Description
The choice of providing local partners with training, equipment and political support appears as a readily available and perhaps low-cost foreign policy option in competitive international relations. While the literature has explored why providers choose security assistance over other options, and also began outlining some of the effects that can be felt both in local conflicts and in regional orders, there are still unresolved issues as to how remoteness operates in this field of practice. This paper explores distance through the intimacy of affective atmospheres. It argues that, in many ways, security assistance is an intensely intimate experience, where the relationship between providers and recipients is central to the functioning of the practice, and where those relationships are essentially bundles of affective experiences. The paper asks: how is security assistance felt, experienced and lived? How are relationships shaped by the affective atmospheres of the material-discursive geography in which they are encountered? How do technologies delivered and the training provided produce certain affective atmospheres? The paper discusses the intimacy of remoteness on three levels. First, it tackles the myth that security assistance ensures a remote control of global security. Second, it explores how affective atmospheres of crisis and disaster, in particular through the material-discursive dynamics of crisis and emergency, bring about affective dispositions in provider-recipient relations by the individuals tasked with implementing security assistance programs. Third, the paper discusses the ways in which such a recalibration of the concept of distance through a discussion of affective atmospheres can help disentangling some of the effects of security assistance.
