US militarization in Africa: What anthropologists should know about AFRICOM

Abstract

While portrayed by the US as the rationalisation of its post‐Cold War global military command structure, AFRICOM is revealed as the culmination of a ten‐year thought process within the US Department of Defense, during which time Africa's strategic importance to the US has undergone several reappraisals as a result of the US's increasing need to secure African resources, notably oil; its global war on terror (GWOT) and China's growing investment on the continent. In the wake of 9/11, the US militarisation of Africa was justified in terms of its GWOT. However, this has become increasingly difficult as Africa, apart from the Maghreb and incidents in East Africa, has been relatively free of terrorism. Consequently, many of the ‘terrorist’ incidents in Africa, notably those in the western half of the Sahara‐Sahel, were either grossly exaggerated or fabricated. Far from bringing development and security to this part of Africa, as AFRICOM claims, the US's militarisation of this region over the last 5‐6 years (through its Pan‐Sahel Initiative, Trans‐Saharan Counter‐Terrorism Initiative and now AFRICOM) brought increased insecurity, repression, economic and social disruption, political destabilisation and ultimately armed rebellions to a hitherto relatively tranquil region. Since 2005‐6, the US has shifted its justification for the militarisation of the continent from the GWOT and counter‐terrorism to the more humanitarian security‐development discourse. This apparent paradigmatic shift, which presents AFRICOM as more benign than it really is, is part of the Bush administration's ‘information war’ and designed to mask the true purpose of Africom. The article explains the false premises on which the security‐development discourse is constructed, its serious consequences for the people of Africa and the implications that both this discourse and the way it is being used by AFRICOM have for anthropologists.

The Long Green Revolution

“…Anecdotal evidence suggests a 'new scramble for Africa', in which the interests of states and of private sector firms with some attachments to that nation often align. In response to Chinese investment, the US is advancing soft power in Africa and building AFRICOM, a combined joint-forces headquarters with particular interests in protecting new finds of mineral and oil wealth (Keenan 2008).…”

Corporate Social Responsibility in the Zambian mining sector: an overview of three distinctive operational eras

“…Haglund (2010) suggests that one main difference between the Western companies and the Chinese is that, whilst Western companies seek operational stability with stakeholders directly, Chinese investors prefer to operate through close relationships with the Presidency, relying on the Zambian state to broker its wider social relationship. This is exemplified by the fact that by 2006 China had become the third largest investor in the country after South Africa and Great Britain in addition to the extensive investment in infra-structure across the African continent (Keenan, 2008).…”

A fusão entre segurança e desenvolvimento no setor da educação: discursos e efeitos

“…Since the mid2000s, many of the major international development agencies, such as DFID, USAID, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, CIDA, AusAID, have developed a new policy related to international development assistance known as the "3D" approach (Diplomacy, Defense and Development), which seeks to integrate and embed development assistance within national diplomatic and security priorities. This "3D" approach appears to be institutionalizing the previously ad-hoc process of the merging of security and development within Western governments' aid policy (Keenan, 2008). While the '3D' approach to development interventions is often discursively presented as a logical development to ensure policy coherence, and also as a means of vindicating the importance of international development assistance, concerns have been raised about the relative power of the different dimensions of foreign policy making.…”