Development, Security and Unending War Governing the World of Peoples

Abstract

For some years I have been aware that development and security interconnect. It is only now, however, after completing this book, that I fully realize how enduring and essential this relationship is. Usually experienced as a benign and practical act of helping others, development is a technology of security that is central to liberal forms of power and government. The benevolence with which development cloaks itself – its constant invocation of rights, freedom and the people – conceals a stubborn will to manage and contain disorder rather than resolve it. Development seeks to control and ameliorate the unintended consequences of progress such as destitution, environmental collapse or humanitarian disasters. Given the constant making and remaking of societies demanded by progress, development is particularly concerned with those groups and communities that, through the contingencies of poverty, gender or lack of voice, regularly find themselves superfluous, redundant or short of the requirements to live an acceptable life. Development exerts a moral and educative trusteeship over this surplus life. Through coaching in the prudent arts of freedom, it is made complete, useful and governable. As a technology of security, development traces its genealogy in the constant need to reconcile the demand for order with the contingencies of progress. As such, it provides a liberal alternative to extermination or eugenics: modernity’s other solutions to the problem of surplus population. Development has consequently always existed in relation to a state of emergency or exception. Today, for example, Afghanistan is being pacified militarily so that aid agencies can operate and secure civilian loyalties. This is not a random connection; development has always been linked with what we now understand as counterinsurgency.