of handling the logistics of the border security programme. It was to procure offices and vehicles, take care of visa issues and supply translators for the courses given by the German police; it had advisers in eight different Saudi ministries and managed the project budget for the Saudi Ministry of the Interior. 5 The GIZ also lent its support to the Saudi government in the search for an expert in the ‘development of complex integrated sensor-based video surveillance solutions’, with experience in the detection of ‘improvised explosive devices’ 6 – fields connected to counter-terrorism.
How have the installation of a border security and surveillance system and militarised responses to terrorism and illegal migration become part of German development aid? In June 2011, the GIZ signed a co-operation treaty with the German Federal Ministry of Defence, which at that point marked the culmination of a policy debate centred around the concept of Vernetzte Sicherheit, ‘networked security’, 7 suggesting an ongoing and unparalleled integration of the German development sector into the logic, processes and projects of the military sector, with a shift from governance to security as a primary concern of German development aid.
‘Networked security’ claims that, without security, there is no development; without development, no security. The need for increased co-operation within and across the two sectors is justified by an intensified engagement in so-called ‘fragile states’, as well as ‘growing vulnerabilities and threats to safety and security in cities’. 8 According to the then German minister for development and economic co-operation, Dirk Niebel (who served from 2009 to December 2013), it is of tantamount importance to ‘closely and mutually integrate both the military and developmental realm in specific planning procedures, and to develop a coherent path of action on all planes as well as a proactive informational and communications politics’. 9
Borders and biopolitics
The support of border management, the GIZ declares, is a prerequisite for preventing conflict between states and fostering regional integration. 10 Borders, from this point of view, do not just prevent movement, they work to integrate as well. Thus the GIZ appears to see borders as part of the nexus of biopolitics (concerned with eradicating the false dichotomy between biological life and politics). The concern is not simply with allowing or preventing particular outcomes, but with regulating and maintaining networks and flows.
In the case of the Saudi border programme, Mike Simms, the vice-president of EADS Defence and Security Systems, was quoted by Grace Jean in National Defense:
Protecting borders with sensors can be problematic because of false readings triggered by innocuous events, such as a camel wandering across the landscape or sandstorms. ‘If you have a radar track, or something moving, you can put a camera on it and check whether it’s legitimate nomads or a covert intrusion or a sandstorm.’
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In other words, the challenge is: how to differentiate between good circulation (camels, nomads) and bad circulation (terrorists, ‘illegal immigrants’, criminals), across borders, specifically. Simms goes on: ‘Software will help operators sort through data to track potential intrusions. It will have the ability to learn over time and to recognize patterns of certain events’ (my emphasis).
This reference to the potentiality of threats points to the growing entanglement of biopolitics with pre-emptive politics. When surveillance is conjoined with dataveillance, it enables ‘the modern state to regulate subjects through … an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of the population through the use of statistics and probabilities’. 12
Additionally, of course, a border is not necessarily located at the edge of a territory but may cut across its very centre, with border technologies and practices occurring far away from the border’s actual physical location. And the zoning in on borders as sites for the use of ever more sophisticated security technologies also tends to generate a complex array of feedback loops which both amplify and open the way to the introduction of yet more of such technologies in an ever-widening area. Thus the fortification of the northern Saudi Arabian border was a direct reaction to the security situation in Iraq that followed the US invasion. In its wake came the ‘disaster capitalism’ that fostered the opportunity for security companies such as EADS to profit from war and destabilisation across national borders. The green zone in Baghdad, then, can be seen as communicating and establishing relations with similar green zones across the region – and beyond.
European security research and catastrophisms
That EADS was awarded the largest border security contract in the world is testimony to the success of the European Security Research Programme (ESRP), set in motion through the publication of the European Security Strategy in 2003 by Javier Solana, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the US neo-conservative report Project for a New American Century published in 2000 which was understood to be a central document for US foreign policy after 9/11. Ben Hayes has remarked that the EU and the US strategy papers, despite markedly different rhetoric, argue along the same lines, calling for the ‘global policing of global threats’, pre-emptive ‘threat prevention’ and ‘military intervention in failed states’. 13
According to Hayes, EADS, together with many other military, defence and security companies, was involved in the formulation of the EU strategy from the outset. The ESRP identified five key mission areas for security research and practice: ‘border security’, ‘protection against terrorism and organised crime’, ‘critical infrastructure protection’, ‘restoring security in case of crisis’ and ‘integration, connectivity and interoperability’. 14 All are addressed by the GIZ as central projects in the quest for development: border security as part of regional integration and crisis prevention; 15 tackling crime and terrorism as the main impediments to development in fragile states or the urban spaces of the global South; 16 the protection of critical infrastructure as fundamental in making the cities of the South ‘resilient’ against natural disasters; 17 restoring security in a crisis through post-conflict intervention; the building of military bases or the rebuilding of police forces; 18 and, wrapping all around, the interoperability that the ‘networked security’ approach proposes. 19 As different as each of these areas appears to be, the EU strategy envisions the same kind of response for them all: ‘maximise the use of security technology; use risk assessment and modelling to predict (and mitigate) human behaviour; ensure rapid “incident response”; then intervene to neutralise the threat, automatically where possible.’ 20 Areas that had been differentiated before are now blurred into one, giving birth to a vision of one overarching catastrophic environment. Terrorism, fragile states, pathogenic threats and large-scale technical, as well as natural, catastrophes all demand the same path of action. The use of security technologies and the propagation of development as envisaged by the GIZ are located in a world of indiscriminate threat, disequilibrium and unspecified integral danger. And, as Massumi points out, if the world is viewed as in a state of ongoing crisis and disequilibrium, then the shift to pre-emption becomes fundamentally logical. 21
Pre-emption and its dynamics
Anxiety is an important part of the dynamics that inform pre-emptive measures as such. 22 In the case of the Saudi Arabian border system, the potential threat of terrorists intruding on Saudi territory is asserted. Even if the terrorist turns out to actually be a camel wandering through the landscape, the terrorist will nonetheless always have been there, potentially. The camel becomes the potential terrorist in the worst-case scenario, just as a sandstorm might potentially veil the intrusion of illegal immigrants. Thus the Saudi government employs security systems on the basis of ‘what if …!’
It follows that pre-emptive decisions are always speculative, centring around fear, apprehension, faith and hope. There is of course a difference between pre-emptive politics and the preventive politics of deterrence. The latter was the form politics took during the years of the Cold War, a time which was also infused with a catastrophic threat emanating from the advent of the age of the nuclear bomb. Prevention relies on the empirical assessment of the origin and causes of threats. Its space of operation is the objectively knowable world, where the relation between cause and effect takes a linear course. But pre-emption operates in a world of objective uncertainty. Threat is never objectively knowable, it is in potential.
Hence, the GIZ, a development agency, points out on its website that the security sector is an important field of action in which it has intensified its activities. And a parliamentary information request revealed that the agency, from 2006 onwards, has carried out twenty different projects in the sector. These range from supporting and training police forces in Haiti, Afghanistan, Southern Sudan or Palestine to strengthening the functioning of the military in Burundi. 23 Policing and border management seem to be most frequently carried out by the GIZ. Even though policing measures are usually regarded as an aspect of state disciplinary power, it now looks as if policing is also pre-emptive. So that when police forces channel and disrupt the movement of populations, they now become part of biopolitical control. I would argue that the mode of control ushered in by the formation of this military-security-development assemblage is a pre-emptive biopolitics with its own synergies and contradictions. It is biopolitics in its intrusion into and concern with the totality of its subjects’ lives, it is pre-emptive in the unbounded and unknowable nature of the threat it attempts to meet.
Painting the world red and green: on the multiplication of borders
Soon after German soldiers first set foot on Afghan soil in 2001, the GIZ followed and started to carry out its mission: building military bases for German armed forces in Kabul, Kunduz and Taloqan. This included ‘accommodation, command and control buildings, medical installations, a road network as well as utilities and a waste disposal system, including sewage works and a water treatment plant’. 24 The GIZ then worked to multiply borders and border-crossings within Afghan territory. The GIZ’s role as a ‘construction manager’ entailed the infrastructural creation of green zones; sites of high security to be protected from external threats. The invasion of Afghanistan went together with a complete re-creation of the environment, with a multiplication of check-points and security infrastructure that spread a kind of manichaeism in micro-relationships throughout the territory.
The designation of green zones only makes sense against the backdrop of red zones managed by the military or the police. It is not surprising then, that the GIZ, in addition to its work managing construction, has occupied itself with the rebuilding of the Afghan police force and has joined up with INTERPOL to fight trafficking, mostly of heroin, to and from Afghanistan. 25 The stated objectives of these interventions are to strengthen the stability of the region, as well as the health and security of the population. But the GIZ’s policies and practices can also be viewed as biopolitical control, whereby, in the words of Claire Blencowe, ‘a population is not solely defined by its specifically physical aspect, but … by its connectivity’. 26 Hence, the establishment of check-points, intra- and infraterritorial borders is of central importance to keep populations separated, unable to connect outside specific areas, and easily and obviously divisible into separate subgroups. In this way, the militarisation of development proceeds by physically altering and at some points even creating the environment in which development, of whatever kind, will play itself out.
And while, on the one hand, biopolitics is focused on enabling the circulation of the populace, within carefully controlled parameters, pragmatically managing what is already a given, on the other hand, pre-emption demands a constant readiness to meet every worst-case scenario. The solution is to insert military bases into any given milieu not with the intention of creating order, but of preventing disorder; ready to strike if day-to-day management and control techniques prove inadequate.
Development work militarised
The creation of a militarised environment obviously has repercussions for development work. The contractual obligations and benefits of the ‘networked security’ agreement integrate development workers into the daily routines of the military. GIZ workers use the mail services of the army, as well as psychologists, working spaces and, in their leisure time, make use of the army’s gym, sweating next to their compatriot soldiers. 27 Moreover, GIZ employees are integrated into a risk-management and early warning system. Via text messages, they may be ordered not to leave military premises in critical situations, so aligning their experience with that of army personnel. 28
Development workers are being implicated in the world of borders they themselves have helped to bring about. Being defined as ‘at-risk’ by the military, they are asked to remain in the green zone. In critical security situations – and it is always critical – development workers are prevented from visiting markets or meeting local people, while they have to adhere to police- or military-co-ordinated routes in armoured cars. Arrangements to meet local ‘partners’ are made as little in advance as possible, to prevent information about these meetings circulating. Since development workers are integrated into the army’s risk management, they have to succumb to its definitions of security and risk. Thus, guns, armoured cars, fences, the trajectories of the cars and the cell phones used to deliver warning messages and further the critical environment are as much part of the military-development assemblage as is the physical presence of civilians and soldiers themselves.
In addition, risk assessment techniques to do with insurance cover are a driving factor in the increasing ‘bunkerisation’ of development workers, as Åse Gilje Østensen points out: ‘In order to be covered by insurance … workers need to comply with security guidelines and “defensive living” in fortified compounds.’ 29 Insurance has become divorced from the statistical assessment of risks and is wedded to the speculative, affective judgement of German soldiers.
But the influence between the development sector and military is not one-way. For the GIZ is tasked with giving training courses to soldiers about the geography, culture and politics of countries that the German army is operating in, 30 which include ‘Islam-sensitive behaviour’. 31 So development workers are involved in shaping the knowledge, imagination and expectations of the soldiers, though how such information is then applied is out of GIZ’s hands. In the local market, for example, where ‘people are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable’ as to their allegiance or intention, 32 GIZ’s data, culled from its development and contextual work, may play a pivotal role in predetermining who will prove the insurgent, who will prove the terrorist, or who is part of the ‘non-risk’ population.
Africa and disputed borders
And work on borders can go further than just maintenance. As part of its work in the African Union Border Programme, the GIZ is tasked with assisting African Union states to manage their borders, which includes properly demarcating and, in some cases, redrawing them. 33 While the GIZ states that such programmes bring structural stability and prevent crisis, the parliament of Zanzibar disagrees. It has always maintained some autonomy and independence over this predominantly Muslim island. At the time of writing, the mainland government of Tanzania, under the auspices of the AUBP was redrawing its maritime borders, which means that oil and gas reserves off the Zanzibari coast have fallen under the mainland’s authority. 34 Dependence on energy resources from the mainland had been one of the main impediments to Zanzibar’s independence in the past, which meant that the discovery of natural resources was seen to boost the separatists’ chances.
Aware of the potential for Zanzibari independence, the African Union, with the help of the GIZ, has sought to pre-emptively alter the actual location of Tanzanian borders: green zones for oil supplies, red zones for Muslims. The environment, in this case the sea, has been opened for conquest.
A comparable situation has been played out in South Sudan where the GIZ (or rather its predecessor, GTZ) has been active since 2004, though with a diametrically opposite outcome. The projects the GTZ carried out in the region preceded the independence of the southern part of what was then Sudan, and initially focused on infrastructural development – building a road network connecting the southern cities of Narus and Malakal, while integrating these two cities into a regional cross-border network with Kenya and Uganda. 35 The GTZ pointed to the importance of said roads for strengthening the economy through better conditions for transport. While there is little doubt that the infrastructure in the south of Sudan needed improvement, the same was true for the north. Nonetheless, the GTZ only carried out projects in the southern part of the country and, when the movement for independence of South Sudan gained traction, the German government firmly supported it. It also lent its resources to help draft the preliminary South Sudanese constitution. Even before independence was secured, the GIZ started rebuilding the South Sudanese police force (SPSS) – though this was more an exercise in rebranding than in recruitment and education, as 90 per cent of the police were former ‘rebel soldiers’ from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. This project continued until after the independence of South Sudan in 2011, and focused on establishing an integrated communications system for transferring data and information. 36
While the GIZ is eager to declare its rebuilding efforts of the SPSS a success, a Human Rights Watch report casts serious doubt on any progress regarding the security situation of the wider population. In 2012 it estimated that ‘[a] third of South Sudan’s prison population of approximately 6000 has not been convicted of any offense or in some cases even charged with one, but are detained, often for long periods, waiting for police, prosecutors, and judges to process their cases’. 37 Rather than addressing the problems that are rife in the South Sudanese policing system, the GIZ focused on enabling the SPSS to track people’s movements, and put them under surveillance. The road-building programme, then, was not solely, or even primarily, about enabling traffic, useful as that is, but about developing the capacity to partition, monitor and more readily control the population at large – enabling, yet again, the imposition of ‘red zones’ or ‘green zones’ should this ever be deemed necessary.
The GIZ runs similar projects focusing on policing and border management in various countries across the African Union, as well as in Haiti, Palestine and Pakistan. Through the expertise built in these projects, whether in direct co-operation with the German military, or local, regional and global law enforcement agencies, the GIZ has positioned itself as a prime contractor for questions of border management and the construction of an environment that needs to be understood as increasingly topological, shifting seamlessly from inside to outside, from red zone to green zone.
South Africa: regeneration in a megacity
The megacities of the South have been another locus for the GIZ’s involvement, describing how: ‘In many countries, rising levels of violence and insecurity are the consequences of rapid urbanisation. Megacities in Latin America, Africa and Asia are especially affected by urban violence and high crime rates.’ 38 What is more, urbanisation brings with it ‘increased disaster risk’. The GIZ insists that, in order to tackle these problems and especially to minimise the economic damage emanating from a wide range of threats, cities must initiate change themselves, rather than wait for events: ‘If they are to become resilient towards disasters, cities must rise to the challenge and be proactive.’ 39
The GIZ’s policies and practices regarding urban development and disaster management in the cities of the global South have, in fact, led to militarised forms of urban regeneration which are epitomised by its involvement in South Africa. The Gauteng city region, which includes the cities of Johannesburg and Tshwane (including Pretoria), is often described as forming the heart of the South African economy. It is the one urban region on the entire continent justifiably deemed to warrant the term global city. When South Africa hosted the Football World Cup in 2010, the government spent substantial amounts on infrastructure and logistics in the host cities of the tournament, along with numerous other projects to address the supposed needs of the South African population.
The GIZ (then the GTZ), eager to get involved in projects in South Africa in the Gauteng region, carried out projects related to ‘community peace work’ (read policing – see below) and transport and infrastructure, such as the establishment of the Rea Vaya, a bus rapid transit system ‘for the inhabitants of Johannesburg and visitors of the football tournament’. For GIZ, resilient cities require the training, equipping and supporting of state security services, particularly the police and military: ‘They bring people to safety, ensure they are protected, and secure critical infrastructure at the time when it is needed most.’ Further, ‘one of the fundamental measures to be taken in developing resilient cities is securing infrastructure, particularly critical infrastructure in combination with citizen-oriented services … It is also vital that urban logistics are well-conceived and can continue to function in a crisis situation.’ 40 As a consequence, it is the very circulation of urban life that needs to be securitised.
The GTZ’s longest-running project was in Tshwane, aimed at ‘training unemployed young people as community peace workers who are able to recognise existing or potential conflict situations in their communities’. 41 The project soon became part of the ‘Urban Crime Management Programme’, where the GTZ co-operated with the National Department of Safety and Security. Then, when the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Services was established in 2002, another co-operation deal was struck to implement the GTZ project as part of a ‘social crime prevention strategy’. In 2006, the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Services assumed financial as well as managerial control of the project, which ipso facto transformed the self-professed community project into a police recruitment measure financed by German development aid.
Living with disaster
Security projects run by the GIZ are linked to a concept of sustainability that owes much to a belief that what has been termed ‘creative destruction’ is necessary to ensure vitality and growth in the future – a kind of drastic pruning and cutting out of dead wood that veers into treating the lives and ways of living of the urban poor as a problem to be dealt with through control, regulation and securitisation. According to Franz Marré, ‘addressing safety and security issues in cities is … an important way to ensure that development efforts are sustainable’. 42 All too often, in the GIZ approach, development appears as something that needs to be sustained by securing it against the urban poor through their management.
For example, the dwellings of the urban poor are often located where they are precisely because these sites are deemed risky and hazardous, and thus offer a degree of protection from rising housing prices or government control. In the case of Johannesburg, the peripheral townships conform to ‘a belt of dangerous, unstable dolomitic soil contaminated by generations of mining. At least half of the region’s non-white population lives in informal settlements in areas of toxic waste and chronic ground collapse.’ 43 Life in these areas has become attuned to the rhythms of catastrophe and insecurity. Those spaces, for GIZ, are ‘fragile’, as violence is seen to proliferate in them, thus diminishing the effectiveness of local and national governance. In ‘contexts of fragility’ the state’s monopoly on the use of force may be in question – so to secure it is a central goal for development aid in such contexts. This, however, obscures the fact that, as Mike Davis explains in his work Planet of Slums, in many cases ‘fragility is simply a synonym for systematic government neglect of environmental safety, often in the face of foreign financial pressures’.
In the face of this neglect, which is regularly accompanied by a show of force by the state through raids, police stops and evictions, the slum dwellers, concerned about their own security, have generated specific urban practices and forms designed to survive and live with disaster. These may include practices of mutual self-help, such as early warning systems designed against government control, through which illegal immigrants working at Johannesburg’s market stalls warn each other before police raids. Making use of the informal, spontaneous and labyrinthine make-up of their neighbourhoods necessitated by ‘bad geology’, they are able to disappear to survive. 44 Theirs may be a catastrophic environment, but it is not necessarily a militarised one. But once a population has been designated as vulnerable or at risk, it is then seen to be in need of management through heavy-handed policing, or even military violence. It is to be ‘saved’ against itself. The Peace and Development programme in Tshwane set up by the GTZ and managed by the municipal police selects community peace workers to help in conflict resolution by, for example, patrolling high potential crime areas and schools, mediation, and liaising with the police, social services or emergency services. 45 The programme, by contracting youth from areas that the police have failed to properly penetrate, thus opens up the possibility of gathering more informed intelligence. This is especially salient since ‘community peace workers’, after their year of service, are recruited by the regular police force.
The Tshwane Metropolitan Police Service has a pivotal role in implementing the municipality’s programmes for ‘urban renewal’, i.e., carrying out evictions and demolitions on sites and plots designated for redevelopment. In 2011, the Metropolitan Police evicted at least 3,000 people from their homes in Schubart Park, Tshwane, on the basis that the living conditions there posed a grave health and safety risk to the inhabitants. Protests erupted, for the residents claimed the city was using a state of crisis as an excuse for a long-planned eviction because their homes occupied valuable land just outside the central business district. In this case, the court ruled in favour of those evicted, demanding the city restore their homes. 46
Re-designing circulations
This example (repeated many times over across the world) shows how the role of the police in such urban areas has an inescapable relation to economic policy; under neoliberalism, the city itself functions not as a civic space, but as a market, its raison d’etre is financial, based on the logic of competition. The process of neoliberal restructuring of cities’ infrastructure, of course, is not confined to destruction, be it of ‘illegal’ housing or market stalls. It is also creative, bringing about new divisions and connectivities through the altering of the built environment. The Bus Rapid Transit system ‘Rea Vaya’, which was implemented with the help of the GIZ, has been promoted as a remedy for the limited mobility of Johannesburg’s poor population. It works through designating bus lanes solely for Rea Vaya buses, which thus are able to navigate the congested streets quicker than any other taxis or minibuses. This new transport system complements the infamous Gautrain, a metrorail train connecting Johannesburg to the airport and Pretoria, which has no stations in any of the mostly black townships but connects rich districts such as Sandton directly with the central business districts.
Though the Rea Vaya rapid bus system has been received far more positively than the Gautrain, its ‘alignment, spatial configuration and pathways [are seen as reinforcing] existing economic routes and corridor services’. And the final developments of Rea Vaya are located far from areas of the marginalised, and act in direct competition with the taxi and minibus industry, which carries about 65–75 per cent of public urban commuters. 47 While some taxi drivers have been taken up with the Rea Vaya scheme, others have violently opposed it, arguing that its establishment funnels money away from the taxi operators, often themselves part of the urban poor. 48 The project is also criticised for the introduction of prepaid cards, which require customers to give their ID number, name, signature and phone number, thus making the tracking of individuals’ movements possible. 49 Through the fine-tuning of such data, which allots either access to or exclusion from basic services for people inhabiting the same political space, zones of inclusion or their opposite – borders, in fact – may appear in the heart of the city. This is the point where infrastructural programmes and punitive policing meet: the GIZ’s development policies and practices serve to reinforce such social hierarchies.
Conclusion
On the most basic level, the GIZ integrated itself into the security sector by striking alliances with and carrying out projects for the German military as well as with armed forces abroad, with local, regional and international police bodies, with private arms and defence companies, and with international bodies such as the African Union. Its work has necessitated and sometimes forced the enhanced physical proximity and entanglement of development workers and military personnel. Moreover, this proximity means that, physically, development workers have become more and more entrenched in the green zone, correspondingly distanced from those actually in need of ‘development’.
The practices of German development work, aligned as these are with security concerns, have been largely successful in creating new and quite specific social relations, by adapting more and more nuanced practices of bordering, often coupled with the intensified collection and circulation of data; all justified by the undercurrent of anxiety running through GIZ reports. Through a general cultural acceptance of a non-standard, indeterminably and indefinitely threatening catastrophic environment, the number of groups within a population that are at risk or risky can be infinitely inflated, thus marking an ever growing number of people for management.
So ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’ cease to be rhetorical devices, but acquire a materiality of their own. They signal the advent of a new dichotomy between managers of resilience that are taking risks, and those that are only there to suffer the consequences. The GIZ’s mode of control, which I tentatively call pre-emptive biopolitics, connects the vicissitudes of a critical and catastrophic environment to neoliberalism’s markets.
Footnotes
Joschka Fröschner carried out a postgraduate degree in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy at Goldsmiths, University of London from which this article is drawn. He currently works as a counsellor for victims of racist and far-right violence at Opferperspektive in Brandenburg, Germany.