Security Infrastructures

This special edition of Politikon extends recent theoretical and empirical engagements with infrastructure in the social sciences to the field of critical security studies (CSS). Infrastructure may be conceived of in the narrowest sense, like roads, airports, and so forth. The definition of infrastructure, as has been the case in recent years in the social sciences more broadly, can however be extended to physical and metaphysical structures that allow ideas, people, objects, and practices to circulate, or not. Infrastructures may enable and disable the mobility of different objects. As such, infrastructure materialises discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, these circulations are the target of securitising moves that aim at the protection of objects but ultimately aim to enable and manifest political and social hierarchies in the usage of infrastructure. Infrastructures are at the same time an important part of the practices of securitisation, for example, through surveillance tools that produce awareness of insecurities. This, in turn, legitimises interventions into ongoing circulations. Infrastructure may also be the referent object of securitisation and at the same time a means through which the need for securitisation is produced. Although the state is the actor investing the most in public infrastructure, all kinds of actors and agents, such as private security firms, security experts and investors can be assembled or clustered together through everyday politics. There is, in a sense, a constant field of security practices in which several non-state actors intervene into the making and managing of infrastructures. Adopting an infrastructural imaginary, that is, taking this extended view of infrastructure as enabling and curtailing circulation, as a lens through which to view security, is the focus of the set of papers included in this edition.

The renewed attention infrastructures have received in the social sciences, not least, applies to CSS, which have begun to interrogate the significance both of the rise of security infrastructures in societies the world over – CCTV, commercial security companies, control and prediction algorithms and so on – and of the declaration of infrastructures as potentially fatally threatened objects, as the recent ubiquity of talk on ‘critical infrastructures’ – that is, infrastructures which are deemed to provide vital services for a given polity and society – testifies. Historical research has underlined that the concept of infrastructure is a formidably modernist notion, invoking social imaginaries that refer to state control over territory, complete accessibility of and for the population and a mobilisation of flows of people, symbols, objects, matter, and value tokens. The concept of infrastructure thus overlaps with the biopolitical understanding that the task of a modern polity primarily resides in its capacity to secure the life and wellbeing of its population. It is thus no wonder that there is a family resemblance between the infrastructural imaginary and the imaginary of the modern state – a resemblance where understandings of full functionality, accessibility, and completeness of infrastructural services meet understandings of the state as the seat of sovereignty, providing security, and safety for ‘its’ population. The recent invocation of ‘critical infrastructures’ that has gained currency the world over may thus be viewed not only as a reaction to crisis perceptions (mainly, in western/northern liberal-capitalist democracies) but also as the crystallisation of a systematic, if latent, proneness of infrastructures to become addressed with demands regarding security and safety.

Against this background, CSS has an elective affinity to questioning the modernist infrastructural imaginary. As CSS renders any notion of essential security doubtful, and with it the traditional seat of such security which is the modern state, it also critically interrogates the infrastructural imaginary and its claims at totality, completeness, integration, cohesion, and functionality. From a CSS perspective, any call to secure infrastructures, and any project to set up security infrastructures, will be critically addressed both as an attempt to manifest sovereignty through the rigidity of control and as a manoeuvre camouflaging blatant malfunctions and inefficacies of infrastructures. To set up security infrastructures might signal a claim to being-in-total-control more than an attempt to alleviate structural causes of insecurity. In turn, to declare infrastructures as being endangered by some vital threat might distract the attention from their actual insufficiency, defectiveness, and damages caused by unequal access to them. An analysis of security infrastructures and the securitisation of infrastructures thus exposes the service that security talk does to the shifting of political agendas away from issues of justice, accessibility, and redistribution to such of control, fencing, and keeping the status quo.

This volume aims to theorise and empirically explore how practices and understandings of security and infrastructure are intertwined. It explores this problematic through empirical work in different fields and in diverse ways.

Andreas Langenohl addresses the recent labelling of the financial economy as ‘critical infrastructure’ by ever more governments, in particular with a view to how this label is bound to shift the politico-economic understanding of the economic functionality of financial markets. Imagined as a critical infrastructure which is vulnerable to outside attacks, the role of financial markets and institutions in the political economy is reframed as an indispensable provider of basic calculative services such as price formation and value assessment. This not only distracts the attention from the genuine financial dangers associated with unregulated securities markets but upgrades their unimpeded mode of operation to a vital concern for the entire economy and society. Langenohl argues that this is an example of how the securitisation of infrastructure co-constitutes the differentiation of allegedly ‘functional’ sectors, thus intervening into the very texture of society.

Jürgen Schraten explores the financial infrastructures of the South African consumer credit market after apartheid. His crucial argument is that, notwithstanding legislative changes, the principle of the securing of property as the cornerstone of the South African consumer credit market was left untouched, leading to a skewed responsibilisation of the borrowers alone in cases of credit default. One condition of possibility for this persistence of a rigorist interpretation of the property principle was the framing of the indispensability of full property rights by regulatory and discursive prioritisations revolving around the figure of the responsible and informed borrower as the sole taker of default risks, effectively sidelining the problematic of reckless borrowing. The article concludes on the argument that South Africa’s consumer credit legislation displays the signs of a ‘disagreement’, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, between lenders and borrowers that are only incompletely concealed by a credit infrastructure imagined in terms of property.

In dialogue with Andreas Langenohl and Jürgen Schraten, Cecilia Schultz approaches finance as a discursive infrastructure that is integral to the articulation and circulation of value. Focusing on the Marikana massacre that took place at a South African platinum mine on the 16 August 2012, this explores how circuits of value, mediated by financial markets, configure economic geographies of production and exchange. These geographies, or spatial fixes (Harvey 1989), are the sites where the materialisation of value takes place. These territorial assemblages, however, tend to rework and realign socio-spatial relations and identities in highly unequal and uneven ways. In the case of the Marikana massacre, this assemblage of value creation interacted with a historical legacy of apartheid, whereby mines were crucial sites of capitalist expansion that depended on the exploitation of cheap, black labour. The financialisation of the mining industry in post-apartheid South Africa reworked this historical geography of capitalism by forcing mining firms to cut production costs through contract employments and wage stagnation. This socio-spatial organisation of capital accumulation is inherently unstable, and indeed, created the conditions for its own decay and obsolescence. This article, therefore, exposes how infrastructures of financial flows create spaces of exclusion and immobility in the geographies through which they circulate. However, like any infrastructural functioning, this is a precarious achievement. Moments of disruption, like the Marikana massacre, therefore offers a ‘vantage point’ to interrogate the politics of flow and connection, of mobility and immobility that shape socioeconomic life.

Amina Nolte and Carola Westermeier draw on the concept of co-constitution, adopted from Science and Technology Studies, in order to account for the interrelation of public and private security actors in the field of infrastructural protection. Methodologically they draw on focussed ethnography during a security conference that brought international representatives of public authorities together with representatives of companies devising security technologies for cities. Nolte and Westermeier’s major contribution lies in the argument that private and public security actors and institutions form entanglements that not only collectively securitise city infrastructure but that become constituted in their different rationalities and responsibilities in the very process of cooperation.

Gideon van Riet explores the role of private security companies (PSCs) in Potchefstroom, South Africa. By drawing on Foucault’s reading of Hobbes he argues that South Africa is not at war, but in a state of war following the rearticulation of conflict via the social contract. Within this setting, PSCs are intertwined with social media and other technologies that intermediate between populations of different strata and as such between conflict and security. Therefore, these companies serve to shield a small minority from an enduring low-intensity conflict in a democratic setting, while other population groups are relegated to spaces of insecurity. To stabilise the situation greater integration of adversarial groups is required.

Finally, Natheem Hendriks analyses newspapers as infrastructures that along with experts, including various think tanks and mainstream scholarly publications, construct and circulate notions of security and threat. The (in)famous ‘A clash of civilizations?’ article by Samuel Huntington is a case in point of the latter. He draws on discourse analytical tools and argues that in South Africa, certain publications have securitised Muslims as a security threat. Consequently, the South African press is complicit in enabling the war on terror. But, this threat cannot be taken for granted and should be viewed as the outcome of a political process of social construction. Contrary to securitisation theory, the process of securitising Muslims in South Africa does not lead to an immediate response. The response from security actors has rather been gradual.