A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and the Security of Supply Chains

Abstract

In recent years, U.S. military and civilian agencies have been rethinking security in the context of globalized production and trade. No longer lodged in a conflict between territorial borders and global flows, national security is increasingly a project of securing supranational systems. The maritime border has been a critical site for experimentation, and a spate of new policy is blurring “inside” and “outside” national space, reconfiguring border security, and reorganizing citizenship and labor rights. These programs seek to govern integrated economic space while they resurrect borders and sanction new forms of containment. Forces that disrupt commodity flows are cast as security threats with labor actions a key target of policy. Direct connections result between market rule created to secure logistic space and the broader project of neoliberalism. Even as neoliberalism is credited with expanding capitalist markets and market logics, it is logistics that have put the cold calculation of cost at the center of the production of space. Since World War II, logistics experts have conceptualized economy anew by spatializing cost–benefit analysis and applying systems analysis to distribution networks. The “revolution in logistics” has changed how space is conceived and represented, and transformed the practical management of supply chains. Historically a military technology of war and colonialism abroad, today logistics lead rather than support the strategies of firms and the security of nations across transnational space. These shifts have implications for the geopolitics of borders and security but also for social and political forms premised on the territory and ontology of national space.

Las entidades militares y civiles de los EE.UU. han estado repensando recientemente la seguridad dentro del contexto de producción y comercio globalizados. Al dejar de estar circunscrita a un conflicto entre fronteras territoriales y flujos globales, la seguridad nacional se ha convertido cada vez más en un proyecto para la protección de sistemas supranacionales. El límite marítimo ha sido un lugar crítico de experimentación, y un torrente de nuevas políticas está dejando su marca “dentro” y “fuera” del espacio nacional, reconfigurando la seguridad fronteriza y reorganizando los derechos de ciudadanía y del trabajo. Estos programas buscan gobernar el espacio económico integrado, a tiempo que resucitan fronteras y sancionan nuevas formas de cerramiento. Las fuerzas que perturban el flujo de mercaderías son culpadas como amenazas a la seguridad y las acciones laborales vistas como como un crucial objetivo de políticas. Ahí aparecen conexiones directas entre la norma del mercado creada para asegurar el espacio logístico y el más amplio proyecto del neoliberalismo. Aunque al neoliberalismo se le da crédito por expandir los mercados capitalistas y la dialéctica del mercado, las logísticas son las que ha aportado como central el frío cálculo del costo en la producción del espacio. A partir de la II Guerra Mundial, los expertos en logística han conceptualizado de nuevo la economía, espacializando el costo–análisis de beneficio y aplicación del análisis de sistemas a las redes de distribución. La “revolución de la logística” ha cambiando la manera como se concibe y se representa el espacio y ha transformado el manejo práctico de las cadenas de aprovisionamiento. Lo que históricamente fuera una tecnología militar de guerra y colonialismo en el extranjero, es ahora la logística que en vez de dar apoyo lidera la estrategia de las firmas y la seguridad de las naciones en el espacio trasnacional. Estos cambios tienen implicaciones para la geopolítica y seguridad de las fronteras, pero también para las formas sociales y políticas establecidas como premisas del territorio, y para la ontología del espacio nacional.

Key Words:

• borders
• citizenship
• geopolitics
• logistics
• port security

关键词:

• 边界
• 公民
• 地缘政治
• 后勤
• 港口的安全

Palabras clave:

• fronteras
• ciudadanía
• geopolítica
• logística
• seguridad portuaria

Acknowledgments

A postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada made this research possible. My sincere thanks go to Tim Mitchell and the participants of NYU's International Center for Advanced Studies 2006–2007 seminar “Rethinking the Social” for productive feedback on the first draft of this article, and to Audrey Kobayashi, Neil Smith, Steve Graham, and the three blind reviewers for incredibly rigorous and generous readings of later drafts. I thank Byron Moldofsky in the Cartography Lab at the University of Toronto for adapting the DHS map on very short notice.

Notes

1. The Office for Homeland Security was created in October 2001 and was later reorganized into the Department of Homeland Security, which became operational in January 2003.

2. Please see http://www.secureportamericas.com/ (last accessed 11 August 2009).

3. I thank one of the blind reviewers for pushing me to conceptualize the project in this way.

4. Colonel Ralph Peters retired from the U.S. Army in 1998 and is a prolific public commentator on military affairs.

5. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Goss is an active duty officer in the U.S. Army currently serving on the International Military Staff at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. For the last four years, Lieutenant Colonel Goss has been a Strategic Plans and Policy officer working on issues of homeland defense and homeland security while assigned to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Goss received a PhD in history from Ohio State University and recently graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School with a master's degree in homeland security.

6. Ports that are currently operational within the CSI include Buenos Aires, Argentina; Freeport, the Bahamas; Antwerp and Zeebrugge, Belgium; Santos, Brazil; Montreal, Vancouver, and Halifax, Canada; Hong Kong, Shenzen, and Shanghai, China; Cartagena, Colombia; Caucedo, Dominican Republic; Alexandria, Egypt; Le Havre and Marseille, France; Bremerhaven and Hamburg, Germany; Piraeus, Greece; Puerto Cortes, Honduras; Ashdod and Haifa, Israel; La Spezia, Genoa, Naples, Gioia Tauro, and Livorno, Italy; Kingston, Jamaica; Yokohama, Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe, Japan; Port Klang and Tanjung Pelepas, Malaysia; Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Port Salalah, Oman; Port Qasim, Pakistan; Balboa, Colon, and Manzanillo, Panama; Lisbon, Portugal; Singapore; Durban, South Africa; Busan (Pusan), South Korea; Algeciras, Barcelona, and Valencia, Spain; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Gothenburg, Sweden; Kaohsiung and Chi-Lung, Taiwan; Laem Chabang, Thailand; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Felixstowe, Liverpool, Thamesport, Tilbury, and Southampton, United Kingdom.

7. My discussion centers on some of the most significant recent programs to be developed after 2001. For details of a range of other recent border security programs see CRS (2005b).

8. Although a number of scholars have been working in the tradition of “critical geopolitics” that aims to contest that national form and imperial purpose. See, for instance, Dalby (1999), Hyndman (2004), and O Tuathail (1996).

9. This is the case outside the United States, too. For instance, one of five key objectives of Canada's 2001 Anti-Terrorism Plan is “to keep the Canada–U.S. border secure and open to legitimate trade.” See http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/anti-terrorism/canadaactions-en.asp.

10. Jomini (2009, 241) wrote, “If it is agreed that the old logistics had reference only to details of marches and camps, and, moreover, that the functions of staff officers at the present day are intimately connected with the most important strategical combinations, it must be admitted that logistics includes but a small part of the duties of staff officers; and if we retain the term we must understand it to be greatly extended and developed in signification, so as to embrace not only the duties of ordinary staff officers, but of generals-in-chief.”

11. In 1985, the National Council of Physical Distribution Management became the Council of Logistics Management, which has 11,500 members (an increase of 248 percent since 1985). The name was changed to recognize that logistics was the most encompassing term that described the management of a firm's acquiring and distributing activities over space (specifically to include both inbound and outbound materials as well as management of the work itself).