Actually Existing Security: The Political Economy of the Saharan Threat

Abstract

The transformation of Saharan populations into an object of global security is analysed as a specific instance of security's expansion globally, as well as of its merger with development, understood as a side-effect of the former. It is shown that the search for threats in the Sahara, and the establishment of surveillance apparatuses, is a precondition for the detection and discursive production of these threats. Security, through its production of knowledge, manages to objectify what had hitherto constituted a borderland of knowledge and government. The securitization of the Sahara and its populations creates a field of intervention for diverse agents of security and development. However, it does so not as part of a coherent global regime of control, but on its own specific and random terms, within a political economy of danger that is the product of discursive and material struggles. The securitization of the Sahara, it is argued, should be seen as actually existing security — that is, a complex of security practices serving diverse interests, with contradictory and open-ended outcomes.

Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT Strategy

“…Wolfram Lacher has analysed the processes by which Saharan populations became objects of official knowledge production, post‐9/11. He found that security concerns about the Sahara and its borderlands had less to do with information about worrying developments there than with the absence of information and the illegibility of the area for surveillance apparatuses (Lacher 2008, 384). The Sahara rapidly became a governable entity through its constitution as a ‘breeding ground for terrorism’.…”

“…An intimate relationship therefore exists between knowledge as the constitutor of threats, the creator of its own field of intervention and action (Lacher 2008, 387–388), and opacity, or illegibility. It is fear of the unknown that creates a ‘will to knowledge’; knowledge which when produced constitutes a governable entity.…”

Transnationally entangled (in)securities: The UAE, Turkey, and the Saharan political economy of danger

“…Since the early 2000s, the Sahel region of West Africa has come increasingly to be seen by Western countries as the epicenter of a 'political economy of danger': security knowledge initially generated through US intelligence made risks connected to terrorism and transnational crime legible and thereby discursively produced the very security threats that surveillance meant to detectsimultaneously rendering them objects of Western security governance (Lacher, 2008). Much in line with threat conceptions at the time and the broadening of the security threat catalogue after Cold War bipolarity, Sahelian security threats were conceptualized in Western policy discourse and responses as 'illicit flows' (Castells, 2010;Stambøl, 2021).…”

The Expansion of Prevent: On The Politics of Legibility, Opacity And Decolonial Critique

“…In making this case she cited the work of Lacher who drew on Scott and Foucault. 11 Lacher argued that the opacity of Saharan populations was perceived as a threat to states with this resulting in the drive by a variety of states to render those populations legible in order to control them. Where it cannot bureaucratically 'see', the state cannot properly control.…”