Introduction: Transnational assemblages and the production of security knowledges. New perspectives on security governance in, and on, conflict and post-conflict contexts

ABSTRACT

This special issue asks how governance orders and security knowledges are co-produced through transnational assemblages. It opens the black box of these assemblages by examining the challenges in bringing together the variety of everchanging interests, representations and positions held by the actors involved in them, and how these affect the making of security governance and the production of security knowledges. The contributions to this issue draw on a postcolonial security knowledge research agenda, and offer empirical cases of security assemblages that defy the traditional geographical and imaginary boundaries between North and South, the local and the international, and expert and experiential knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• assemblages
• knowledge production
• security governance
• postcolonial

1. INTRODUCTION

Local security challenges in conflict and post-conflict states are heavily intertwined with transnational security agendas. In the Sahel region, states and local communities face pressures from the Global North to control migration and violent extremism. In Afghanistan, while the world observed stunned the withdrawal of American troops in the summer of 2021, self-organised groups filled in the gaps of security intelligence and crime control. The invasion and war on Ukraine by Russia are reshaping the world order, renewing fears of a Third World War and a nuclear war catastrophe, and provoking a world food security crisis and an energy crisis that will be felt for years to come. Importantly, as news images of Russian tanks completely destroyed and distressed young Russian soldiers captured by the Ukrainian army fill our screens, the Wagner Group – a Russian mercenary army that first went into action during Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and has been active in Syria, Libya and Mali – registered in Russia as a ‘private military company’ in 2022 and has been recruiting prisoners from Russian jails to operate in Ukraine in exchange for pardons.

The distribution of security provision capacities and knowledges amongst local, global, state and non-state actors is not a new phenomenon. International Relations (IR) literature has produced concepts such as multilevel governance (Marks & Hoogue, 2004), the military–industrial complex (Adams, 1968; Fallows, 2002), and global security assemblages (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2009), which have helped articulate a world view where international actors, state institutions, and private security actors or civil society organisations jointly take part and hold specific roles in governance orders (Cavelty & Balzacq, 2016). Yet, the challenges associated with understanding this distribution go beyond acknowledging the proliferation of security actors and analysing their (institutionalised) relations. We need to comprehend how governance orders and the security knowledge underpinning them are constituted and transformed through new complex relations that often involve coalitions of actors spreading across the ‘North/South divide’ and which have the potential to redraw hierarchies and (re)distribute agencies, legitimacy and authority. In the case of peace- and state-building, for instance, while knowledge produced by from the Global North has in the last decades shaped responses to conflict in the Global South, drawing on Global South actors’ perspectives and knowledge has now become increasingly important to justify the legitimacy of international interventions and to access localised information (Moe & Müller, 2018). At the same time, Global North actors face competing pressures to empower local communities to respond to global threats and local challenges alike, while simultaneously restricting access to confidential military knowledge. Similar competing pressures exist for Global South actors, who advocate for the use of local knowledge to solve conflicts, while simultaneously needing to draw on the international standardised knowledge that brings authority and material benefits.

Investigating how security knowledge production has shaped security governance, Critical Security Studies literature has thoroughly researched the dominance and standardisation of Western understandings of peace- and state-building, border management, and counterterrorism (Autesserre, 2017; Bigo, Bonelli, Chi, & Olsson, 2007). Various works have sought to highlight the imposition and transfer to the Global South of these understandings (Cooper & Packard, 1997; Merry, 2016), as well as their ensuing effects, including the inadequacy of international interventions to adapt to local contexts (Machold, 2020; Martín de Almagro, 2021), and their marginalisation or selective integration of Global South actors (Chandler, 2019). While they have offered a timely critique denouncing intervener’s ambitions to govern population in the Global South and their lack of success, this literature has been less good, save for a few exceptions (Frowd & Sandor, 2018; Moe & Müller, 2018; Sandor, 2016), at empirically exploring the complex coalitions of actors (experts, policymakers, military and police officers, think tanks, civil society organisations, academics, etc.), ideas, and interests that cut across the ‘North–South’ divide. By blurring the dichotomous Global North–Global South boundaries, these coalitions force us to question the representation of a unilateral and unified dominance of the Global North and its security knowledge and require further investigation to understand their workings and effects. They form what Abrahamsen and Williams (2009, p. 3) have called global security assemblages: ‘settings where a range of different global and local, public and private security agents and normativities interact, cooperate and compete to produce new institutions, practices, and forms of security governance’.

To address such shortcomings, the main goal of this special issue is to examine the complex relations established in these coalitions, the challenges in bringing together the variety of interests, representations, and positions held by the actors involved in them, and how these relations affect the production and circulation of security knowledges. By looking at the production of security knowledges in these transnational security assemblages, we can help defy the traditional geographical and imaginary boundaries between North and South, the local and the international, expert and experiential knowledge, and better understand the emergence and transformation of security governance orders. The notion of transnational security assemblages is central here as it enables us to critically engage with the multiscalar processes of security knowledge production and the co-constitution of governance orders. This special issue thus investigates the effects of these transnational security assemblages through one central question: How are governance orders and security knowledges co-produced through transnational security assemblages?

To answer this question, this special issue calls for an empirical postcolonial and post-socialist security knowledge research agenda that moves beyond the mainly theoretical thinking in knowledge production in IR, and offers empirical cases on security assemblages. The different articles in this special issue explore how knowledge is produced, reconfigured and circulated through these assemblages, how authority is performed and legitimacy (re)distributed, how social hierarchies are (re)produced, and how new security governance orders emerge. To engage with these issues, the authors draw on the literature on knowledge production (including in Science and Technology Studies (STS) through its overlaps with approaches in Security Studies focused on the interaction of local and global, and the literature on assemblages and networks of security and intervention.

In this introduction, we first delineate our rationale for bringing together these articles and anchor it in the literature on assemblages. We then offer a review of the literature on knowledge production in critical and postcolonial security studies to which we hope the articles in this special issue contribute. In the final section, we propose an overview of the articles and explore the links between the different contributions to provide a sense of how the special issue offers an answer to our common research question, but also to elucidate the precision and complexity of findings offered by the contributing authors on the topic of transnational security assemblages and knowledge production.

2. RATIONALE: TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY ASSEMBLAGES

Often anchored in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, assemblage thinking has inspired a variety of disciplines such as STS (Latour, 2005), the Sociology of Globalisation (Ong & Collier, 2005; Sassen, 2006), Security Studies (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2009, 2011), and Political Geography (Allen & Cochrane, 2007; Dittmer, 2014; McFarlane, 2009). As a concept, global assemblage has been mobilised to unpack the construction – the assembling – and the disassembling of socio-spatial formations (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2009; Sassen, 2006). Tracing new or shifting geographies of power has enabled these authors to show how diverse elements hold together and through which kind of connections, thereby making visible the transformation of formations that we often take for granted (Müller, 2015). Sassen’s (2006, pp. 4–5) work on global assemblages exemplifies these attempts to destabilise powerful formations such as the state or the global as she explores the institutionalisation of territory, authority and rights to show how they have been partly denationalised and ‘reassembled into novel global configurations’.

In Critical Security Studies, more specifically, Abrahamsen and Williams (2009, p. 3) have explored the configurations and effects of global security assemblages. They have shown how transformations in security governance triggered by processes of state disassembly and global reassembly are reconfiguring the power of the state in Africa while many of its security competences have become privatised (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2009, 2011). Inspired by their work, various authors have since then explored global security assemblage in different settings: border management at African airports (Sandor, 2016), interventionism in the Sahel (Frowd & Sandor, 2018), counter-piracy off the coast of Somalia (Bueger, 2013); while Doucet (2016, p. 116) understands international interventions as assemblages of ‘institutions, agents, practices, knowledge and relationships’. They all explore the complex relationships connecting coalitions of actors doing the security work and stretching across the ‘North–South divide’. Sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive, these relationships bring about security discourses, practices, knowledges that underpin new or shifting security governance orders (re)distributing power, agency, and resources. It is precisely these ‘changes in socio-spatial relations and security practices  …  stretched across diverse and new geographies of power’ that the contributions of these special issue are exploring (Sandor, 2016, p. 494).

Using an assemblage lens is more than just insisting on connections between actors and sites, ‘it draws attention to history, labour, materiality and performance’ (McFarlane, 2009, p. 566). While there are many styles of assemblage thinking (Acuto & Curtis, 2014), some distinct features are most often mentioned. First, assemblages are emergent, relational and socio-material, they are made of heterogeneous actors. They organise relations between humans and non-humans, private and public actors, formal and informal actors, individuals, organisations and artefacts, to form a new whole (Acuto & Curtis, 2014; Bueger, 2014; Müller, 2015). Danielsson (2023, in this issue) illustrates well this heterogeneity: she studies the creation of an urban peacebuilding project, Kosovo’s first skatepark, as an assemblage made of urban planners, peacebuilders, municipal and city representatives, the general public, but also material and technological elements such as the computer game Minecraft.

Second, an assemblage lens implies giving a central place to agency by exploring how these heterogeneous actors and elements are connected, hold together, and cohere ‘in the face of tension’ or adversity (Li, 2007, p. 264). The attention is on who has the capacity, the authority, legitimacy or the resources to assemble (McFarlane, 2009) which also enforces a reflection on who is deprived from such capacity and on how agencies are transformed through assemblages. As Salehi (2023, in this issue) demonstrates, after the 2011 revolution in Tunisia which toppled the authoritarian government of Zine-el Abidine Ben Ali, the new Tunisia’s Ministry for Human Rights and Transitional Justice established a Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC), specialised chambers in the Tunisian court system, and a reparations fund. Although these were set up with the help and know-how of civil society and international transitional justice experts, knowledge was not simply transferred from the international justice industry to domestic actors. Rather, knowledge produced and transmitted was co-constituted through dynamic transnational assemblages of actors, who could confine knowledge flows to determine who had and who had not access to information.

Third, the emphasis is on transformation as an on-going process. Assemblages are shifting, provisional, historically contingent and high maintenance (Acuto & Curtis, 2014; Harman, 2014; Sandor, 2016), even though they have enduring features that enable temporary stabilisation. Transformation takes place through processes of territorialisation (assembling) and de-territorialisation (disassembling). Through territorialisation, the elements of an assemblage cohere and hold together for a while – the spatial and non-spatial boundaries of the assemblage are strengthened, and its homogeneity increases (Bueger, 2014, p. 64); but assemblages are also subject to centrifugal forces – de-territorialisation – that trigger the opposite movement (Müller, 2015, p. 32). A specificity of assemblages is that elements ‘can be subtracted, and recombined with one another ad infinitum without ever creating or destroying an organic unity’ (Nail, 2017, p. 23). Therefore, these processes do not have to be about creating anything new but ‘forms that are shifting, in formation, or at stake’ (Collier & Ong, 2005, p. 12).

In sum, assemblage thinking enables us to consider the spatial dimension of power and politics and bring our attention to ‘why orders emerge in particular ways, how they hold together, somewhat precariously, how they reach across or mould space and how they fall apart’ (Müller, 2015, p. 27). Further, a constitutive part of these transformations, tightly linked to the distribution of power in these socio-spatial orders, is the production and negotiation of knowledge. Central to the labour of assembling is the practice of problematisation – ‘how problems come to be defined as problems in relation to particular schemes of thought’ (Li, 2007, p. 264), often linked by expert knowledge that renders visible, defines, and evaluates problems that need to be addressed (Doucet, 2016, p. 119). Knowledge here can thus take various forms and play various roles as an object of negotiation and struggle, a resource that shapes the distribution of agencies, legitimacy, and authority within transnational assemblages; and can define the norms, rules, and principles of the socio-spatial orders in which actors are embedded. It participates to (re-)inscribe (a)symmetrical relations and anchor dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

Knowledge production in and about the local security context, for instance, is often negotiated, reorganised, streamlined and reassembled through coalitions of Global North–Global South actors to make it coherent and authoritative. This process has important effects both on the position and legitimacy of the actors involved depending on who is listened to, who this knowledge is empowering and giving agency to, and on the way security issues will be tackled, through which institutions – thus transforming or reinscribing a particular governance order with its respective winners and losers. Moe and Müller (2018, p. 195) illustrate this well as they explore the emergence of ‘coercive Realpolitik’ interventions aimed at strengthening Global South elites as actors of stabilisation while scaling down expectations of what can interventions achieve. They show that this coercive realpolitik is the product of the emergence of transnational knowledge networks made of knowledge entrepreneurs from the North and the South who strategically seek to produce knowledge that serve their ‘political symbolic, and economic capital accumulation strategies’ (p. 197) – thereby redefining and contesting hierarchies in the ‘fragmented global “intervention community” itself’ (p. 197). Similarly, Lopez-Lucia (2020) shows how a coalition of region-builders and security actors from the Global North and from the Sahel has produced a new spatial imaginary legitimising the reordering of regional security governance and practices. As a result, political authority and legitimacy in regional security matters was redistributed among African regional organisations, at the detriment of the Economic Community of West African States and to the benefit of the G5 Sahel, an ad hoc coalition of Sahelian states presented as the ‘right’ scale of governance. Such work on the making of security governance show well how knowledge produced within transnational assemblages involving actors from the Global South and the Global North are seen as more legitimate as they involve ‘local’ knowledge and Global South actors’ inputs and therefore have the power to reallocate authority and disrupt social hierarchies. It raises questions regarding how agency gets distributed and who wins and who loose in the production of such ‘legitimate’ knowledge. Baldaro and D’Amato (2023, in this issue) explore such dynamics of transnational security assemblage as they investigate the emergence of a North–South epistemic community of experts and practitioners in Mali on prevention and countering violent extremism. They delve into a micro-analysis of one particular project from the design to the implementation to shed light on the mechanisms at work as this community shapes the cognitive, normative and practical dimension of this policy field.

More generally, the generative capacity of knowledge ‘to produce new entities and relations in the world’ (Dominguez Rubio & Baert, 2012, p. 4) makes the politics of security knowledge production constitutive of the emergence of security governance orders. A common theme in STS (Felt et al., 2014), the concept of co-production – in our case of security knowledge and governance orders – refers simply to the fact that ‘the ways in which we know and represent the worlds (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it’ (Jasanoff, 2004a, p. 2). In this special issue we draw on this idiom of co-production which enables us to ‘explore how knowledge-making is incorporated into practices of state-making, or of governance more broadly, and, in reverse, how practices of governance influence the making and use of knowledge’ (Jasanoff, 2004a, p. 3). Hence, this special issue investigates how actors from the Global North and the Global South such as experts, policymakers, civil servants, military and police officers, think tanks, civil society organisations, private actors and academics enter in a variety of alliances and coalitions that blur the dichotomous Global North–Global South boundaries, and the effects of their entanglements and relations through one central question: How are governance orders and security knowledges co-produced through transnational security assemblages?

3. BACKGROUND: KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN CRITICAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SECURITY STUDIES

The politics of security knowledge production has become increasingly popular as an object of study in Critical Security Studies (Aradau, 2017). It has coincided with various recent ‘turns’ in IR, including the ethnographic and practice turns which seek to understand how evidence and expertise are shaped by relations of power that are often embedded in organisational routines and seemingly self-evident practices. More generally, since the 2000s, the field of Critical Security Studies has challenged conventional definitions of ‘security’ and categorisations of threats and has reclaimed the political nature of the concept (Frowd & Sandor, 2018). From a state-centric idea of security focused on ‘objective’ material threats, security studies now emphasise the intersubjective process of construction and negotiation (Campbell, 1998; Hansen, 2006) and the discursive and performative construction of security (Buzan, Wæver, & De Wilde, 1998). Security policies do not merely respond to the ‘reality’ of their environment, but they are also the product of negotiation and (re)definition of what constitutes knowledge on security (Bigo, 2008). It has also been acknowledged that security knowledge is both social and technical (Frowd & Sandor, 2018). As a governing technology that emerges from the interaction of actors and that goes beyond specific individual interests and ideas, security is ‘embedded in training, routine, and technical knowledge and skills, as well as technological artefacts’ (Huysmans, 2006, p. 9).

A variety of studies have explored the sociological aspects of security as a political practice of knowledge production, such as works on the impact of epistemic communities on security policies (Bush & Duggan, 2014; Davis Cross, 2013; Howorth, 2004; Lemay-Hébert & Mathieu, 2014); the role of experts, expertise and security professionals (Beerli, 2018; Bigo, 2002; Bueger & Villumsen Berling, 2015; Danielsson, 2022; Leander, 2014; Oliveira Martins & Jumbert, 2022); the mechanisms and actors involved in knowledge production (Bueger, 2015; Bliesemann de Guevara & Kostić, 2017; Stepputat, 2012), as well as the role of academics in the production of security knowledge (Biersteker, 2010; Bueger & Bethke, 2014; Eriksson & Norman, 2011; Ish-Shalom, 2016). However, this work has been done mostly to study actors, knowledge and practices located in or elaborated in North America and Europe, as most of this work has studied European Union (EU) and US security agencies and their practices towards or in the South (Bigo et al., 2007; Bigo & Tsoukala, 2008; Doty, 2009; Prokkola, 2013).

A second strand of scholars has more specifically studied the epistemic authority of experts and organisations (Danielsson, 2020; Goetze, 2017; Littoz-Monnet, 2017) to analyse how and through which technologies dominant knowledge on international peacebuilding and interventions is established, maintained, and contested (Jeandesboz, 2017; Machold, 2020; Mac Ginty, 2017; Merry, 2016; Sending, 2015). These scholars have criticised that through knowledge production tools such as reports (Martín de Almagro, 2021; Merry, 2016), indicators and indices (Jaeger, 2010; Löwenheim, 2008; Martín de Almagro, 2021), ‘liberal’, ‘global’ or ‘international’ expertise encourages ‘de-politicized and de-contextualized engagements  …  that favour models that are already legible to the field and its “best practices”, rather than innovations that may extend or challenge the field as we know it’ (Nesiah, 2016, p. 34, cited in McAuliffe, 2017, p. 180). These ‘technologies of accountability’ (Merry, 2016) result in a disaggregation of social processes into standardised data from which the world ‘can be described, classified, understood and improved’ (Mignolo, 2005, p. 36). Moreover, international Global North experts count on their ability to present themselves as impersonal and neutral, as offering ‘objective truths of scientific knowledge’ to claim their authority and legitimacy to intervene in the name of ‘the universal, the public good, the general will’ (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004). This also includes the use of ‘objective’ jargon from Global North communities, such as ‘aid effectiveness’, ‘fragile states’ and ‘developing’ (Orbie, 2021) producing ‘a stable (white, patriarchal, heterosexual, classed) vantage point’ (McKittrick, 2006, p. xiv).

In an article that explored the work practices of the international non-governmental organization (NGO) International Crisis Group, Bliesemann de Guevara uses the notion of a ‘battlefield of ideas’, in which policy-relevant knowledge is produced and sold in a marketplace fashion by powerful ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2014) reducing the space to produce critical knowledge (Bliesemann de Guevara & Kostić, 2017) and creating ‘ignorance’ by silencing other perspectives (Bakonyi, 2018; Leander & Waever, 2019, pp. 1–11; McLeod, 2019). As Autesserre (2017) demonstrates, policymakers rely on international expertise and business as usual instead of on local, indigenous knowledge when an intervention becomes difficult. Therefore, it is not just that there is not a Malian, Nepalese or Afghan research group writing about local narratives of conflict and insecurity in these places, but also that from dominant perspectives, postcolonial, Black and any Other knowledges are hidden and made invisible, ‘out of sight’ and ‘out of place’ (Pain & Cahill, 2021, pp. 5–6).

3.1. Engaging local knowledges

Scholars from indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives have further criticised the idea of ‘knowledge transfer’ from the Global North to the Global South as a solution (Cooper & Packard, 1997, p. 2), the neoliberal culture and structural conditions under which such knowledge transfer is generated producing expert and data inertia through the use of numbers, benchmarks, rankings, indicators and other quantitative technologies (Martín de Almagro, 2021; Merry, 2016; Littoz-Monnet, 2017). They have claimed that these processes result in ‘epistemic injustice’ (Shilliam, 2016), because they reproduce the racial–epistemic conceptual hierarchies between ‘traditional’ versus ‘expert’ knowledge (Taylor, 2012, p. 393) that pervaded the administrative practices and technologies of rule of colonial territories and colonised people as ‘laboratories of modernity’ (Stoler & Cooper, 1997, p. 5). The result is segregating people between the modern, Western men with authority and legitimacy to produce rational, objective knowledge and all women as well as non-Western men, whose knowledges and experiences are considered as irrational, extraneous and as hindering ‘social progress’ (Harding, 2008). For these scholars, Western security knowledge production practices invest in ignorance, silencing alternative visions of life (Mignolo, 2012) that are plural and contested (Bustelo et al., 2016). As a result of these dual mechanisms of silencing, and speaking for and about an essentialised non-Western Other, the analytical potential of security knowledge is of ‘arguably limited empirical and political relevance for major parts of the non-western world’ (Buzan & Hansen, 2009, p. 19).

As a solution, critical and post-colonial scholars have sought to recognise the work of the subaltern as a ‘knowledge holder’ (Radcliffe & Radhuber, 2020) and to reach and incorporate authentic, experiential local knowledge into conflict analysis and security through surveys (Karim, 2019); oral history (Hale, 1991); informal storytelling (Baines & Stewart, 2011); and arts-based methods such as narrative feature film-making (Harman, 2018). Nevertheless, as Scott (1991, p. 779) explains, experience should not be taken as the origin of knowledge ready to be excavated and be used as a completement to expert knowledge by researchers or practitioners, since subjects themselves are constituted through experience. Therefore, experience is contestable and always political (Scott, 1991, p. 797) and there are multiple meanings for any of the concepts that are deployed (p. 793). As Alcoff has argued, experiences are ‘always experiences of as well as in the social world’ (Alcoff, 2018, p. 74). Basham (2013, p. 8) argues that ‘the problem is not so much the privileging of direct experience, but its privileging as though it were unmediated by wider relations, institutions and processes’. Thus, the recovery of local voices should be understood as part of broader relational assemblages linked with race, class, gender and histories of colonialism and imperialism, and can only provide ‘a partial glimpse into ongoing knowledge regimes’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 21). In other words, and as the contributions in this special issue demonstrate, the complex knowledges and experiences of subaltern subjects are not out there for grab, because they are also products of transnational mediated processes embedded within security assemblages and long-term processes of global governance that defy the traditional geographical and imaginary boundaries between the local and the international. This means, amongst other things, that local narratives are authentic, but they are translated into consolidated representations that can resonate to transnational audiences for security and peacebuilding-related activities (Curtis et al., 2022; Danielsson, 2023, in this issue).

3.2. Limits and potential of critical and postcolonial approaches to security knowledge production

While critical, postcolonial and decolonial security literature has thoroughly investigated how the South is marginalised or is selectively integrated in security knowledge production processes, there are certain limitations to their work. First, in order to offer their critique they have to do the very thing they are denouncing: to divide between the local and the international, and to speak ‘for’ those marginalised perspectives without exploring the ways in which the Global South is constructed by the ‘EuroAmerican professional intellectual’ (Jazeel & MacFarlane, 2010, p. 114) who often diagnoses the lack of epistemic diversity from a very abstract and macro-/metatheoretical analysis that rarely engages with empirical experiences and social practices (Hönke & Müller, 2012). In order to better understand how transnational security assemblages in a postcolonial world work in practice, we need research that combines theory with rich empirical content.

Second, critical, and postcolonial studies that focus specifically on North–South assemblages remain rare (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2009; Frowd & Sandor, 2018; Sandor, 2016). Even when these studies have been conducted, they have often concentrated on demonstrating how international actors and practices transform local ones, be it through co-optation or extraversion. The literature on global assemblages retains this particular focus which is why we have preferred the term transnational assemblages to global assemblages. Even though these works do not depict ‘the local’ as passive and unpack the politics through which global assemblages are made, the main focus remains on how ‘the global’ or ‘global forms’¹ – associated to the Global North and the products of modernity – are remaking various local/national contexts that are often identified as the Global South. Abrahamsen and Williams (2009, p. 6), for instance, are concerned with investigating the way in which ‘the global is inserted into the local’: tracing how Western-made shifts in global governance connect to shifts taking place in Africa (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2014, p. 28). In the same way, Ong and Collier’s (2005) edited volume on global assemblages investigates how variable contexts in the world are constituted through ‘the global’: exploring how global forms, ‘articulated in specific situations – or territorialized in assemblages’, ‘define new material, collective, and discursive relationships’ (Collier & Ong, 2005, p. 4).

Most often they are right that powerful global forms such as monitoring and evaluation procedures, SSR guidelines or intervention expertise contribute to reconfigure the state and security practices in the Global South. However, at the same time, this ‘global’ lens contributes to maintain a distinction between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ which might bring us to overlook how ‘the Global’ can also be transformed by, and not only be actualised in, ‘the local’ – thereby denying and simplifying the agency of subaltern actors in complex assemblages – and how these categories are often blurred in practice. Choosing transnational instead of global assemblages² forces us to consider how Global North–Global South categories are also made and reconfigured through these assemblages (Hönke & Müller, 2012). Audrey Reeves and Aiko Holvikivi provide a revealing case study of such complexity in this issue with the study of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda as a transnational security assemblage. On the one hand, they highlight how women refugees transform global understandings of women refugees as the WPS agenda provides them with opportunities to inform and re-construct local and transnational understandings of security, thereby unsettling stereotypical portrayals of refugee women as passive. On the other hand, they show how the WPS agenda constrains which activist can speak and what is acceptable to say. In the same way, while Global North–Global South boundaries are seemingly blurred by the symbol of Mina Jaf – founder and director of a migrant and refugee women’s organisation – who became the first conflict-affected woman based in the Global North to address the Security Council, the authors argue that the WPS agenda reinscribes global hierarchies by exclusively choosing women from the Global South to embody conflict affectedness at the Security Council.

We therefore retain two elements from these critical and postcolonial perspectives. First, we understand knowledge production assemblages on and about security as relational processes, and not as structures. The concepts of entangled and/or shared histories are essential for conceptualising the processuality, as well as the entangled histories of inequalities and oppressions in a transnational realm. In other words, some of the articles in this special issue, such as Salehi’s (2023, in this issue) and Reeves and Holvikivi’s (2023, in this issue), make visible and explore how the knowledge, practices and technologies of rule that were experimented with and developed in colonial territories and colonised people (Stoler & Cooper, 1997, p. 5), and that were reimported in the Global North, are still playing a significant role in the development of transnational security assemblages and governance orders.

Second, the articles understand these transnational security assemblages as multiscalar spaces. The focus on spatial multiscalar configurations is a condition sine qua non to avoid thinking of governance orders as container-like, territorially bounded entities. The mutual shaping of multiple spatial scales is studied as articulated within specific assemblages such as the postcolonial or post-socialist configurations. Thinking about the postcolonial condition implies moving beyond the static analytics of ‘bounded units’ and fixed territorial spaces (such as ‘the South’ or particular taken-for-granted world regions (Coronil, 1996; Mignolo, 2005).

4. OVERVIEW: THE CO-PRODUCTION OF GOVERNANCE ORDERS AND SECURITY KNOWLEDGES THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY ASSEMBLAGES

Building on this rich critical and post-colonial literature, this special issue goes one step further and brings together theory and empirical research to productively study and explain how security knowledges are (re)produced, negotiated, contested and blended, how they move across geographical, political and social spaces, and with what effects on security governance orders.

4.1. The production of socio-spatial formations: beyond binaries and dualisms

This special issue draws attention to the diversity of positions and roles of actors in security assemblages necessary for the production of socio-spatial formation such as security governance orders. Following Massey (2005, p. 101), we understand space as ‘the constant production of typologies of power’ which points to ‘the fact that different “places” will stand in contrasting relations to the global’. Looking at the production of space in terms of practices and relations forces us to acknowledge that ‘the local is implicated in the production of the global’ (p. 102) rather than only the other way around (‘the Global’ constituting ‘the local’). Yet, as we have seen, in Security Studies, we tend to focus on ‘the global’ understood as the domination of the Global North through the diffusion of global forms as a one-way process. Massey’s insights are important as they emphasise the co-formation of domination. In this issue, Danielsson (2023, in this issue) explores this topic as she shows that security assemblages are at the same time produced and situated in a particular setting, but are also globally enframed, and therefore, ‘portable’. For her, this also means that ‘what is claimed as “global” is necessarily made possible and at times transformed by the situated and the “local”, as much as vice-versa’.

Massey’s writings also warns us against thinking in terms of dichotomies such as ‘power’/‘resistance’ (or passivity), or against associating a particular place such as the Global South to a particular politics (‘resistance’) or interest – thus not romanticising it as being ‘good’ or refusing to recognise its implication in power (Massey, 2005, p. 103). Sandor’s (2016) study of border governance illustrates well this diversity of interests as the Senegalese actors he follows either support, subvert, or resist global practices of interventions in border control. Doucet (2016) also points to the limits of thinking that intervening states and their elite allies in the Global South are defined by unified material and institutional interests. More generally, this posture means acknowledging that actors in the Global South as much as in the Global North have diverse positions, implications and responsibilities in these assemblages as they are producing hegemonic projects aimed at governing the South such as development, the global war on terror, state-building, or the governance of migration. Tracing the practices of actors within transnational security assemblages enables the contributions of this special issue to recognise how situated subjects relate and connect from a variety of positions that are not defined by determined unified interests attached to Global North–Global South categories, and shed light on the production of security governance orders.

Working with transnational assemblages is thus an invitation to go beyond ‘binaries and dualisms’ such as state/non-states or human/non-human, or in our case ‘the global’/‘the local’ and Global North–Global South which enactment themselves require explanations (Bueger, 2014, p. 65). A way to do that according to political geographers is to turn our attention to how scales are constructed in assemblages: being ‘attentive to how scale or network, as particular spatial imaginaries, become key devices used by actors as they attempt to structure or narrate assemblages’ (McFarlane, 2009, p. 564; see also Allen & Cochrane, 2007; and Müller, 2015, on regional assemblages). References to ‘the local’ or the Global South are, for instance, often used by NGOs or social movements to legitimise their role or a particular expertise (McFarlane, 2009). Herpolsheimer (2023, in this issue) shows how African security governance is tightly linked to spatial imaginations about conflicts in Africa. Co-produced by actors from the Global North (the EU) and the Global South (West African states and organisations), the spatial imagination of ‘regional in/stability’ designates the regional level embodied by regional organisations as the right one to manage conflicts. By shaping spaces at regional and interregional scales in West Africa and enabling interregional practices, this spatial imagination has led to an increasing interconnection between West Africa and Europe in the field of security governance, in practice blurring the lines between these actors and spaces (on spatial imaginations and security governance, see also Baldaro & Lucia, 2022).

In Herpolsheimer’s case study, this spatial imagination was also key for West African actors to gain legitimacy and increasing financial support from the EU and other Northern donor agencies. More generally, references to ‘the global’, the ‘international’ or global forms such as ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’ or ‘the war on terror’ has become a common strategy used by elites to pursue their political projects, gain power, and construct governance orders. The literature on extraversion in Africa has analysed these strategies at length. Bayart (2000) shows how African leaders have leveraged their collaboration with, and aligned on, external actors’ – whether former colonial powers and other states, the EU, international institutions or international NGOs – priorities and norms such as ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’ or ‘the war on terror’, in exchange for political and symbolic support, and financial resources (see Jourde, 2007, on democracy). The war on terror has become an important resource enabling and reinforcing the possibilities for these extraversion strategies (Fisher, 2012; Ricard, 2017; Tull, 2011).

The literature on internationalisation also explores how individuals from the elite in the Global South deploy internationalisation strategies – for instance, studying in prestigious academic institutions in the Global North (Dezalay & Garth, 2002), working in institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank (Guillot, 2005), or training in Northern war schools such as the School of the Americas (Gill, 2004) – which enables them to become ‘transnational brokers’ by connecting politicians, academics, think tanks, foundations or international institutions from the Global North to their national settings (Dezalay, 2004). These actors who play this double game, national and international, have the capacity to both use their access to institutions in the Global North – being ‘international’ – as a resource in their national spaces and use their knowledge of national realities to become necessary brokers for external actors (Siméant, 2003). As Baldaro and D’Amato (2023, in this issue) show, local staff of the Malian Ministry of Religious Affairs who took part in a transnational project on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism in Malian prisons made themselves indispensable to carry out the project, while also managing to negotiate, influence and bargain the transformation of a future project that suits their interests and needs better.

These internationalisation strategies are characterised by the importation of ‘universal’ knowledge (global form) from the North used by factions of the Global South elite in their national power struggles. This importation of ‘state-knowledge’ transforms the state while disrupting or reproducing social hierarchies (Dezalay, 2004; Dezalay & Garth, 2002; Siméant, 2003) These strategies of extraversion or internationalisation (re)enact Global North–Global South boundaries inasmuch as they are narrated by the actors deploying these strategies; while also blurring them as these actors, their practices, and the states, institutions or the governance orders that emerge from these strategies become hybrid entities that cannot fit into these categories anymore. This is well illustrated by Baldaro and d’Amato (2023, in this issue) who show how ‘local’ experts sit in-between the local and the international through their participation to externally funded prevention and countering violent extremism projects in Mali to gain legitimacy, financial resources and position themselves in the Malian state field. Similarly, Salehi (2023, in this issue) found that Tunisian transitional justice experts diverted the trainings and workshops provided by international actors on, for instance, how to establish evidence for the purpose of truth commission work, to learn about things they were interested about. In other words, knowledge transmission and production provided discursive tools to Tunisian members of the transnational assemblage to formulate demands and access transnational resources.

It is thus important to understand transnational security assemblages as unfolding across space and tying all these actors into the making of security governance orders. This calls for ‘a politics of specificity’ (Massey, 2005, p. 103) that acknowledges implication, responsibilities, and a variety of positions, practices, and interests within these assemblages. For Massey (2005, p. 148), this allows for an effective politics which ‘pays attention to the fact that entities and identities  …  are collectively produced through practices which form relations; and it is on the practices and relations that politics must be focused’. It is only by focusing on the negotiation of relations and geographies of power in the making of domination that we can understand and challenge its stability and grasp its transformation (Jasanoff, 2004b).

4.2. Studying transnational security assemblages

Highlighting ‘the often-invisible role of knowledge, expertise, technical practices and material objects in shaping, sustaining, subverting or transforming relations of authority’ (Jasanoff, 2004a, p. 4), this special issue shades light on the production of knowledge within transnational security assemblages as a process of socio-political (re-)ordering and transformation which underpins and (re)allocates legitimacy and authority. The (re)allocation of authority and legitimacy participates to (re)distribute agencies and can (re)shape hierarchies, sovereignty and autonomy in governance orders. In turn, as these processes of (re-)ordering produce identities, subjectivities, institutions and orders, they delineate and constrain the kind of knowledge that can be produced (Felt et al., 2014; Jasanoff, 2004b). Opening the black box of these processes to explore transnational security assemblages is not an easy endeavour. Drawing on assemblage thinking, the contributions of this special issue draw on in-depth empirical work as they aim to identify new or shifting configurations of heterogeneous elements that ‘always become capable of different things’ (Nail, 2017, p. 26).

In particular, understanding the co-production of security knowledge and governance orders means studying the groups which are producing and negotiating the knowledge that underpins new policies, institutions and orders (Daho & Vauchez, 2020; Siméant, 2003). Indeed, knowledges ‘are forged in the context of their “circulation”, in direct and continuous contact with their users’ (Vauchez, 2013, p. 13); they are not transplanted as such but go through ‘a whole work of translation and mediation’ (Dezalay, 2004, p. 25) of various interests to facilitate their pooling. Identifying and localising these groups thus enable the authors to better understand the social conditions of negotiation, circulation, and diffusion of knowledge throughout these assemblages. By following this circulation, they study how things gain a truth effect, how it is possible for them to be scaled up, move across diverse domains, gain an authoritative status, and constitute particular geographies of power (Collier, 2014, p. 34). The contributions of this special issue thus share an ethnographic gaze, common in assemblage thinking, that implies an attention to the practices of actors (Collier & Ong, 2005; Li, 2007): ‘the mundane activities of doings and sayings by which realities are enacted, relations are built, and ordering takes place’ (Bueger, 2014, p. 65). The contributors draw from long-term, deep, and original field research that cross various geographical and issue areas: from state-building to the war on terror, interregional security governance, migration and asylum, transitional justice, and post-war urban security. For each case, they explore how knowledge is produced, reconfigured and circulates through these assemblages, how social hierarchies are (re)produced, and how security governance orders emerge or transform. Building on various literatures on security knowledge production, assemblage, international interventions, STS, and Political Geography, the articles make it possible to apprehend the entanglement of the Global North and Global South and to overcome simplistic binaries and asymmetries of ‘the local’ versus ‘the global’, all while keeping in sight power and normativity implications.

In the first article, and inspired by Latour’s (1990) ‘inmutable mobiles’, Danielsson (2023, in this issue) combines urban studies in peacebuilding with science and technology studies to argue that urban peacebuilding knowledge is at the same time produced and situated in a very particular setting, in which local needs and perspectives are put to the front, ‘albeit in a particular and narrow epistemic manner’ that is portable, because globally enframed in discourses, technologies and artefacts brought by international funding and actors, that makes the global possible and constituted in and through the local. She illustrates what she calls a ‘situated-portable epistemic nexus’ by reconstructing a peacebuilding project that unfolded in Pristina in 2015–17 which sought to transform a green market into a stake park and urban park.

In the second article, Herpolsheimer (2023, in this issue) investigates the multiple, interconnected sites, actors, practices and spatial imaginaries of ECOWAS–EU interregionalism. In particular, he analyses here two sets of practices. On the one hand, he shows that the practices of designing and spatially framing EU funding for programmes in support of African regional organisations, and efforts specifically by ECOWAS actors to position themselves towards them (cooperatively or resistantly), have produced the overarching rules governing interregional relations. On the other hand, the practices resulting from staff support to the ECOWAS Commission have involved African individuals on ‘both sides’, aiming to make these relations work while building capacities and implementing projects. As a result, the lines have often become blurred between the ECOWAS and EU. The article thus connects academic debates on international practices and critical geography to develop a new perspective on transnational and transregional security assemblages by emphasising the role of practices and their intimate connection to space-making at regional and interregional scales.

In the third paper, Baldaro and D’Amato (2023, in this issue) offer a fine-grained analysis of an international prevention and countering violent extremism project implemented in Mali between 2018 and 2021 to investigate the construction of a transnational counterterrorism assemblage. They zoom in the dynamics of reappropriation, negotiation, bargaining, and knowledge production between the local and international actors participating in the project to demonstrate how these dynamics not only resulted in changes in the practical delivery of the project and the reframing of the methodology and purpose of its iterations, but also translated into an acquisition of political authority and legitimacy for Malian actors at the domestic level. They argue that to gain concrete information about the way counterterrorism works and is produced, we need to analyse how the transnational expert community participates in practice to the creation of this security assemblage and the interactions that take place within it.

Through an exploration of the post-2011 Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC) to bring light into the atrocities committed during Ben Ali’s regime and the concept of confined knowledge flows, Salehi (2023, in this issue) explains how a variety of actors from the Global North and the Global South determined how knowledge on the past travels and is shared. Using empirical examples illustrating how in practice knowledge flows are confined through workshops, trainings and infrastructure, she analyses the ways in which these knowledge flows constrain which knowledge is made relevant and who gets access to discursive and material resources. She characterises these knowledge flows as ambivalent as they enable and limit at the same time. Indeed, while the confinement of knowledge functions as a form of control and contributes to the reproduction of the (neo-)liberal politics of transitional justice that privilege particular forms of knowledge and ‘truths’, and visions for the future over other, she also argues that this does not mean that institutionalised transitional justice cannot be used to support a more radical vision of justice and structural transformations.

In the last contribution, Reeves and Holvikivi (2023, in this issue) offer a multiscalar and processual understanding of transnational security networks of women refugee activists. The article explores how women forcibly displaced by conflict from their home countries to the Global North now influence security policy and are recognised as experts by state institutions and international organisations. Although the agency these women have gained within the Women, Peace and Security transnational assemblage has been constrained by conventional representations of women and particular liberal modes of doing politics. Through an examination of the work of women refugees after settlement, this last article not only broadens empirical understandings of security experiences, but also challenges stereotypical representations of refugee women as passive victims, and questions Global North–Global South boundaries.

In sum, this special issue calls for new theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that are sensitive to the particularities of security knowledge production under postcolonial and post-socialist conditions and that can shed light on the transformation of security governance orders. In contrast to rigid juxtapositions of North versus South, rational versus experiential knowledge, understanding the politics of security knowledge in a fragmented postcolonial world requires recognising knowledge production as entangled in shared histories of inequalities and oppressions. This is because the postcolonial condition is embedded in the construction of security knowledge and practices in all the spaces where security governance is also shaped by external agents. The focus is therefore on security assemblages as multiscalar constellations of actors (local, national, transnational, global) whose borders are fuzzy and everchanging, moving beyond the static analytics of ‘bounded units’ of knowledge producers such as the ‘South’, the ‘local’ or the ‘international’ (Coronil, 1996; Mignolo, 2005).The result is, therefore, a revealing of the entangled processes of security knowledge production in ways that do not deny differences in how security actors imagine and construct the world, but that avoid at the same time essentialisation and exoticisation.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Global forms’ are systems of governance and administration, regimes of ethics and values, technoscience, expert systems or standards that have a ‘global’ quality in the sense that they have ‘a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations’ that they participate to reconstitute (Collier, 2014, p. 400).

2 McFarlane (2009, p. 562) who criticises Collier and Ong (2005) for implicitly making a distinction between forms as ‘global’ and assemblages as ‘local’ proposes to use the prefix ‘translocal’ as an ‘attempt to blur, if not bypass, the scalar distinction between local and global’ to analyse social movements. We prefer using ‘transnational’ as it reflects better the scale of analysis of the contributions.