Political Engineering ? The co-production of infrastructure, political order and security in Western statebuilding efforts in Africa
Can roads literally lead to peace? While this seems an odd question to ask, contemporary Western statebuilding efforts in fragile states--currently home to 1.5 billion people, mostly in Africa--seems to hinge on this very assumption: significant portions of the budgets of Western stabilization programmes, since 9/11 the dominant paradigm of Western statebuilding, are allocated to infrastructure. Yet, it has only received scant attention that central political concerns in stabilization--impacting profoundly on the lives of the most vulnerable populations in fragile states--are mainly acted upon through technical practices on the physical environment of fragile states.
The objective of this proposed research is therefore to further our understanding of how infrastructure interacts with security and political order in ongoing western stabilization programmes in the DR Congo, South Sudan and Somalia. We pursue the following research question:
How are infrastructure, (in)security and political (dis)order co-produced in international statebuilding efforts in fragile states?
Introducing insights of science and technology studies as well as the emerging anthropology of infrastructure to peace and development research, we follow how concrete infrastructure projects (such as roads and administration buildings) unfold and are attributed political significance by stakeholders, including Western policy actors, locally affected populations and host governments.
The objective of this proposed research is therefore to further our understanding of how infrastructure interacts with security and political order in ongoing western stabilization programmes in the DR Congo, South Sudan and Somalia. We pursue the following research question:
How are infrastructure, (in)security and political (dis)order co-produced in international statebuilding efforts in fragile states?
Introducing insights of science and technology studies as well as the emerging anthropology of infrastructure to peace and development research, we follow how concrete infrastructure projects (such as roads and administration buildings) unfold and are attributed political significance by stakeholders, including Western policy actors, locally affected populations and host governments.
Final report
Aim and project implementation
The project started from the observation that much of the political ambitions in contemporary Western peace- and statebuilding missions in Africa are realized by means that many consider ‘technical’ in nature, that is, by substantial investments in infrastructure. The puzzle at hand, namely that peace, security and legitimate state authority can be attained by building roads, informed the project’s research question: What value do donors, state agents and beneficiary communities attribute to infrastructure in the context of peace- and statebuilding operations in South Sudan and Eastern Congo?
As a first major milestone of the project, in February 2017 we held a high-level policy workshop in collaboration with the UN’s infrastructure body, the United Nation Office for Project Services (UNOPS). At this workshop, around 50 policymakers, practitioners and scholars representing 26 international institutions deliberated on the opportunities as well as the limits of infrastructure as a means to peace and security. The PIs’ extensive review of the literature on infrastructural interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states, identified key challenges, which informed the thematic panels at the workshop.
In 2017 and 2018, we did a first round of interviews with international donors and practitioners in Goma (DRC) and Juba (South Sudan). In 2019, the PIs did initial fieldwork along donor-funded road projects in the Kivu region of Eastern Congo as well as in central parts of South Sudan. At the same time, we trained Congolese and South Sudanese researchers, who, equipped with deep knowledge about the politically fragile areas, did interviews with residents along carefully selected donor-funded road projects in the two countries (Lakes State, Warrap State, Unity State in South Sudan; North and South Kivu in Eastern Congo). Altogether, the teams carried out ca. 150 informal or semi-structured interviews and close to two dozen focus group interviews. Furthermore, in order to investigate the relationship between infrastructure and rule during British imperial rule, archival work was done at the Sudan National Archives in Juba as well as the Sudan Archives in Durham, UK.
Findings
Here we summarize the three main findings derived from the project:
i.) While donors are quick to deploy infrastructure to attain political objectives in conflict-affected states, there is hardly evidence for what drives success and failure in these settings. We show in our extensive review of the deployment of infrastructure projects across the contemporary intervention spectrum that those missions are likely to encounter significant challenges due to divergent objectives, time horizons, capabilities and interests between donors and host-nation as well as local communities. Too often, donors consider the construction of roads or government building a ‘peace dividend’, oblivious of the fact that any major investment in conflict context is seen as deeply infused with political issues.
ii.) Building authority and building roads have a long-entangled history in the two countries; and the politically contested character of road projects resonates until today. Colonial and post-independence authoritarian rule was projected along/from the roads. Due to this trajectory, road-building cannot be detached from the ambitions of state authorities. Along expanding roads, authorities—both colonial and postcolonial—have manifested themselves first and foremost as extractive of produce, labor and cash. Unsurprisingly, local communities meet the recurrent promise of opening up rural areas and realize connectivity with deep-seating scepticism. Hence, for local populations the stakes remain high in the context of today’s infrastructure projects in fragile settings.
iii.) Specific ecologies, such as wetlands, mountain areas or arid areas, afford particular forms of authority, which do not fit the categories state- and peacebuilders operate with. Challenging ecosystems have historically acted as barriers to political aspirations of central authorities and thus allowed people a certain degree of autonomy. At the same time, those terrains produce political orders in which the lines between traditional categories—state, rebel, bandit, local security provider—are blurred. Lacking the sensitivity to comprehend those fluid forms of rule, international authorities are caught between buttressing the state (assumed the provider of peace and security) or evading the state (when acting ‘irresonsibly’). The relations between state agents and mobile populations in ‘unruly’ terrains are characterized by interaction, interdependence as much as by avoidance.
Future questions
As we followed stabilization road projects from conception to implementation, it dawned upon us that a whole political economy is generated around the cash flow involved in road building. We noticed we lack insight into the way in which these monies end up finding their way to specific contractors, and how roads are selected: among any possible feeder road cutting through contested terrain, why does this one specific road get targeted, and not others? To what extent do donor projects have to work through the right power brokers who influence the choice of contractors and of stretches of road to be rehabilitated? In this sense, may internationally funded roads be a reflection more of power brokers’ preferred geography, rather than stabilization priorities?
Second, we were stunned to see the institutional amnesia around road projects—donors rehabilitate a road, and leave. It washes away with the next rains, as there is no maintenance. Then, a year or so later, a new donor promises to rehabilitate the road and ‘open up’ the area—only to have the same occurring. This temporality, lack of maintenance, and rebuilding of roads in the global south sustains a whole cyclical economy of donor intervention without any roads being sustainable on the ground. This contradiction of repeated cyclical donor intervention has been going on for decades, without any feedback, evaluation, or reassessment of the very premises of the—often very costly—interventions. This observation merit further study on the linkages (or their absence!) between engineering knowledge, development, and the political economy of underdevelopment.
International research collaboration
The project has yielded a number of inspiring international research collaboration. A spin-off of this project is an interest in the question of how the field of logistics and political (dis-) orders inform each other in areas of the global South that are both integrated into and at the fringes of global supply chains. In order to further investigate the co-production of the world of circulation and political order, in November 2016 we held an international workshop on “States of circulation”, which assembled 20 international experts on critical studies of logistics and resulted in a special issue of Environment and Planning D (co-edited by Finn Stepputat, DIIS; Peer Schouten, DIIS and Jan Bachmann, University of Gothenburg).
In the course of the project, we intensified our collaboration with UNOPS. This collaboration resulted a) in the jointly organized workshop on infrastructure in conflict-affected states, b) in joint publications on infrastructure and peacebuilding, and c) to the set-up of the website www.roads-to-peace.org as a resource base on the topic. We could further build up international research collaboration with the World Food Programme in South Sudan with whom Schouten is doing a mapping of roadblocks in the country (2019-2021).
In February 2020, we organized an international academic workshop on “Political ecologies of statebuilding – infrastructure and resistance at the edge of empire”. This workshop brought together archaeologists, historians, geographers, anthropologists and IR scholars to investigate how state-resistant ecologies have subverted or evaded political projects and their infrastructural materializations. The results will be published in a special issue edited by the PIs for the journal Geoforum in 2021.
The project started from the observation that much of the political ambitions in contemporary Western peace- and statebuilding missions in Africa are realized by means that many consider ‘technical’ in nature, that is, by substantial investments in infrastructure. The puzzle at hand, namely that peace, security and legitimate state authority can be attained by building roads, informed the project’s research question: What value do donors, state agents and beneficiary communities attribute to infrastructure in the context of peace- and statebuilding operations in South Sudan and Eastern Congo?
As a first major milestone of the project, in February 2017 we held a high-level policy workshop in collaboration with the UN’s infrastructure body, the United Nation Office for Project Services (UNOPS). At this workshop, around 50 policymakers, practitioners and scholars representing 26 international institutions deliberated on the opportunities as well as the limits of infrastructure as a means to peace and security. The PIs’ extensive review of the literature on infrastructural interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states, identified key challenges, which informed the thematic panels at the workshop.
In 2017 and 2018, we did a first round of interviews with international donors and practitioners in Goma (DRC) and Juba (South Sudan). In 2019, the PIs did initial fieldwork along donor-funded road projects in the Kivu region of Eastern Congo as well as in central parts of South Sudan. At the same time, we trained Congolese and South Sudanese researchers, who, equipped with deep knowledge about the politically fragile areas, did interviews with residents along carefully selected donor-funded road projects in the two countries (Lakes State, Warrap State, Unity State in South Sudan; North and South Kivu in Eastern Congo). Altogether, the teams carried out ca. 150 informal or semi-structured interviews and close to two dozen focus group interviews. Furthermore, in order to investigate the relationship between infrastructure and rule during British imperial rule, archival work was done at the Sudan National Archives in Juba as well as the Sudan Archives in Durham, UK.
Findings
Here we summarize the three main findings derived from the project:
i.) While donors are quick to deploy infrastructure to attain political objectives in conflict-affected states, there is hardly evidence for what drives success and failure in these settings. We show in our extensive review of the deployment of infrastructure projects across the contemporary intervention spectrum that those missions are likely to encounter significant challenges due to divergent objectives, time horizons, capabilities and interests between donors and host-nation as well as local communities. Too often, donors consider the construction of roads or government building a ‘peace dividend’, oblivious of the fact that any major investment in conflict context is seen as deeply infused with political issues.
ii.) Building authority and building roads have a long-entangled history in the two countries; and the politically contested character of road projects resonates until today. Colonial and post-independence authoritarian rule was projected along/from the roads. Due to this trajectory, road-building cannot be detached from the ambitions of state authorities. Along expanding roads, authorities—both colonial and postcolonial—have manifested themselves first and foremost as extractive of produce, labor and cash. Unsurprisingly, local communities meet the recurrent promise of opening up rural areas and realize connectivity with deep-seating scepticism. Hence, for local populations the stakes remain high in the context of today’s infrastructure projects in fragile settings.
iii.) Specific ecologies, such as wetlands, mountain areas or arid areas, afford particular forms of authority, which do not fit the categories state- and peacebuilders operate with. Challenging ecosystems have historically acted as barriers to political aspirations of central authorities and thus allowed people a certain degree of autonomy. At the same time, those terrains produce political orders in which the lines between traditional categories—state, rebel, bandit, local security provider—are blurred. Lacking the sensitivity to comprehend those fluid forms of rule, international authorities are caught between buttressing the state (assumed the provider of peace and security) or evading the state (when acting ‘irresonsibly’). The relations between state agents and mobile populations in ‘unruly’ terrains are characterized by interaction, interdependence as much as by avoidance.
Future questions
As we followed stabilization road projects from conception to implementation, it dawned upon us that a whole political economy is generated around the cash flow involved in road building. We noticed we lack insight into the way in which these monies end up finding their way to specific contractors, and how roads are selected: among any possible feeder road cutting through contested terrain, why does this one specific road get targeted, and not others? To what extent do donor projects have to work through the right power brokers who influence the choice of contractors and of stretches of road to be rehabilitated? In this sense, may internationally funded roads be a reflection more of power brokers’ preferred geography, rather than stabilization priorities?
Second, we were stunned to see the institutional amnesia around road projects—donors rehabilitate a road, and leave. It washes away with the next rains, as there is no maintenance. Then, a year or so later, a new donor promises to rehabilitate the road and ‘open up’ the area—only to have the same occurring. This temporality, lack of maintenance, and rebuilding of roads in the global south sustains a whole cyclical economy of donor intervention without any roads being sustainable on the ground. This contradiction of repeated cyclical donor intervention has been going on for decades, without any feedback, evaluation, or reassessment of the very premises of the—often very costly—interventions. This observation merit further study on the linkages (or their absence!) between engineering knowledge, development, and the political economy of underdevelopment.
International research collaboration
The project has yielded a number of inspiring international research collaboration. A spin-off of this project is an interest in the question of how the field of logistics and political (dis-) orders inform each other in areas of the global South that are both integrated into and at the fringes of global supply chains. In order to further investigate the co-production of the world of circulation and political order, in November 2016 we held an international workshop on “States of circulation”, which assembled 20 international experts on critical studies of logistics and resulted in a special issue of Environment and Planning D (co-edited by Finn Stepputat, DIIS; Peer Schouten, DIIS and Jan Bachmann, University of Gothenburg).
In the course of the project, we intensified our collaboration with UNOPS. This collaboration resulted a) in the jointly organized workshop on infrastructure in conflict-affected states, b) in joint publications on infrastructure and peacebuilding, and c) to the set-up of the website www.roads-to-peace.org as a resource base on the topic. We could further build up international research collaboration with the World Food Programme in South Sudan with whom Schouten is doing a mapping of roadblocks in the country (2019-2021).
In February 2020, we organized an international academic workshop on “Political ecologies of statebuilding – infrastructure and resistance at the edge of empire”. This workshop brought together archaeologists, historians, geographers, anthropologists and IR scholars to investigate how state-resistant ecologies have subverted or evaded political projects and their infrastructural materializations. The results will be published in a special issue edited by the PIs for the journal Geoforum in 2021.