Privatizing Security in the Central African Republic
The growth of a private security industry in Africa is a not a recent development. But the growth of a local one deserves particular attention. My article, ‘Local Dynamics of Security in Africa: The Central African Republic and Private Security,’ in African Security Review surveys some of the actors of an ascending private sector in one specific country, the Central African Republic.
It studies two main issues; the first relates to the political economy of private and public security. What is the state of the local private sector and where does it operate? What are the different commercial policies and hiring strategies? What is the relation with the traditional policing institutions? These questions are addressed in a perspective that advances the traditional literature–which has focused primarily on private military and security firms intervening outside their country of origin, mostly non-African actors intervening in the African continent. The companies I interviewed are instead local firms; their recruitment is also local. My research also shows that the increase in private security is matched by a declining strength of public forces. A dwindling proportion of the national budget is allocated to security in the last two decades. A larger question is whether the ‘market for force’ produced “˜externalities’, that is whether there is a direct connection between the rise of one sector and the collapse of the other. This cannot be unambiguously shown. Yet, a skewed distribution of security plagues the country–i.e. PSCs have the same unevenly distributed territorial presence as the public forces.
The second question that I study relates to the presence of a specific discourse and a techno-managerial vocabulary of security that aims at depoliticizing security thus posing a real danger of self-perpetuation of supply. Some biased characterizations involve a reconfiguration of international political opinions at the micro-level. They reflect the discourse of commentators who associated the situation in Chad and the CAR to Darfur. Incidents occurring in Chad and the Central African Republic are thus incorporated into the “˜genocide in Darfur’ story and a supposed danger of genocide is thus paradoxically integrated into the list of dangers and hazards to insure against. I conclude that although private security firms hardly present a silver lining for unravelling conflicts, the study of the sector is significant in Africa’s weak states where forces that operate outside the formal state boundaries play increasingly important roles.
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As a PhD student who has been studying the Central African Republic (CAR) for more than five years, I’m always pleased when colleagues direct their glance toward this under-studied corner of the world. Marco Boggero’s article left me a bit perplexed, though: of all the countries that fulfill the his statement “private security sector constitutes a rising and local component of the ailing security sector” (p. 25) why did he choose to focus on CAR? At times, I almost had trouble recognizing CAR in the analysis he sets out. Unlike in some other countries in the region, members of the PSCs he describes (Fox, Powers, etc.) are armed only with sticks or blank-firing pistols. The level of armament in the country is relatively low. The statements of causality Boggero advances and then sets aside as requiring further study, such as the contention that the existence of PSCs erodes public sector security, seem to me to miss the important issues in CAR by emphasizing archetypal binaries that never really existed in this dysfunctional state.
The issues that tell us about security in CAR are the gray spaces that blur the distinction between public and private, making it difficult to state where each begins and ends. Here are a few of these gray areas: at least one of the PSCs Boggero mentions was linked to the former president, Patassé, who used it for his own security; one of the main problems with soldiers and gendarmes are the roadblocks and “tolls” they exact from all who wish to pass, an entrepreneurial opportunity in a land of subsistence (this offers one clue as to why, despite how underpaid and ineffective its soldiers are, many members of armed groups demand integration into the state forces as part of their disarmament package); anti-poaching militias – now funded by the European Commission, formerly funded by safari hunting companies and Russian oligarchs – who roam in search of elephant-killers. And who loses out? As is so often the case, the millions of unprotected civilians.
Dear Louise,
first of all, let me thank you for having put time in reading my work and for an insightful, critical and thoughtful posting.
There are some points that I would like to make more explicit. As you write, I propose “statements of causality and then set them aside as requiring further study, such as the contention that the existence of
PSCs erodes public sector security”. Why do I pose this question? This line of argument stems from the observation that in many cases, private companies ‘crowd out’ the public sector. By discarding the hypothesis of a strong causal link, I am not suggesting that private security does not create a distorted sense of security; nor do I argue that it does anything for the public good. I actually suggest that it provides an unevenly distributed service that often benefits the mere protection of few business interests. By “setting them asideâ€, I am trying to abide to principles of the social scientific inquiry and I do hope to be able to find better data to prove the point.
Overall, however, your perplexity concerns the relevance of the general question I tackled (“the article left me a bit perplexed, though: of all the countries that fulfill his statement “private security sector constitutes a rising and local component of the ailing security sector†(p. 25) why did he choose to focus on CAR?”). My research stems from a concern for security from practitioners and professionals who work or have worked in the CAR. It stems from having worked and traveled in the region for a few years and from staff raising pressing questions on how to improve security. In a more general perspective, I think there are at least two reasons to study the topic in the way I did. The first is to show that there is a market for force, even in the CAR, unlike twenty years ago. The on-going research on the market for force is relevant for the stability of states. A good (and short) summary is provided by Anna Leander in “African States and the Market for Force: The Destabilizing Consequences of Private Military Companies” (2004). My much humbler contribution addresses the development of this type of market in the CAR and I hope I provided some comparative elements for other contexts. Indeed, other countries would have been interesting to research, as you write, but they would have been equally more difficult to study exhaustively – e.g. Angola had 90 companies when Alex Vines wrote about it.
Secondly, the topic of private security has some relevance for Darfur. There has been a stream of suggestions, sometimes insidious, that private force could assist in the operations in Darfur. What can we make of these signs? And what can we say of the way a CAR-Darfur tale is sometimes told for marketing purposes? Many more questions would follow.
As you write, so few scholars have studied the CAR. If you can provide further input, I would be much grateful.
Thank you, again, for the time and interest you put in it.
Marco