Description
Clientelism is an enormous impediment to state-building and SSR. In security. clientelistic linkages between politicians and local elites (patrons) and security officers (clients) often extend the influence of clientelistic networks into state security agencies. This paper argues that clientelism in security differs from ‘conventional’, hierarchical patron-client relations and that officers do not stand under the typical and strict transactional obligations of clientelism. Officers often need to balance, at times competing, order from patrons and official superiors, and, in contexts with multiple patrons and clientelistic networks, accommodate to interests of other patrons.
This paper proposes to study clientelistic linkages in security as heterarchies, meaning systems of multiple competing hierarchies. Such an approach allows to develop a broader typology of officers’/clients’ agency beyond being a patron’s henchman or competing over patron’s favours. In fact, officers/clients may have relatively more autonomy than ‘regular’ clients and seek to leverage this for their own (political) interests.
This paper first surveys the literatures on clientelism and heterarchical orders before discussing a preliminary analytical framework for studying of clientelism in security, followed by a brief discussion of how this approach can be applied to the empirical cases of Lebanon and Mexico.
