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Politikon
South African Journal of Political Studies
ISSN: 0258-9346 (Print) 1470-1014 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpsa20
Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security
Siphokazi Magadla
To cite this article: Siphokazi Magadla (2015) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, Politikon, 42:1, 151-153, DOI:
10.1080/02589346.2015.1008676
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2015.1008676
Published online: 17 Jun 2015.
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references to how affected South Africans interpret government actions. Interest- ing examples include the interpretation of indigent policy. She notes that indigent does not translate well into Zulu, but it is associated with giving to those in need and restoring dignity (134). This positive interpretation of indigence explains why some poor people will continue to expect free services. She also notes that some South Africans interpret policy instruments such as water meters as another round of dispossession (107). These interpretations highlight that there is a need for us to examine how citizens interpret government’s policy instruments. For example, what do porter toilets or a lack of service delivery mean to the citizens who experi- ence it?
Hart offers interesting insights into the state of the South African nation. She links interpretations of past and present economic and political developments.
She draws our attention to these linkages to highlight why we continue to experi- ence inequality in South Africa. She directs attention to how government responds to citizens (policy) and how citizens interpret these responses. The value of her work also lies in the fact that she gives developments in post-apartheid promi- nence when explaining the current state of affairs in South Africa. To conclude, apart from the other listed reasons, Hart’s book requires our attention because it tells the story of how those South Africans who have remained disadvantaged are continuing their struggle, but only this time, it is against their democratically elected government.
UBANESIA ADAMS-JACK#2015 Stellenbosch University, South Africa http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2015.1008675
Mark Duffield (2014)Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security(London and New York: Zed Books), 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-780-32560-6
Mark Duffield’s second edition of ‘Global Governance and the New Wars’ offers an important and biting critique of how different actors within the security and development discourse have adapted to the various transformations of war in the post-cold war era. In this picture drawn by Duffield, the power of states in the South continues to be eroded by an exclusionary market that is driven by the global political economy wherein state’s development and security responsibilities are increasingly assumed by non-state actors (predominately constituted by Western aid agencies). Those who fall outside the bounds of the state, development and humanitarian aid agencies can be found operating in an expanding shadow economy that is also shaped by a global dynamics which make the conditions for
‘network war’ possible. In this context, the lines between ‘war’ and peace” are dif- ficult to distinguish. Overall, the book paints a depressing picture on the lack of
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substantive changes in the livelihoods of the poor as attention has been directed to discussions about ‘new wars’ or altered forms of violence that have characterized the post-cold war era. The book unforgivingly exposes the failures of the discursive changes post-cold war to reconceptualize development and security in terms that move beyond description and into substantive change especially regarding shifting the development discourse from its historic modernizing impulses.
The new wars are characterized by their ‘autonomous non-state dimensions’ as
‘self-provisioning. . .armed non-state actors (xix). A major contention of the book is that the strategic responses to these conflicts under the banner of ‘liberal peace’, which have created closer links between governments, militaries, civil society and business sector for the objective of conflict prevention, ‘have a good deal in common, in structural and organizational terms, with the new wars’ (13). Accord- ingly, Duffield states that ‘liberal peace’ coupled with ‘the new wars have blurred and dissolved conventional distinctions between peoples, armies and govern- ments’ (13). To Duffield, they are both ‘forms of adaptation to the effects of market deregulation and the qualification and attenuation of nation-state compe- tence’ (14). Duffield defines network war as ‘an extreme form of competition that exists between non-state and state systems of regulatory authority and is often connected with the manner in which markets are controlled and integrated into the global economy’ (190).
In this post-cold war context, the site of conflict is located in the poor South where conflict is understood as a result of underdevelopment and thereby making the promotion of development ‘synonymous with the pursuit of security’
(37). Thus, the radicalization of development introduced a new security frame- work that is ‘different from that of the Cold War [era] when the threat of massive interstate conflict prevailed’. This new framework has shifted from
‘being concerned with the biggest economies and war machines in the world to an interest in some of its smallest’ (16). In this frame, which sees underdevelop- ment as ‘dangerous’, the concern of global governance is to ‘reconstruct societies and establish functioning market economies as a way to avoid future wars’ (34).
The author makes a considered comparison between the previous forms of external intervention ‘imperial peace’ and liberal peace. The premise of imperial peace was ‘direct territorial control’ which used ‘physical and juridical imperial forms of pacification, sometimes in [an] extreme and violent manner’ (34).
Liberal peace is ‘non-territorial, mutable and networked relation of governance’, where citizens of the South ‘are no longer ordered what to do—they are now expected to do it willingly themselves’ (34). Compared to imperial peace, liberal peace, ‘while just as real and disruptive, is more nuanced, opaque and complex’ (34). Within this view, ‘cooperation paves the way for development assistance and access to the wider networks of global governance, while non-cooperation risks varying degrees of conditionality and isolation’ (34). It is Duffield’s measured engagement with the discursive shift in the language of development and humanitarianism that is one of the strengths of this book. In dis- cussing the ‘new humanitarianism’, he points out that although post-cold war intervention presents itself as a collaborative process between beleaguered
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states and external actors, it separates itself from previous forms of assistance which sought to maintain an apolitical stance by explicitly recognizing that devel- opment and humanitarian work is political (96).
In this perspective, the recognition of the political nature of development rests on the recognition that aid ‘is seen as making a difference’ and is able to ‘alter outcomes’ (96). The author argues that this recognition has however been defined narrowly as to mean that ‘politics are the decisions that agencies take on their assumption surrounding the consequences of their actions’ instead of placing their actions intimately within the context they are operating in. Duffield posits that the positioning of aid as political is far too pre-occupied with how it handles the context of conflict therefore, despite the ‘rhetoric about politics, aid agencies are understood as if they were instruments’ (97).
Using the case of the displaced and marginalized Dinka ethnic group in Sudan (amongst others), the author argues that external organizations often ignore local patterns of wealth organization (which are premised on identity) in this case orga- nized around sultan patronage systems. In Sudan, Duffield argues organizations such as CARE and OXFAM have focused on transgressing this identity based pol- itical economy because they see the maintenance of ethnic categories as contribut- ing to conflict. The author argues that a more effective form of support is not to create a new moral universe but ‘rather than being blind to ethnicity, NGOs would also have to consider working with a particular ethnic group or clan in support of their survival strategies’ (249).
In the end, it is not clear whether the future is a cosmopolitan one or a liberal one. Duffield concludes by calling for a better engagement with the ‘political com- plexes associated with the new wars [and] how such complexes are integrated within the liberal world system’ and the ‘mode of operation of global liberal gov- ernance itself’ (260).
Overall, this second edition is an important contribution to the literature as it demonstrates the conceptual utility of the new wars/network wars discourse at the turn of the century in the post 9/11 era. Events in North Africa and the Middle East since 2011 underscore the importance of a sustained conversation on ruptures and continuities in conflict especially to the extent to which these seminal moments are shaped by structural conditions within the international system.
SIPHOKAZI MAGADLA#2015 Rhodes University, South Africa http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2015.1008676
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