Description
In the shadows of Iraq and Afghanistan, postcolonial East Africa has emerged as a new frontier for the so-called private security industry, though one enmeshed with wider patterns of continuity in the circulation and constitution of force in relating both to decolonisation and legacies of settler-colonialism. This paper is based on extensive and immersive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with transnational security professionals in Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania. This includes contractors for private military companies (PMCs), security consultants, humanitarian security professionals, and a variety of other associated metaphorical titles including ‘resilience’ or ‘stabilisation’ professionals. This ‘contractor community’ is bound by shared military background, culture and experience, and various rituals and practices translated from the military play a crucial role in socialising contractors into this community. The paper stresses the importance of taking seriously the contradictions inherent in such security work. ‘Security’ is an occupation, but also a rationale for escape, devoid of content whilst imbued with meaning. Significantly, these individuals do not cast themselves as the modern purveyors of corporate violence fighting in ‘new wars’, but instead imagine themselves as engaged in a far older struggle, articulated through imperial yearning and the figure of the colonial ‘frontier soldier’. Drawing on Ann Stoler’s notion of ‘imperial debris’, I show how the collective historical memories of these contractors are an important facet of the habitus of this particular ‘community’. Some members of this transnational community of contractors circulate literature in the form of colonial travelogues, recounting the experiences of British soldiers fighting in the wars of decolonisation, and recasting their own role in similar terms. The broader effect of this has been a revival of imperial epistemologies in both habitus and praxis of transnational security professionals. I conclude that this framing is entwined with the particular settler colonial histories of the region but that such colonial nostalgia is fundamentally a reaction to the disquiet of the liberal present and more specifically declining western power and authority, as well as the perceived breakdown of traditional military roles.
