Jana Hönke

Governing (in)security in a postcolonial world: Transnational entanglements and the worldliness of ‘local’ practice:

While analysis of transnationalized forms of security governance in the contemporary postcolonial world features prominently in current debates within the field of security studies, most efforts to analyse and understand the relevant processes proceed from an unquestioned ‘Western’ perspective, thereby failing to consider the methodological and theoretical implications of governing (in)security under postcolonial conditions. This article seeks to address that lacuna by highlighting the entangled histories of (in)security governance in the (post)colonial world and by providing fresh theoretical and methodological perspective for a security studies research agenda sensitive to the implications of the postcolonial condition.

Transnational companies and security governance : hybrid practices in a postcolonial world

1. Introduction 2. Engaging Hybrid Security Governance 3. Transnationalised Business Spaces in a Postcolonial World 4. Practicing Hybrid Security: Multinational Companies and Hybrid Security Practices, post-1995 5. Understanding Hybrid Security Practices: Transnational Meaning Systems, post-1995 6. Companies, Security Governance and Change: Practicing Transnational Meaning Systems, 1890s-1920s 7. Conclusion

Business for peace? The ambiguous role of ‘ethical’ mining companies

Multinational companies are increasingly promoted as peacebuilders. Major arguments in support of such a position emphasise both interest-based and norm/socialisation-based factors. This article uses research on large mining MNCs in eastern DRC – those that, arguably, should be most likely to build peace according to the above positions – to engage critically with the business for peace agenda. First it demonstrates the limited peacemaking, as well as active peacebuilding, activities in broader society that companies undertake. Second, it finds that even those companies deemed most likely to build peace continue relying on hybrid (in)security practice. Third, this article calls for more reflexivity concerning the implications of the business for peace research agenda. While the latter might contribute to socialising businesses into contributions to peacebuilding, it also produces companies as legitimate authorities, despite their limitations as peacebuilders. As a result, new conflict and insecurity are produced, especially for/with those displaced from land and artisanal mining pits and left with no alternative livelihood options.

A topolographical approach to infrastructure: Political topography, topology and the port of Dar es Salaam

Economic infrastructure hubs, such as ports, are crucial sites for exploring new political geographies. In such environments, mobilities are enabled and rigidly channelled premised on the stasis of the port-as-checkpoint. Such nodes are part of an ever-growing political geography of zones that requires more attention. This article proposes a ‘topolographical’ approach – a combined heuristic drawing from political topography and topology – to comprehend more fully the transformations in the political geographies of large-scale infrastructures. The cardinal nature of the port of Dar es Salaam makes it a crucial site through which to illustrate the purchase of this framework. The topographical analysis puts forward the port of Dar as archipelago of global territories, within which heterogeneous actors claim graduated authority. Drawing on topology, the article shows what is folded into the port, constantly shaping not only who governs but, more importantly, how power and authority are exercised. It will be shown how imaginaries of the port – as gateway, seamless space, and modernity ‘from scratch’ – as much as new technological devices work to produce historically and geographically distinct political geographies, and indeed bring new ones into being.

Racing to the Top

Sans Fibre, a large chemical industrial textiles firm in Bellville, Cape Town, was a heavy environmental polluter during apartheid times (Heritier et al. 2009, Bray and Thauer 2014). The surrounding neighborhoods suffered badly from the Sans Fibre factory’s industrial fallout, effluents, uncontrolled hazardous waste disposal and emissions. With South Africa’s full transition to democracy, the local community would not take it any more. Citizens rallied together against the business. To force the company to reduce its pollution output, inhabitants organized a series of actions. A media campaign was launched; protests were organized in front of the factory gates; and local politicians and state representatives, who in South Africa often lack the capacity to enforce environmental laws, were pressured to take action against the pollution of the firm. As a consequence, the firm agreed to establish an environmental forum as a conflict mitigation mechanism. In the context of this forum, Sans Fibre was forced to negotiate pollution reduction measures with the local community. Today, the firm is in the process of ISO 14001 environmental management certification, and has significantly mitigated its negative impact on the locality.

Security and Human Rights

The link between security and human rights is important. This link is reinforced if we consider that human rights define human security. Individual, international, and national development requires the protection of human rights; therefore you cannot have security without the protection of human rights. Development requires respect for human rights, and respect for human rights prevents conflicts. Peacemaking must be built on human rights foundations and peacekeeping and peace-building must likewise give a central place to human rights considerations as indeed must incorporate human rights strategies.

Mobilising security and logistics through an African port: A controversies approach to infrastructure

Abstract Ports form part of the logistical infrastructure of the global economy. This article argues that both recent security and mobilities literatures are placing too much emphasis on supposedly all-encompassing global technologies to govern them. It uses a controversies approach to develop a greater sensitivity to the diversity in the global makings of mobility and security. By looking at the port of Dar es Salaam, it reveals how controversies result from variegated understandings of situated political economies and offer a unique window to reveal more diverse and contested landscapes than is suggested by the literature. Three controversies are analysed: (1) cargo security; (2) delays in dwell time; and (3) modernity ‘from scrap’ or ‘from scratch’ (Dar versus Bagamoyo).

Cleaning up Their Act, or More? Mining Companies and Environmental Protection in South Africa

Historically, mining is the most important industry sector in South Africa. No other industry matches this sector in terms of its contribution to the GDP and its political weight (see Chapter 2 in this book). However, the industry is also the number one polluter in the country. The negative externalities of mining are substantial. Mining causes large-scale destruction of landscapes: erosion, siltation, deforestation and desertification are common side effects of mining. Mining activities are also often contested on account of the land conflicts they inevitably entail, as they repeatedly compete with other forms of land and nature appropriation, such as agriculture or tourism. In addition, the use of toxic chemicals in mining and processing leads to the pollution of soils, rivers and ground water; air pollution is caused by dust from bulldozing and tailing dams. Conflicts over pollution, for example water affected by toxic spills and seepage of acid or radioactive substances, occur regularly.1 Toxic waste management and the rehabilitation of old mines — issues particularly important for the traditional mining areas of Witwatersrand — are crucial regulatory aspects. In addition, mining companies have an extraordinarily high energy-consumption; energy, in turn, is mostly generated by coal-fired power plants in South Africa. The mining industry thus contributes substantially to South Africa’s CO2 emissions, and to climate change in general.

Between Cause and Cure: The Mining Industry and HIV/AIDS Governance in South Africa

The story of HIV/AIDS and the mining industry in South Africa is complex. It is also more controversial than that of other sectors discussed in this book. Two interrelated factors account for the particularity of the case. Firstly, mining companies have contributed significantly to the spread of HIV/AIDS through the use of their 120-year-old model of migrant labor. At the 2010 HIV/AIDS conference in Durban, the South African gold mining sector came under heavy criticism from medical practitioners, ex-miners, advocacy groups and the South African Minister of Health for its part in the tuberculosis crisis that affects the industry and its workforce. Tuberculosis is a so-called opportunistic disease of HIV/AIDS. An activist with the Aids and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa referred to the industry as ‘TB factory’.1 The health minister, Mr. Motsoaledi, stated that ‘[if] TB/HIV is a snake in Southern Africa, we know that its head is in South Africa in the mines. We are exporting TB and HIV throughout the region’.2 Secondly, the mining industry was early in identifying HIV/AIDS as a key risk to its operations. Already in the mid-1980s initial responses were developed. However, the overall exclusionary nature of these first approaches laid the ground for some of the difficulties in the implementation of comprehensive prevention and treatment policies later on.

Beyond the Gatekeeper State : African Infrastructure Hubs as Sites of Experimentation

Abstract While Africa has often been portrayed as peripheral to major global economic flows, the copper mines in the South of the DRC as the port of Dar es Salaam are hubs of extraction and trade at the heart of the global economy. This article departs from the notion of the gatekeeper state, which describes the creation of islands of effective state territoriality around such gates in the colonial encounter, producing postcolonial states that essentially only control enclaves and corridors in their territory. These form the basis for an outward, extraction-oriented political economy. The article proposes a reconceptualisation of gatekeeping as a set of practices performed by a range of actors, including (but not limited to) governments. I argue that this brings into view how the political geography of gates is being transformed by a multitude of actors including from the Global South. It is also shaped by powerful transnational technical systems and logistics. Empirically, this will be explored through a study of Dar and Bagamoyo ports in Tanzania. Studying gatekeeping and gate-making practices around these ports diversifies our understanding of political transformations around gates and helps to go beyond the theories based on the more frequently studied extractive industries.