In/ securities

Representative:

Joschka Philipps Joschka.Philipps@uni-bayreuth.de

PI Members:

Martin Doevenspeck, Jana Hönke, Melina Kalfelis (University of Bayreuth), Yacouba Banhoro (Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo Ouagadougou)

Overview

In an emerging new world (dis)order, Africa is a key site of global contests. Multiple networks of African political actors, multinational businesses, transcontinental religious communities, security agencies, vigilante groups and social movements concurrently claim access to, and control over, land, resources, political systems, cultural orientations and recognition. New configurations of actors and technologies are coming to the fore in processes that challenge existing knowledge, hierarchies, and relations of domination. Via digital connections, these resonate with reconfigurations elsewhere, entangling African everyday life-worlds and histories with assemblages of global struggles that make it increasingly difficult to decipher what is going on, let alone what it may lead up to. Across this panoply of actors, events and processes, a recurrent (if not overarching) concern is the quest for security and the concomitant fight against alleged sources of insecurity. Especially in contexts where democratic formulas have lost their credibility, discourses of unpredictability and insecurity are leveraged to legitimise political power and violent tactics that frequently feed back into experiences of uncertainties, vulnerabilities and threats. If ‘worlds’ can be understood to

provide a sense of security to those who make, nurture and inhabit them, we also witness a growing insecurity of life-worlds.

As a title, In/securities bespeaks the political and conflictual aspects of world-making, as well as the strong links between discursive and material realities. Politics and societies across the globe, as Mbembe argues, are increasingly driven by their focus on an enemy: by a ‘vision of the world that is threatening and anxiogenic, one that grants primacy to logics of suspicion’(Mbembe, 2019b, p. 48). On a political level, these logics feed into militarised responses to real and perceived threats; this ‘securitization’ of politics is a form of world-making that thrives on a sense of insecurity (Abrahamsen, 2018), and African politics are no exception. The ongoing wars and conflicts in the Sahel and Sudan, for example, are among the more visible instances of how in/security affects world-making and how the concept of world-making can reconfigure the study of in/securities. African cases sensitise us to the potentials of a decentring of politics and a multiscalar reading, allowing for a reconceptualisation of in/securities beyond prevailing Eurocentric approaches that too often lead to an impasse of political imagination (Mamdani, 2020). Grounding our theory-building in reflexive empirical and ethnographic observations, we insist on the relationality of multiple and competing actors and how they are making worlds with varying senses of in/security. In turn, this requires our critically assessing the micro-politics, moralities, and mediations within collectives and groups, notably along lines of gender, class, generation, kinship and social identity (Soré et al., 2021).

With its cryptic orthography, In/securities emphasises the ways that security and insecurity are, and are understood to be, co-constitutive: how some people’s security becomes prioritised over that of others, or how ‘our’ security is considered to be contingent on the insecurity of ‘the other’, for example.

In/securities thus captures several key foci of our research, including: a) the presence or absence of physical harms and/or fears of destruction; b) power-infused competitions to define who is deserving of protection from particular threats; and c) political discourses about realms of belonging and realms of existential threat that fundamentally impact how people and political institutions relate to the world around them. Building on work done in AM 1.0 (especially in the Mobilities and Moralities RSs), we will analyse spatial, temporal and moral dimensions of in/securities, mediations and practices of peacemaking across divides, considering their inherently economic and gendered characteristics in ways complementary to other proposed strands of AM 2.0 research (e.g. in RS Accumulation).

In approaching world-making through the lens of in/securities, we will address both empirical and methodological questions. Empirically, we will be asking how contests over discourses and practices of in/security shape and constitute the emergence of ‘worlds’ in Africa. Too, we will reflexively address methodological questions of knowledge production on in/securities in Africa, and specifically on violent conflict, in terms of how data is collected and analysed. This critical reflexive posture remains a crucial axiomatic backbone for the reconfiguration of African Studies in general, and the study of African in/securities in particular. Through this combination of empirical and theoretical work on the continent, our aim is to enrich urgent globally emerging debates on how in/securities are (re)making our world(s) at every scale, emphasising the African scholarly perspectives which, too often, they are currently lacking.