Security for whom? Analysing hybrid security governance in Africa's extractive sectors Open Access

Abstract

In this article, we analyse the factors underpinning the shift towards hybrid security governance in Africa. Extant scholarship largely attributes this shift to broader global processes, such as histories of colonialism, neoliberalism and transformations in global governance, which have served to legitimize the role of private authority in security provision around sites of resource extraction. Our analysis seeks to understand the relative and relational influence of power and rules in international politics by offering empirical insights about what hybrid security arrangements look like ‘on the ground’. Drawing upon recently conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana, we examine how hybrid security arrangements affect the lives of those living near sites of natural resource extraction. Our analyses suggest that although hybrid security has emerged as the leading approach to security governance, this approach to security does not uniformly involve or serve the interests of all stakeholders. Rather, we find that hybrid security arrangements aid the security of extractive operations—securing investments in both physical and human capital—while sometimes undermining the security of nearby communities.

Since around 2010, there has been a curious change in discourse about the role of non-state actors in providing security in Africa. In conventional scholarship, non-state actors involved in security provision were often characterized as illegitimate and violent, while the presence of the private security industry was seen to be a sign of the erosion of state power.¹ Today, however, partnerships between private security companies (PSCs), public security actors and other stakeholders, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are common. In fact, such partnerships are often presented as an effective, economical and necessary approach to achieving and maintaining security in many African states.² One of the central justifications for such partnerships is the notion of ‘limited statehood’,³ a condition seen as underpinning the inability and/or unwillingness of state entities to independently address the myriad security concerns that arise in sites of resource extraction. The international community has played an important role in reinforcing this perception, often encouraging governments to accept, regulate and normalize the presence and authority of non-state security providers as a crucial means of addressing insecurity.

This ‘revalorization’ and shift in attitudes about the role and place of non-state actors in security provision is particularly apparent in Africa's extractive sectors.⁴ Across the continent, the presence of non-state actors in security provision around sites of resource extraction is now almost expected. Particularly around major operations, extractive companies enter into contracts with PSCs to provide security for their operations, or to participate in innovative, hybrid security arrangements with public security providers. They may also hire security consultants to oversee and coordinate public and/or private security forces. It is also increasingly common to find extractive companies partnering with NGOs with the declared aim of bringing ‘peace and development’ to communities residing near extractive projects, and to observe nearby community members participating in various security roles. In short, multiple actors are now involved in the process of providing security to extractive companies, and in securing and patrolling spaces around sites of resource extraction in Africa.

A growing body of scholarly literature describes and critically engages with the evolving role of non-state actors in security in Africa's extractive sectors. This literature has shown how a more plural approach to security governance has become normalized in the extractive sector in recent years,⁵ documenting hybrid security arrangements and practices at specific sites of resource extraction across Africa.⁶ Collectively, this scholarship reveals how broader processes of globalization, including (neo-)liberalization, deregulation and financialization, have resulted in the partial disassembly of the state's monopoly over security and a shift towards more complex security arrangements around sites of resource extraction. Notwithstanding the advances already made in the literature on contemporary security practices in Africa, scholars have identified a need for more instances of ‘empirically grounded theory’ that offer a ‘careful analysis of how different security actors, discourses, values, technologies, and so on, are assembled and brought together in different localities’.⁷ Concomitantly, scholars of extractive sector governance have called for more comparative multi-case studies of security issues in order to cultivate a better understanding of why grievances arise among stakeholders in these sectors.

With these calls for further work in mind, we consider the different ways in which security governance in the extractive sector is being transformed, and with what consequences. Informed by both theoretical reflection and empirical insights from fieldwork in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana, our analyses examine how the shift towards hybrid security governance has materialized in each country's extractive sectors and draw conclusions on what this shift means for both those enveloped by hybrid security arrangements and those excluded from these arrangements. We problematize security by emphasizing its tangible impacts on marginalized communities in the countries we have studied, whose experiences can range from being evicted from homesteads owing to land speculation to losing access to land for farming, informal harvesting of foodstuffs, hunting and fishing. Hence, our conception of ‘security’ is much broader than physical security (e.g. securing a mine or oil installation). Rather, it encompasses multiple dimensions of human security and reflects a broader understanding of the subject that focuses on the ability to sustain traditional livelihoods (e.g. access to arable land for food production and clean water).

We start with a discussion of recent literature on extractive sector security governance in Africa, situating our contribution in relation to hybrid security governance and global security assemblages in particular. Next, we introduce three case-studies representing three different countries in Africa, each of which illustrates the shift towards hybrid security governance in the extractive sector. We conclude by bringing these cases into conversation with one another, exploring variation in hybrid security governance arrangements across the cases and considering how this variation contributes to different security outcomes, and then reflecting on the implications of our comparative analyses.

Theorizing the shift towards hybrid security governance

Much of the recent work on security governance in Africa has shown that security is provided by networks of state and non-state actors that operate at both global and local levels. These include state authorities, local police forces, PSCs, civil society organizations, international development organizations and transnational security advisers.⁸ In some cases, these actors coordinate their activities and integrate their approaches to security provision; in other cases, they compete to provide security in order to take advantage of the growing global security marketplace.⁹

Different and sometimes competing theories have been used to explain the shift towards hybrid security arrangements, where both state and non-state actors participate in providing security. However, there is wide acceptance that the shift towards hybrid security governance has its roots in the lasting legacies of structural adjustment—particularly in Africa's extractive sectors. As Singer observes, under structural adjustment the use of private security in extractive sectors became more routine.¹⁰ The state rolled back its involvement in security provision, and private actors were permitted to step in to fill certain gaps around sites of resource extraction and production. Over time, extractive sector participants became accustomed to the perceived benefits of non-state security provision, often arguing that the private sector could provide some of these services more efficiently than the public sector. This contributed to the rise of a lucrative marketplace for non-state security providers, such as PSCs. Motivated by the potential for income, an array of actors beyond PSCs have since entered the security marketplace, including NGOs, conservation organizations, think-tanks and educational institutions. Together, these actors now offer a range of specialized security services to extractive companies, each playing its own role in hybrid security arrangements.

Even as some states have worked to rebuild their public security forces following the era of structural adjustment programmes, many have attempted to work alongside non-state security actors to protect investments in the extractive industries, rather than to replace those actors entirely. Today, security services in the extractive sector are commonly delivered through secondments of police officers or military personnel, along with various forms of partnership between extractive companies, PSCs, public security actors and other stakeholders such as NGOs. Whereas in previous decades non-state actors exercising force (or facilitating its exercise) around sites of resource extraction would have been seen as ‘agents of greed, illegitimate violence and political disorder’,¹¹ normative shifts in the global political economy have served to (re)valorize the role of non-state actors in security provision and normalize hybrid security governance in Africa's extractive sectors.

Williams describes these networks of public and private actors as global security assemblages, which operate as ‘complex structures where a range of different global and local, public and private security agents and normativities interact, cooperate and compete to produce new institutions [of] practice and forms of security governance’.¹² Our theorization and use of global security assemblages in this article are influenced not only by the essay just quoted, but also by the collaborative work of Abrahamsen and Williams, and other recent writings by Abrahamsen, Higate and Gould.¹³ This body of literature advocates the assemblage approach to the study of security in African contexts for several reasons. First, assemblage thinking draws attention to the plurality of new actors involved in security—emphasizing connection, interaction, competition and interdependence across a spectrum of scales while ‘abandoning strict dichotomies between the global and the local, the international and the domestic’.¹⁴ This, it is argued, reflects security realities ‘on the ground’ better than traditional state-oriented theoretical frames that fail to capture the dynamics at work in many African countries.¹⁵ Second, adopting the analytical concept of assemblage reveals the diversity of knowledge and technologies that are disassembled and reassembled in the provision of security.¹⁶ Furthermore, it is argued that, in rejecting preconceived ideas and theories about what security is and how it should be practised (and by whom), the assemblage framework is useful for understanding how securitization in contemporary Africa results from the historical specificity of the post-colonial African state.¹⁷

Existing academic literature on global security assemblages has largely focused on the actors, dynamics and politics that comprise and shape contemporary security arrangements. Some attention has also been paid to the effects of the assemblage approach to security governance. For example, Hönke and Thomas have theorized the intended and unintended effects of the pluralization of security governance on different collectivities.¹⁸ Others, such as the contributors to a recent collection edited by Higate and Utas,¹⁹ have used locally grounded empirical research to inform theory-building about the impact of hybrid security governance. Higate and Utas recommend that future research should engage more directly with the politics of security assemblages in investigating who wins and who loses as a result of transformations in the contemporary landscape.²⁰

In the following sections, we respond to this call by examining who and what are incorporated in—and who and what are made marginal to—the workings of global security assemblages. In doing so, we make two specific scholarly contributions. First, we further develop the global security assemblage framing by revealing the different impacts of transformations in security governance on both those included in and those excluded by novel security arrangements. Uncovering the ways in which different segments of the population affect and are affected by hybrid security arrangements represents an important contribution to research, as it reveals that the hybridization of security does not have uniform effects—for example, inevitably benefiting all those included and harming all those excluded. Rather, hybrid security arrangements reshape security relationships in ways that tend to benefit those in possession of existing forms of power and privilege, such as companies and domestic elites, while further marginalizing more vulnerable segments of the population.

The second, related, contribution is to offer insights as to who and what are included in and excluded from security arrangements, based on grounded fieldwork in three different localities. As noted above, critical security scholars have called for more comparative multi-case studies of security issues in order to cultivate a better understanding of differences and similarities that emerge across cases of hybridized security. Although there are important variations across our three cases, one of our key findings is just how similar security arrangements are across different locales in terms of whom they include and exclude, and how they increase human security risks for certain segments of the population. In examining these three cases, we extend the geographic thrust of existing literature on extractive sector security in Africa, which has tended to focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Tanzania.²¹

Analysing hybrid security governance in Africa's extractive sectors

Each of the cases examined in this section illustrates the shift towards hybrid security governance in the extractive sector and examines the implications of this shift in respect of who is secured and how. These illustrative cases are informed by fieldwork conducted at sites of resource extraction in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana between 2013 and 2016. Collectively, we used an exploratory qualitative research design entailing data collection techniques such as semi-structured interviews with purposively selected respondents, focus group discussions, and participant observation both at project sites and in the three national capitals (respectively, Nairobi, Kampala and Accra). Purposive sampling allowed us to select research participants whose contributions were expected to be pertinent to the research objectives. This included relevant stakeholders, such as government officials, representatives of extractive companies, and members of host communities and civil society groups. With a view to challenging normalized security arrangements, the research was designed to purposively engage with actors with less political or socio-economic power such as associations based in marginalized communities and ‘ordinary’ community members, particularly women and young people.²² This fieldwork has been supplemented by a review of relevant secondary sources, including ‘grey’ literature, as well as analyses of primary sources such as corporate documents, government publications and legislation, and working papers.

In the analysis that follows, we treat the extractive sectors in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana as meaningful units of analysis (i.e. illustrative cases) that can be compared and contrasted to generate wider insights about global security assemblages. Of course, there are certain epistemological limitations associated with comparing cases that are drawn from countries with different histories and different social, economic and political realities. However, there are also compelling similarities across our cases that support their comparison. For example, they have all experienced recent oil discoveries and now host similar oil sectors, with Tullow Oil playing a particularly prominent role in all the three cases. What makes this work especially relevant globally is the fact that Tullow's activities are nested within a globalized assemblage of actors, networks and structures of power that transcend the specific countries on which we focus in this article. Furthermore, our methodological design is validated by other recent research on security governance in Africa. Hönke, Meagher, and Dunigan and Petersohn employ a methodological approach similar to ours, drawing conclusions about broader patterns and processes of security governance in Africa by examining particular local cases.²³

Kenya

When oil reserves were discovered in Uganda's Lake Albert Basin in 2006, there was a rapid upsurge of interest in Kenya's oil sector.²⁴ An influx of companies submitted tenders for exploration rights, resulting in a spike in the grant of exploration permits and subsequent exploration activity. These investigations were rewarded in 2012, when Tullow Oil discovered commercially viable reserves in north-west Kenya. Today, recoverable resources of 560 million barrels have been confirmed. Although the sector has developed slowly, owing to local and national politics as well as global uncertainty, it is estimated that the country could be exporting 100,000 barrels per day by 2024.²⁵ Kenya's mining industry has followed a similar trajectory, with recent exploration activities signalling a strong potential for growth. By some estimates, the contribution of resource extraction to Kenya's GDP will grow from the current figure of roughly 1 per cent to as much as 10 per cent by the mid-2020s.²⁶

While the government and corporate investors have trumpeted economic growth projections, the expansion of the extractive sector has contributed to rising tensions between companies and communities. The oil sector, in particular, has faced protests, demonstrations and roadblocks, creating a new suite of risks for companies and communities alike. The northern counties where oil development is proceeding are some of Kenya's most insecure—already facing regional insecurity, a limited state presence and a proliferation of small arms.²⁷ These security challenges are accentuated by the lack of public security forces: just 45 police officers are responsible for patrolling the 7,000-square-kilometre sub-county where oil was initially discovered.²⁸ Addressing this insecurity has been a key issue of concern for all those involved in and affected by the oil sector. As one community elder residing near a site of oil exploration stated: ‘Before we take the oil out of the soil, we need to achieve security. We have seen what happened in Nigeria.’²⁹ An elderly woman from the same community suggested: ‘Until our communities are safe, the oil should stay in the soil.’³⁰

In response to this insecurity, various public and private actors have been enrolled in the oil sector's security assemblage. These include a subset of national police specially nominated to be stationed at oil sites to work alongside private security sector actors. Following the oil discovery, PSCs already established in Kenya, such as the Kenya-based KK Security and British-based G4S, quickly expanded their services to provide security to the oil sector. New PSCs specializing in oil and gas also entered the region. For instance, the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, established a company called Frontier Services Group to provide logistics, on-the-ground security and new technologies such as aerial security services for oil companies in African countries such as Kenya. At the same time, new companies emerged to offer security advice and expertise to the Kenyan oil sector and government; these included the Ireland-based Glenevin and London-based Control Risks. Clearly, then, a range of private and public actors possessing diverse knowledges and technologies constitute the extractive security assemblage in Kenya.

The configuration of actors within this assemblage also includes more informal and ambiguous security actors, knowledges and technologies. When exploration activities first began, many oil companies relied on the Kenya Police Reserves (KPR) for security. KPR personnel are untrained civilians armed by the government to provide communities with protection in the absence of a formal police presence. They are paid a stipend from the government in return for their services. In parts of northern Kenya, the KPR are ‘the main visible state-sanctioned security’.³¹ During the early phases of oil exploration in the region, KPR personnel on short-term contracts also became the most visible form of security for oil exploration teams.³² Hiring KPR was initially seen by oil companies as an expedient solution to the complex security risks facing the sector in Kenya's north—not least because, in addition to being armed (unlike private security personnel), KPR members possess local knowledge, language expertise and experience of dealing with insecurity in the region.³³ By some accounts, KPR personnel were paid between five and ten times more by oil companies than by the government at this time.³⁴ Providing above-market wages made it easy for oil companies to recruit KPR members and also enabled those companies to claim that they were generating profitable local employment opportunities. This provides an interesting illustration of how everyday citizens, responding to new market opportunities, have been enrolled into security assemblages in Kenya's extractive sector.

However, given that KPR was established to deter raids and intercommunal conflict at the local level, their subcontracting out to oil companies to secure the exploration, extraction and production of natural resources has been perceived as detrimental to communities. During interviews, many women with husbands working for KPR under contract to oil exploration teams explained how the out-migration of men from their communities was contributing to new risks and vulnerabilities at home, such as more frequent incidents of cattle raiding, banditry or other forms of violence. As one woman explained: ‘The oil companies look at the KPR as guns-for-hire and they pay well too. This means that many of our police, who were armed by the government to protect communities, are now working for the oil companies instead.’³⁵ As such stories have made their way into research and media reports, national and transnational legal and human rights experts and groups, such as the London-based Institute for Human Rights and Business, have criticized the oil sector for its reliance on KPR.³⁶

In response to this criticism, larger oil companies have begun to reduce their use of KPR for security services. However, even as these efforts have been made, some young men continue to be drawn towards oil exploration and drilling sites, as well as growing urban centres, in search of new roles in private-sector security provision—temporarily putting aside their KPR uniforms and weapons in exchange for positions with private companies.³⁷ This reflects what Higate and Utas refer to as ‘role-switching’, which allows individuals who can perform security functions to insert themselves into assemblages.³⁸ As a result, the shift away from KPR has not worked to lessen the increasing responsibilities and risks for those left behind. For example, one woman explained in an interview that her husband was making more money as a private security guard in a growing oil town nearly 100 kilometres away, but that this left her and her young daughter tending to livestock alone—increasing their vulnerability to abuse or other violence.³⁹ Data from the Armed Conflict Location Event Database confirm that communal insecurity and conflict in Turkana have increased in the past five years.⁴⁰

This case illustrates how hybrid arrangements can detract from individual and public security for the sake of improved private security outcomes. In the case of northern Kenya, the extractive security assemblage has created enclaves of enhanced security for companies while simultaneously contributing to greater insecurity for more marginalized segments of the population outside these enclaves.⁴¹ Worryingly, not only are enclaves of enhanced security uneven and inequitable, they are also fragile and temporary. Over the past year, oil companies have significantly scaled down their operations in northern Kenya. Tullow Oil has cut hundreds of jobs and local businesses have followed suit, reportedly ending contracts with security providers and dismissing security guards. This suggests that, even if novel security arrangements in the region could be made more inclusive, this would not fix the problem of both individual and public security becoming increasingly dependent on the priorities of the extractive sector.

Uganda

Oil exploration and formal mining activity in Uganda date back to the 1920s, and by the mid- to late 1990s mineral resources accounted for nearly half the country's exports. In 2006, commercially viable oil deposits were finally confirmed, with subsequent estimates placing the amount of oil somewhere between 2.5 billion and 6.5 billion barrels,⁴² which would place Uganda in the upper-middle stratum of African oil-producing countries. Estimates for the potential Ugandan government revenues to be derived from oil range between US$2 billion and US$4 billion annually,⁴³ varying in accordance with several factors, most prominently actual production and world prices.

In 2012, the China National Overseas Oil Corporation and Total SA bought into Tullow Oil's concessions, each company taking a one-third ownership stake in each of the three main oil production blocks. Despite this influx of foreign investment and expertise, oil has yet to flow from Uganda's wells—and is unlikely to do so until the early 2020s.⁴⁴ Although some progress has been made as regards the logistics, several governance issues have arisen—which also have the potential to generate significant grievances.⁴⁵

Disagreements over the terms of government–industry production-sharing agreements (PSAs)—as well as allegations of bribery and unpaid taxes by the firm that has had the longest tenure in Uganda's oil sector, Tullow Oil—have strained relations between this firm and the government, and prompted media and civil society organizations to raise questions about the quality of governance in relation to the oil sector more generally. The details of the PSAs remain shrouded in mystery.⁴⁶ In addition, the route of the pipeline from the extraction sites—which was initially set to travel eastward to Kenya, but will now travel southward to Tanzania—has generated land speculation and profiting from land sales linked to some of the few parliamentarians privy to the plans.⁴⁷ This activity has already aroused grievances and fears of economic exclusion in rural communities around the oil installations and planned pipeline—not to mention fears that local content (domestically sourced goods and services) and employment opportunities will be limited.⁴⁸ Against this backdrop, the government of Uganda continues to tinker with revised legislation on oil revenue management—a process that first began in 2008.

In anticipation of oil extraction, observers have already started to worry about the environmental impact and security ramifications of the pipeline and the wells, most of which are located in environmentally sensitive areas along and near Lake Albert as well as the complex riparian system of the Upper Nile and its nature reserves. There are also environmental concerns relating to the livelihoods of local communities. Artisanal mining, fishing, agriculture and tourism provide the main economic livelihoods in the region. For instance, the Albertine Graben region generates over 70 per cent of Uganda's tourism income and roughly one-third of its food production.⁴⁹

A vital component of the oil governance equation in Uganda is security in and around the oil installations, the pipeline and the proposed refinery. The security issue is best understood through the dynamics of local, regional and global security assemblages in Uganda's security environment, wherein forms of power and authority are shifting to a variety of actors via militarization, privatization and the personalization of oil security to support President Yoweri Museveni and his family.

First, the Ugandan Police Force (UPF) has become increasingly militarized over the past decade, a process which includes (but extends beyond) the introduction of military-style uniforms and weaponry. Military officers are often appointed to senior positions within the UPF, and it has created new units with mandates more akin to military operations than policing. The purported need for increased militarization of the police is often attributed to the possibility of incursions by the Lord's Resistance Army or Al-Shabaab militants within the country.

Second, since the 1980s Uganda has seen a shift from reliance on public security forces to reliance on private security forces.⁵⁰ This is consistent with Bruce Baker's observation that, aside from the state police force, a wide variety of individuals are now involved in ‘policing’ in Uganda.⁵¹ Though private security has a long history in the country—as evidenced by companies in the colonial era frequently fielding their own security forces—it has taken on a markedly different practice and form under the auspices of privatization in recent years. The first stand-alone private security firm to be permitted to function in Uganda, Security 2000, secured a licence to operate in 1988. By 2008, approximately 17,000 Ugandans were employed by some 58 registered private security firms.⁵² While this a welcome form of employment in the formal labour sector, most salaries are considered ‘paltry’.⁵³ By 2016, although the number of private security firms had grown only slightly—to 60—the number of employees in the sector had more than doubled to 37,000.⁵⁴

Third, both private and public forces providing security in Uganda's oil-producing regions have very close links to the country's president (who, in various public speeches, has claimed that he ‘discovered’ the oil, or at least had known for a long time that the country had oil reserves, and is therefore best placed to oversee its development).⁵⁵ The largest PSC in Uganda, Saracen International, is owned by Salim Saleh, President Museveni's brother and trusted adviser. Tullow Oil employs Saracen International to provide security on its oil concessions. Since the beginning of the 2010s, both the Ugandan police and the Ugandan armed forces have received steadily increasing funding for salaries and new weaponry.⁵⁶ While this recent trend runs counter to the image of the ‘poorly paid police officer’ in east Africa, it is unclear whether increased salaries will translate into better respect for human rights, especially if protests erupt over poor governance in the oil sector. What is clear is that this increased funding is part of Museveni's strategy to court the support of the police and armed forces in order to sustain extant political alliances and curb sources of potential competition for the presidency. It is also worth noting that President Museveni's son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is head of the Special Forces Command, the segment of the army entrusted with protecting the president and the oil fields. In 2017, Kainerugaba was named Senior Presidential Adviser for Special Operations, which many observers view as the latest step in Museveni's plans to keep the office of the president in his family's hands once he eventually departs.

First-hand observations in the Albertine Graben Region of Uganda (via participant observations in May 2016) confirm that this hybridization of public and private security providers is now well entrenched in the country's oil sector. These changing security assemblages have both advantages and drawbacks. While many respondents implied that it is morally more desirable to have security provided by public-sector personnel in the police and armed forces, this view is predicated on the notion that those forces are held accountable for their actions through democratic or other legal or institutional mechanisms. In practice, however, this cannot always be counted on, as public security personnel might lack training and be subject to delays in payment of government salaries, which often decrease morale. Private security forces, on the other hand, may well be better trained and more reliably paid, and consequently practise better professional conduct in such settings, which in turn provides greater public security, albeit indirectly. Private security forces and their employers are also subject to different incentives and motivations from their public-sector counterparts—that is, earning profits. The trends described above regarding the commodification of security as part of global security assemblages in an era of globalization therefore apply to Uganda—with implications for human and regional security.

Even though oil extraction has yet to begin in Uganda, human and regional security concerns associated with it abound. These concerns, which are consistent with our conception of security, range from the influx of migrants seeking work (and the attendant instability and grievance caused in local communities) to increased hostility and sporadic violent clashes between the DRC and Uganda over oil deposits under Lake Albert, the activity of armed militias in the wider region, and increased militarization among Uganda's public security forces. Displacement owing to the land speculation referred to above and weak land tenure rights (especially for women) mean that marginalized communities will face additional human security challenges in attempting to maintain traditional livelihoods. Added to these concerns are the grievances already reported by local communities, who fear that they will not benefit from the oil revenue and its spinoffs, such as direct and indirect employment, once the pumping stations become operational.⁵⁷ Such tensions have strong potential to spark violent protest, and civil society groups doubt that private and public security forces in and around the oil-producing regions will respect human rights when responding to such demonstrations. Civil society groups also point to the fact that private security guards and police top the rankings in statistics on theft and other crimes by uniformed individuals in Uganda.⁵⁸ Ultimately, the common denominator among all the facets of power and authority in Uganda mentioned above is that the shift towards hybrid security governance has provided little in the way of local community involvement. Instead, the global security assemblages evolving around the militarization, privatization and personalization of oil security appear to be giving more influence to the ‘private’ over the ‘public’, thereby favouring those select few who have close ties to Uganda's president.

Ghana

Although the extractive sector is important to the economies of all three cases in the present study, it has the longest legacy in Ghana. Records of mining in Ghana can be traced to the late fifteenth century, and mining gold was an integral part of British colonial rule. While Ghana and Uganda discovered oil in commercial quantities around the same time (2007 and 2006, respectively), the former has made major advances in production, exporting its first shipment of oil in January 2011.⁵⁹ Over the past two decades, Ghana has enjoyed greater internal and regional security than Kenya or Uganda. Indeed, Ghana has come to be considered one of the most peaceful countries in Africa as a result of the democratic consolidation experienced through five ‘free and fair’ elections and subsequent successful changes in government.⁶⁰

In Ghana, the mining industry is where the normalization of hybrid security is best witnessed. Mining companies are permitted to maintain private security operations to protect their concessions from encroachers and trespassers; at the same time, with the assistance of the government (through the various regional security councils), they have access to state security personnel (from both the police and the military), who may be deployed to protect their concessions.⁶¹ According to the 1992 constitution (article 257.1), all public lands are vested in the president, who holds them in trust for the people of Ghana. As a result, even lands on which mineral extraction occurs and those surrounding sites of extraction remain the property of the state. Thus public security forces are often in charge of external security or policing of concessions (primarily mine project sites and neighbouring communities), whereas private service providers handle internal policing (usually entailing protection of mine assets such as the offices and residences of mine workers). It must be noted that the line dividing the two types of security provision is often blurred, to the extent that a mixture of these types could be handling both internal and external affairs simultaneously. This phenomenon presents at least a couple of challenging security implications.

First, the hybrid nature of the shifting terrain of security governance implies that private/public and global/local security actors are carefully ‘knit together’ as security assemblages that seek to govern sites of extraction effectively. However, this hybridization makes it difficult for host communities in Ghana to identify who is in charge of, and ultimately responsible for, security.⁶² Although some community members believe it is the state apparatus that provides security personnel for extractive companies, others are convinced that corporations use their own private providers in the name of the government. The confusion is largely generated by the uniforms these different types of security officers often wear. To several community members interviewed in mid-2013, these were not readily distinguishable—hence the challenge in ascertaining culpability when need arises.

From participant observations conducted at the mining sites of Newmont and Kinross in May and June 2013, it appears that this phenomenon forms part of both explicit and implicit efforts to homogenize security forces and produce the appearance of a shift towards collective security governance. In the event of human rights violations, communities may accuse either the company or the government without being able to accurately support their claims. For instance, some of the interviewees in the mining communities of both Newmont and Kinross complained about both abuse of power and neglect of duty by the police. In respect of the former, they claimed that security personnel beat them up every time they attempted to get close to farmlands that bore harvestable produce but had been officially handed over to mining corporations. This speaks to our broader understanding of security to include sustainable livelihoods (e.g. access to arable land for food production and clean water)—a tangible human security concern for rural communities in particular, and one that supports our critique of prevailing hybrid security governance at sites of extraction where local communities have been negatively affected. Also, one respondent noted that ‘whenever we attempt a demonstration, they send soldiers from Tarkwa to beat us up and tear our clothes—even stripping the women naked and throwing us into the bush’.⁶³ The reference to ‘soldiers’ may not be entirely accurate, because it was revealed that although the police and the military take turns in guarding the posts of various mining concessions, their uniforms are not always distinguishable to the average community member. In respect of neglect of duty, some of the women complained that, despite cases of deaths caused by company vehicles speeding on local roads, the police have not carried out investigations to ascertain the facts and deter repetition. As noted in the case of Kenya and Uganda above, hybrid security has come to be viewed by extractive companies or the government as a viable response to some of these challenges and the limited nature of public security provision.

An executive of Chirano Gold Mines, operated by Kinross, remarked that these dilemmas result from the generally negative perception communities have of mining—leading to exaggeration of what is occurring and misidentification of the perpetrators.⁶⁴ But part of the problem is the lack of transparency and education about security arrangements around sites of extraction. As an officer of a community-based advocacy group emphasized in an interview, ‘once you have these two players [i.e. private and public security actors] squeezing in on communities with virtually no education, no knowledge about their rights, then you perpetuate vulnerability’.⁶⁵ Even some key officials at the Minerals Commission, for instance, could not provide any relevant information about security measures in the mining sector. Despite the democratic accolades that the country receives internationally, such secrecy around this important issue raises questions about who benefits from the collaborative policing between public and private security forces. Thus, despite the ongoing shift towards collaborative security governance via powerful global assemblages, the ‘shadow of legality’ that formerly surrounded the work of mercenaries, as noted by Abrahamsen and Williams,⁶⁶ still informs a reluctance on the part of certain actors to readily admit the use of private security on their sites.

It is noteworthy that the issue of hybrid security arrangements in the mining sector and its implications for host communities has been documented in a report by Ghana's Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice entitled The state of human rights in mining communities in Ghana,⁶⁷ which presents evidence that corroborates the remarks of our interviewees reproduced above. The investigators found that all the companies operating in the communities visited (including the mining site of Chirano Gold Mines) had established permanent posts for the military, the police or both on their concessions. There were also many documented examples of recklessness on the part of security agencies and security contractors who were tasked with the primary duty of securing both those communities and the companies’ mining concessions. One of the recommendations that came out of the report was that the government of Ghana should review the use of the military in mining communities, and allow it only under ‘exceptional circumstances which are beyond the control of the police service’.⁶⁸

As for recent developments in hybrid security governance, the Private Security Operations Directorate of the Ghana Police Service was established in 2017 to oversee the activities of PSCs in the country in order to align them with the national security system; also, the various regions have their own private security liaison officers who work with regional police commanders to oversee local private security-related activities.⁶⁹ This development further underscores the deepening partnership between public and private security sectors. To address the seriousness of the issue of indistinguishable uniforms noted above, in October 2017 the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) launched a set of three official uniforms that private security operators are required to wear in order that allegations of violations attributed to them can be effectively tracked, and to weed out non-licensed individuals from the private security industry.⁷⁰ According to the IGP's statement, this innovation serves to distinguish the uniforms of the police, military and prison service from PSCs. A subsequent press release via the Twitter page of the Ghana Police Service identified 1 November 2018 as the implementation date for the new uniform regime.⁷¹

The nascent oil sector also presents an interesting case for this discussion around hybrid security governance in Ghana's extractive sector. None of the companies interviewed during fieldwork in 2016 would admit engagement with private security personnel. To them, the Jubilee oil field, for instance, is a national asset and is therefore protected by Ghana's navy, who are deployed with the assistance of the Western Regional Security Council. As activity in this field is currently taking place offshore, the primary focus has been on asset protection, which is usually done by a few navy ships. A security manager at Tullow Oil admitted that a few non-navy people are involved on the vessels themselves, but described them as ‘Tullow employees’, not private security providers.⁷² An officer of Friends of the Nation noted that although bodies of water on or under which oil and gas extraction occurs are seen as state assets monitored by the navy, it is possible there are private service providers who work on these vessels and who are indirectly or privately compensated by oil companies.⁷³ This blurring of roles and the intimate working relationship between the navy and Tullow is evocative of the contemporary evolution of global security assemblages in the extractive sector worldwide.

As noted above in the theoretical section of this article, assemblage thinking draws attention to the multiple new actors involved in security and thereby emphasizes connections and interdependence across a spectrum of scales.⁷⁴ The case of Ghana further illustrates the artificiality of the boundaries perceived to exist between global and local, public and private. Yet it cannot be assumed that these blurred structures of power and authority advance the security needs of all actors equally, as the consequences of hybridization differ across the scalar spectrum. For instance, despite the relatively positive image created by company officials interviewed in both the mining and the oil sectors, interviews with community members and civil society groups revealed serious grievances around human rights as well as issues of social and environmental justice.⁷⁵ It is also important to note that what is considered a ‘site of extraction’ is highly significant for the forms of security governance being examined. Oil exploration—and oil production in particular—has had devastating implications for the human security of those who depend on deep-sea fishing for their livelihoods, as some of these areas are now restricted, securitized zones devoted to oil extraction. This suggests that hybrid security governance can—and in fact often does—occur at the expense of public interest and people's well-being.

Conclusion

There is a tendency within the existing literature to overlook the fact that although security landscapes around sites of resource extraction are increasingly pluralized, certain actors, knowledges, norms, values, authorities and technologies remain excluded from hybrid security arrangements. The aim of the analyses of security governance in Kenya's, Uganda's and Ghana's extractive sectors presented here has been to illustrate who and what is excluded from—and who and what is made marginal to—the workings of global security assemblages in practice. These cases also depict how extractive companies incorporate diverse actors into the process of securing their operating sites. Rather than necessarily relying on the centralized authority of the state, firms are now enabled by the pluralized security landscape to legitimately deploy various types of security actors and use a range of security practices and techniques to protect their sites. While the growing role of PSCs in securing extractive sites is certainly part of this story, our cases illustrate the wide range of other state and non-state global and local actors that collaborate with PSCs to assert and regulate spaces of extraction. From domestic elites in Uganda to armed civilians in Kenya to police and navy forces in Ghana, the various actors enrolled in security assemblages have different forms of power and resources available to them: these actors exercise authority across local, domestic and global scales by coordinating and collaborating at sites of extraction.

Yet, at the same time, these three cases also reveal that the shift towards hybrid security governance in Africa's extractive sectors does not uniformly involve or serve the interests of all stakeholders. Rather, the shift towards pluralized security landscapes has varied and uneven impacts across different segments of the population, privileging the agendas, interests and visions of some actors over those of others. Evidently, extractive companies are better able to secure investments through these arrangements and by incorporating a plethora of actors, technologies and forms of knowledge into the security governance processes. Domestic elites may also benefit from new opportunities created by the more pluralized landscape of security. As the case of Uganda demonstrates most clearly, elites can become intimately entwined in extractive security assemblages by winning contracts to provide security services. However, these actors are motivated to participate in extractive security governance not by the public interest but by their own respective interests—economic and otherwise. This has clear implications for how security priorities are determined, how security services are provided and for whom security is provided.

In answering the question ‘security for whom?’, our cases suggest that those with less political or socio-economic power do not necessarily benefit from the wide array of security arrangements, services and techniques that are now available to extractive companies. In fact, our cases indicate that those living in communities near sites of extraction often grow increasingly insecure as more actors and resources are enrolled in the process of securing private interests. This is illustrated in the case of Kenya, where young men are migrating in search of contract security jobs at oil camps—abandoning their traditional roles in safeguarding their communities in favour of wage labour at sites of extraction.⁷⁶ It is also illustrated in the case of Ghana, where the blurring of the line between public and private security actors has had adverse impacts on the day-to-day safety of communities living near extractive projects, contributing to the ambiguities communities experience in trying to decipher who they should turn to for protection when extractive activities infringe their rights. Ultimately, one unintended side-effect of the emergence of novel security arrangements around sites of extraction is the disassembly of pre-existing, local security arrangements. This, in turn, serves to produce and entrench security disparities between private interests and the public interests of local populations.

It could be argued that hybrid security arrangements should not be held accountable for failing to meet the needs and priorities of local communities, because non-state actors—such as extractive companies and PSCs—are primarily responsible to their shareholders rather than the public. As this article demonstrates, the problem with this argument is that public actors are also enrolled in extractive security assemblages. For example, civilians armed by the government to provide communities with protection in the absence of a formal police presence have been contracted by companies to secure oil exploration activities. Hybrid security arrangements that include public actors have a responsibility to continue to serve the public interest and deliver security as a public good, even if this happens alongside other security tasks—such as securing extractive operations on behalf of private companies. Moreover, although non-state actors may not be responsible for securing the public, they are obliged by international law to avoid adverse impacts on local communities. The illustrative cases presented in this article reveal that, beyond simply failing to improve security outcomes for local communities living near sites of extraction, the pluralization of the security landscape in the extractive sector sometimes contributes to greater insecurity for communities.

Our three cases reveal that the prevailing approach to security governance in Africa's extractive sectors is increasingly geared towards protecting private interests, rather than safeguarding people. In this sense, hybrid security governance is diverging from broader efforts to improve best practices that respect human security. On a practical level, this evidence raises urgent questions about how to build more accountable, inclusive and responsive security governance arrangements in Africa's extractive sectors, so as to ensure that hybrid security arrangements meet the needs of extractive operators without compromising the everyday life of communities located near sites of extraction. Evidently, a more people-centred approach to extractive sector security is needed in place of the current approach that attracts a growing number of actors and an increasing amount of resources for the protection of private interests.

Footnotes

Author notes