The post-Cold War attempt to assert a system of cosmopolitan liberal peace now lies buried in the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan (Richmond 2014). As liberal interventionism unravelled, there has been a resurgence of global resistance and recalcitrance at the same time as a growing appreciation of Western weakness and inhibition (MSR 2017). International professionals who defined themselves as being there on the ground, so to speak – such as aid workers, journalists or academic researchers – are drawing back and circumscribing their presence. Even mass tourism is changing. The once-popular Middle East resorts have emptied, as safer destinations and ocean cruising gain in popularity. Using the example of international professional groups, especially aid workers, this chapter examines this unease. At one level, it reflects the exhaustion of the second wave of terrestrial globalization, of which the NGO-led fantastic invasion was an important part. At another, however, we can see a growing existential remoteness and distance that is proportional to the absorption of human agency and thinking by machines. Erupting onto the international stage in the 1970s, a sans-frontières humanitarianism pioneered and developed new forms of connectivity as international space was narrowing and closing against the circulation of political praxis. Reflecting the paradox of connectivity, the international aid industry is now hemmed in by recalcitrance and ground friction regarding the cosmopolitanism it espouses. The transitory architectural form of this exhaustion and remoteness is the fortified aid compound. It is the concrete expression not only of the fantastic invasion in retreat but also of the fact that its heirs now operate from the electronic atmosphere.
After an absence of nine years, I returned to Sudan in May 2008. Most of the time was spent in the South helping to complete an evaluation for UNHCR of post-war refugee resettlement (Duffield et al. 2008). Having been in South Sudan on several occasions both before and during the second civil war, which ended in 2005, this trip left a striking impression. With the ending of the war, an increase in the number of aid agencies operating in the South had been expected. What was surprising and unexpected was the widespread withdrawal of donors, UN agencies and the larger international NGOs into visibly fortified aid compounds. The daily routine associated with these compounds was wreathed with security protocols. The situation was extraordinary because international aid workers had enjoyed greater freedom of circulation during the war than, as it then was, three years into the peace.
Mandated to support the peace agreement, the HQ for the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) then lay immediately to the south of Khartoum Airport in a large rectangular compound fortified with double walls and razor-wire, complete with watchtowers and armed guards. Besides a several-storey office block, lines of air-conditioned prefabricated offices within the walls housed the administrative staff. Rows of the UN’s ubiquitous white SUVs ringed the defensive perimeter. At first glance, the overtly militarized appearance of the UNMIS HQ seemed out of place. Khartoum remains a relatively safe city and crime levels – especially of violent crime – have historically been low.1 While UNMIS was there to oversee the peace in South Sudan, it brought the architecture of war into the city. Its HQ, however, appeared anomalous, a sort of mini-Green Zone, but without the obvious dangers or violent history of Baghdad. Given the shameful ineffectiveness of UN peacekeepers to protect anyone but themselves, this was an ironic posture at best. While UNMIS was distinct in terms of the degree of fortification it deemed itself worthy of, since the early 2000s, all the UN agencies and larger NGOs in Khartoum had similarly upgraded their physical defences, variously drawing from the now-common repertoire of no-logoing for buildings and vehicles, erecting outer chain-link fencing and double entrance gates, and employing private security.
Moving on to Juba, the capital of the South, this bunkered architecture was replicated. Having a relatively small built environment during the war, rather than upgrading old buildings, in 2008 Juba had more new, purpose-built aid compounds distinguished by their large spatial footprints. Since the 2005 peace agreement, whole districts had been taken over and divided up between incoming agencies, many relocating from Khartoum and Nairobi. From the outside, the UNDP compound, for example, presented itself as a high white-painted exterior wall, topped by razor-wire. Like an ornamental frieze, ‘NO TRESPASSING’ was stencilled in blue around its extensive perimeter. The main gate to this complex was complete with a guardhouse, heavy steel doors and crash barriers – entrance by invitation only for ID-carrying visitors.
In South Sudan’s small semi-rural towns, the environmental impact of the fortified aid compound was, if anything, greater. In May 2008, UNHCR’s purpose-built and security-compliant regional HQ at Yei, near the Uganda border, was still awaiting the completion of some internal landscaping and construction. As a new-build, it brought out clearly the essence of an aid architecture that now seeks to combine defensible working environments with places of cultural refuge. Apart from the usual double gates, guardhouse and outer perimeter chain-link fence, the wide dead zone between the fence and the inner razor-wired wall was patrolled by armed guards at night. This large compound combined accommodation, offices, leisure and essential support facilities. In addition to a water tower and generator making it independent of the town for its basic utilities, the Yei compound contained a block of about a dozen offices and work rooms; a dining area; a laundry; an open-sided tent containing gym equipment; and, in two facing rows separated by open ground, a dozen semi-detached bungalows, each comprising a bedroom, lounge and shower room.
At the time of my visit, the dining area was still a temporary structure fashioned from two metal containers. The intention was to replace these with a brick building and, at the same time, to landscape the rough ground between the facing bungalows. Their freshly painted porches, air conditioning, and internet and satellite TV connections, however, only heightened the feeling of alienation the bungalows gave off – the barred windows and razor-wire on the 8-foot wall behind them unsettling any sense of suburban tranquillity.
Three years later, in August 2011, less than a couple of months after independence, I was in Juba again.2 As an extract from the situation report suggests, these spacing trends had intensified:
Juba can best be described as a series of privately guarded gated-communities that provide refuge for its plural elites. These defended spaces vary in their size and degree of autonomy from the rest of the city. In the spaces between these fortified compounds and residential complexes, where the majority of the Sudanese live, there is little in the way of public infrastructure. Having their own generators and guards, and sometimes their own wells, like the agency vehicles that ply between them, these resources are privately owned and managed. Over the past three years the UN has, quite literally, built its walls higher and increased the density of the razor-wire with which it surrounds itself. Contractors, consultants, World Bank officials and international NGO live and work in gated offices and team houses. It is rare to find international NGOs that do not employ a private security company to guard their gates. (Duffield 2011)
One fresh observation yielded by this trip was that the new South Sudan government buildings being erected now mimic the fortified aid compound. While sometimes avoiding razor-wire for more decorative railings to top their high walls, perhaps sensing the catastrophe ahead, South Sudan’s elites were also fencing themselves off. Worthy of more consideration than is possible here, this defensive architectural style runs counter to the design of colonial government buildings. Rather than fortified structures, surviving examples and photographic evidence suggest the colonial regime preferred open fronted, low-walled buildings for their administrative centres (Daly & Hogan 2005: 231–52).
The fortified aid compound is now widely found, from the Caribbean through Africa to the Balkans, Middle East and East Asia.3 It is important to emphasize that the bunkerization of the aid industry, and the culture of security that drives it, represents a break with the 1980s direct humanitarian action discussed in chapter 5. Aid compounds, in the modern sense, have existed for decades; they are not new. Regarding the UN in Sudan, these were mostly established by treaty with the government during the 1960s. In these sovereign spaces of the international, such agreements typically confer diplomatic status on international staff and inviolability of the offices, documents and equipment of the agency concerned (UNHCR 1968). Representing visible islands of modernity where vehicles, diesel, electricity, medical supplies and telecommunications are corralled, NGO compounds have existed in South Sudan since the early 1970s (Tvedt 1994). Their present geographical distribution was mainly shaped during the second civil war, being especially associated with the spread of bush airstrips, most of which appeared after 1993.4 These airstrips provided the in-country logistical grid for the UN’s humanitarian Operational Lifeline Sudan (OLS) which, from 1989 to the end of the second civil war in 2005, was managed from Kenya (Duffield et al. 1995: 172–5). Using community labour, the building of bush airstrips was typically agreed with local rebel groups (Levine 1997). As part of these negotiations, rural NGO compounds were established in their wake.
In terms of the current trend to increasing remoteness, the security apparatus that OLS developed and operated during the 1990s is instructive (Karim et al. 1996). Spurred by the killing of four aid workers by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1992, this apparatus was designed to move beyond the own-risk ethos of the 1980s, while maintaining humanitarian circulation under the changing conditions of ongoing conflict. In practice, it actually served to increase the number and geographical footprint of international NGOs operating within and moving around the conflict zone. OLS security was based on two interconnected innovations. First was the negotiation and agreement of a series of Ground Rules with the rebel movements, from 1993. These rendered humanitarian assistance dependent on the respect and protection of aid workers and their property (Bradbury et al. 2000). Second, based on the bush airstrips and the establishment of a regional short-wave radio network, came the recruitment of an ex-military security management team that established an intelligence-led hierarchy of security alerts and matched responses. Depending on the threat, these ranged from work-as-normal, through reducing staff numbers, to the evacuation of the location. In the mid-1990s, a review of OLS described this system in the following terms:
The evacuation and relocation of aid workers, on a few occasions with only minutes to spare, is now a routine event for OLS. As a consequence, humanitarian assistance closely follows the dynamics of the conflict. This adaptability has increasingly come into its own, for example, as areas of Bahr el-Ghazal and Upper Nile became more insecure from the end of 1994. Here, the system has supported the development of mobile aid teams, enabling workers to remain on the ground for shorter periods, but covering wider areas. (Karim et al. 1996: 2.6.5)
At the time, this security apparatus was praised and enjoyed the confidence of the aid agencies involved. Through informed risk-calculation derived from human intelligence, OLS was able to maintain, even expand, the circulation of international aid workers under conditions of ongoing conflict. This is markedly different from today’s more restrictive practices. OLS was disbanded at the end of the war in 2005 and is now largely forgotten. Even before the end, however, not only were aid compounds becoming more defensive in their outward appearance, international aid workers especially were being enveloped in a culture of risk-reduction that works against circulation, exposure and flexibility (da Costa 2012). In 2011, two years before the outbreak of South Sudan’s third civil war, there were still a few aid workers in Juba who remembered OLS. The irony of enjoying more freedom under war conditions was not lost upon them.
During the war I could do all kind of things with UN Security approval that I cannot do now. I was dropped with a radio set and a tent and stayed for weeks in the bush. Today no one walks, no tents. This means that we have no access, nor flexibility to go to the areas where there is greatest need. (Senior UN official, quoted by Collinson & Duffield 2013: 7)
By 2008, compared to the direct action of the fantastic invasion, the interaction between internationals and aid beneficiaries had lost all spontaneity. It typically took the form of a security-approved sortie that minimized time spent outside the compound. These outings were usually set up and mediated by local staff. On the cusp of the rapid diffusion of cheap mobile telephony, even in the rural areas of South Sudan, apart from questionnaire surveys completed by local staff or community organizations, direct information-gathering by internationals still took place through focus group meetings or project workshops. Briefed on the need for gender balance, local staff would go out in advance to organize groups in selected villages or displaced locations. For internationals following behind, UN security protocols dictate that not only is a backup vehicle required, one of their number has to have base radio contact. As in my case, consultants would arrive at an arranged time, conduct stilted and often awkward conversations through interpreters with bemused beneficiaries, before returning to the compound well before dark.
Within a couple of years, even this would change, as the UN began to subcontract its information-gathering requirements to private subcontractors able to operate outside of the UN’s own security protocols. Reducing the need for international presence, this reflected a trend that was already evident in the more insecure environments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia and northern Uganda – that is, the emergence of a series of techniques known as ‘remote management’ (Bruderlein & Gassmann 2006; Rogers 2006; Stoddard et al. 2010). This includes practices such as working at arm’s length through local staff or local NGOs, or subcontracting information collecting or project management to private companies. In Afghanistan, for example, it was common for international managers, through email or mobile telephone, to oversee projects from a distance – in some cases, never visiting at all (Montgomery 2009: 253). Encouraged by the internet and satellite phone, there are also examples of operational aid agencies no longer being sited in the same country as the programmes they support. For example, Jordan had become a logistical and management base for aid operations in Iraq, while Nairobi and Dubai serve Somalia and Afghanistan, respectively.
The security measures appearing in the mid-2000s can now be seen for what they were: a growing closure to the world at a time when connectivity was deepening. What is important, however, is that this closure and remoteness do not come naturally. They have to be taught, encouraged and rewarded.
From a conventional perspective, the fortified aid compound is a consequence of the widespread perception that aid work is more dangerous than it used to be. Since the mid-1990s, statistical evidence indicates a steady increase in the number of violent attacks, including kidnappings, directed at aid workers (Stoddard et al. 2009). Typically dominated by a few countries, such as Somalia, South Sudan and Afghanistan, before declining somewhat in recent years, this violent trend peaked in 2013. With national staff affected more than internationals, there were then 251 incidents affecting 460 aid workers, of which roughly a third were killed, injured or kidnapped (Stoddard et al. 2014). On paper, the trend seems clear; interpreting the figures, however, is less so. Since the 1990s, the total number of aid workers and the insecurity of the countries they are working in have also increased. At the same time, the motives driving these attacks are not always given. Although there have been a number of well-documented political attacks against the UN in the Middle East, what proportion of the remainder relate to criminality or personal grievance is a moot point (Collinson & Duffield 2013).
In accounting for these attacks, since the end of the Cold War there have been regular claims that the nature of war itself has changed. New and often irrational non-state actors have emerged, whose violence shows no restraint and little respect for international laws, agreements or norms (Boutros-Ghali 1995: 42; Kaldor 1999; HERR 2011). Given the horrors of the ‘total war’ that emerged in the West during the course of the twentieth century, such claims are not particularly helpful. On a firmer historical footing, others have argued that, during the 1990s, international aid mutated with the appearance of the UN integrated mission (Eide et al. 2005). As a key institution of cosmopolitan liberal peace, the aim of the integrated mission was to secure greater coherence between the previously separate aid and political wings of the UN system and their associated NGOs (Macrae & Leader 2000) – as a result, making international aid a key instrument of liberal interventionism (Fox 1999). Geographically widespread, the integrated mission saw the emergence, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, of a number of ambitious terrestrial stabilization programmes that included work on disarmament, demobilization and democratic reconstruction in support of victorious warring parties newly emerging from the long Cold War upswing of internal war.
During the Cold War, development, and sometimes humanitarian assistance, were used to cement international political alliances. Changing the social or political system of a country was the business of clandestine military support to the opponents of the regime – either that, or the political theatre of the coup d’état. In comparison, the UN integrated mission was essentially postmodern. The practical fiction of neutrality and impartiality was dropped as aid agencies took sides in support of the victors. Achieving Western foreign policy goals moved from the shadows to become the acknowledged work of aid agencies. Whereas, during the Cold War, NGOs often opposed the international aims of their governments, they were now the ‘implementing partners’ of the same bodies. Often referred to as the ‘politicization’ of aid, it reflects our hyper-political times. With the disappearance of ‘neutrality’, the losers or those otherwise excluded from the peace deal are prone to see a political fix. Consequently, ‘the universality of the values promoted by the UN no longer guarantees the security of its access in conflict situations’ (Bruderlein & Gassmann 2006: 65). In places like Afghanistan, for example, such politicization led to the effective paralysis of the aid operation during the 2000s (Donini 2009).
While statistics and claims relating to the threats faced by international aid workers are incomplete or ambiguous, one thing is clear. There is a widespread de facto perception that aid work – or journalism or academic research, for that matter – is definitely more dangerous than it was. Despite differences on the ground, this belief asserts a structural equivalence between the real dangers of Syria, South Sudan or northern Nigeria, for example, and the more predictable circumstances encountered in most other countries. Although a few war-affected or disrupted countries account for most of the danger, as we shall see, mandatory security and insurance protocols have been centrally rolled out by aid agencies, governments, media organizations and universities, on a blanket rather than a locally nuanced basis.
Importantly, however, reflecting the questionable nature of the structural equivalence being suggested, how individuals comport themselves in a more dangerous world cannot be left up to them. They have to be taught, and correct behaviour rewarded. Now more Homo inscius than Homo economicus, security cannot be left to the reasoned judgement of the individual or group. The World Bank, for example, in its 2015 report on Mind, Society and Behaviour, has a section on the cognitive biases and confusions that challenge aid professionals and can impair their judgement (World Bank 2015: 179–91). In relation to security, people have to be instructed in how to read an environment from a post-human perspective. Since the world lacks history or causation, the task is to experience the enfolding environment as a shifting sea of unmediated cognitive cues, signals and alerts. In response to uncertainty, international aid workers, for example, are trained not only to scan the horizon constantly, but to accept defensive living and endless risk assessment as good for themselves, their wellbeing and their work. Given the gaps and ambiguities in the evidence, however, the training regime, with its associated insurance, career and security requirements, is more real than the dangerous world it defends against.
By the mid-1990s, the UN’s first post-Cold War, system-wide attempts to work in situations of ongoing conflict in places like Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda were breaking down.5 Against this background of failure, the need for better security training among international aid workers first emerged (Cutts & Dingle 1995). From this time, improving security training for aid workers, especially enhancing risk-perception, has been an ongoing issue (Van Brabant 1998). A key publication was Koenraad Van Brabant’s (2000) Operational Security Management in Violent Environments. Drawing from earlier ad hoc NGO programmes and training initiatives, Operational Security brought together in a comprehensive manner what has since become a standard training template (compare RedR 2017). It is the nature of security training to encourage standardization – having different organizations doing different things is counterproductive and harms interoperability. Security encourages the centralization of decision-making within organizations. In the case of aid agencies, for example, it has justified transferring much day-to-day managerial responsibility from field offices to HQ managers. A good example of this centralizing tendency is the ‘kill lists’ of suspected terrorists operated by the Obama administration. At the apex of the ‘kill chain’, the former President himself was responsible for the final life-or-death decision (Ackerman 2015; see also Chamayou 2015 [2013]).
Regarding the security of international aid workers, the generic training framework that has emerged typically divides field security into a number of scenarios, including that of outside movements, the work and home environments, and personal wellbeing. Training programmes exist in basic or advanced forms, they can last from several hours to several days, and vary in realism from classroom examples to outdoor role-play exercises, including car-jacking and hostage-taking. In its essentials, the development of field-security training within the UN builds upon and consolidates earlier NGO initiatives. The security training done by the UN is important because it sets the standard and acts as a point of reference for donors and other aid agencies. As a means of risk reduction, donor decisions on whether to fund a particular NGO, for example, can take into consideration the degree to which the organization is compliant with UN security practice.
While individual UN agencies began by developing their own policies, the trend has been towards a ‘system-based security approach’ (Bruderlein & Gassmann 2006: 65), resulting in centralization and standardization. This occurred at the same time as the already-mentioned appearance of the UN integrated mission and the politicization of aid. A system approach emerged out of increasing cooperation between the Department of Peace-keeping Operations (DPKO) and the Office of the United Nations Security Coordinator (UNSECOORD). This cooperation focused on creating uniform security standards and procedures, including comprehensive security and stress management training (UN 2001: 3–4). By 2002, complementing individual agency initiatives, the UN was conducting one-off security training sessions in more than 100 countries.
At the same time, Minimum Operational Security Standards (MOSS) were introduced. MOSS represents the development of an objective set of security standards covering security planning, training, communications and equipment, for implementation at each UN duty station. These minimum standards spell out ‘the standard which must be met in order for the system to operate safely’ (UN 2001: 6). Importantly, the adoption of MOSS, and more recently the Minimum Operational Residential Security Standards (MORSS), also became an essential requirement of the UN’s insurance underwriters. While MOSS/MORSS standards can vary, they constitute a set of centrally driven minimum operational requirements. In practice, this means that all UN operations have to be MOSS/MORSS-compliant. Propagated in the politicized medium of the UN integrated mission, fed by insurance requirements and driven by security experts, such developments shape the conformity culture of the fortified aid compound.
The August 2003 bombings of the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) HQs in Baghdad added further impetus to the emergence of a centralized system-based security apparatus (Bruderlein & Gassmann 2006). Headquarters oversight was strengthened and, following an improvement in the career prospects of security personnel, standardized security protocols were rolled-out through what was emerging as a global network of security officers. In December 2004, a new UN Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) was established within the UN Secretariat. This brought together existing security personnel, such as UNSECOORD and the civilian security components of DPKO, under one roof. In January 2005, a former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard was appointed to head DSS at Under Secretary General level. With a specific mandate ‘to professionalise the UN security system’ (2006: 76), this was the first time a security professional had been appointed at such a senior level within the organization. One outcome of these developments is that standardized security training is now mandatory for all UN staff.
This security apparatus came together in the mid-2000s, at a time when the depth of the foreign policy debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan was coming to light. It emerged into adulthood as liberal interventionism and the UN integrated mission were being buried in the rubble of the Middle East. Henceforth, interventionism would take a back seat. It would give way to demands for resilience as the inhibition resulting from fears of terrestrial blow-back took hold (Chandler 2016b; Joseph 2016). As Peter Sloterdijk pointed out, those who would intervene to police or democratize have been forced to acknowledge ‘that all initiatives are subject to the principle of reciprocity, and most offensives are connected back to the source after a certain processing time’ (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]: 11). In this emerging climate of failure and inhibition, the mid-2000s also marked a rapid increase in connectivity, with the availability of broadband and the accelerating penetration of cheap mobile telephony within the global South. Future-present imaginaries of a technological solution would henceforth qualify failure and inhibition. If the ground was now corrugated with friction and resistance, the electronic atmosphere could provide a fresh vantage point. The question arises, however: how do you now understand a distant and recalcitrant world and, not least, act within it? As a new world of political push-back, unknown threats and international no-go areas? In the case of aid workers, shaping this understanding and comportment has been the central task of field-security training.
In the mid-1990s, prior to the emergence of an expert UN system-based security regime, we have already seen that OLS was operating a well-regarded field-based security system in South Sudan. Despite them being separated by only a decade, the differences between the two approaches are telling. Managed from northern Kenya, OLS’ security system was locally embedded and responsive to the dynamics of the war. Aid workers, including internationals, moved in and out of South Sudan according to the changing rhythm of the conflict. System-based security is different. It changes the basis of security and redirects its focus. Whereas OLS allowed space to understand the local dynamics of conflict through grounded informants, situation reports and causal reasoning, there is no longer an interest in such detail. As environments are not as open to the immersion and ethnographic investigation of the past, they are evacuated of history, politics and causation. The resulting ‘complexity’ is normalized by encouraging individuals to adopt a direct or unmediated cognitive relationship with the outside world while, at the same time, linking this relationship to the health and fitness of the inner self. System-based security teaches the individual how to read and understand the environment, any environment, as a changing mix of green, amber and red behavioural signs and alerts, and how this ability is enhanced through strengthening one’s personal mental resilience.
Emerging towards the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the privileging of cognitive immediacy finds parallels and structural echoes across a whole range of practitioner, educational and aesthetic fields. The individuation of environmental experience underpins, for example, current trends in architecture (Spencer 2016a), as well as the rise of post-humanism within the academy (Braidotti 2013). Alison Howell (2012), for example, demonstrates how an earlier discourse around post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a mass medicalized condition justifying liberal interventionism (Summerfield 1996; Pupavac 2001) has given way to encouraging personal resilience combined with neuro-cognitive approaches to work-related stress. Field-security training based on environmental awareness and care of the self creates portable forms of transnational expertise that aid workers carry from one ‘challenging environment’ to another. In relation to the international, one is tempted to draw the conclusion that, as a consequence of the failure of liberal interventionism (Richmond 2014), the West has given up trying to understand the world. While one could try to rekindle an interest or raise the alarm, there is the suspicion of a certain political functionality in this. With global precarity growing and, importantly, blurring North–South divisions, blocking off the world as dangerous and unknowable can have its uses.
As a means of normalizing remoteness, security training has a number of generic characteristics. While the evidence on the dangers facing aid workers contains unknowns and ambiguity, security training strips out all shades of grey. It adopts an uncompromising view of the external environment.
Internationals everywhere and at all times face permanent and pervasive danger.
Such unequivocal sense-certainty is understandable. The purpose of security training is to encourage behavioural change in order to strengthen organizational, individual and mental resilience. It cannot do this if the message is overlain with the noise of doubts or exceptions. At the same time, the clarity of the message means that training materials lend themselves to deconstruction. They cast light onto remoteness and environmental individuation more generally.
In Sudan in 2008, it was necessary for visiting HQ staff or consultants to pass the UN’s Basic and Advanced Security in the Field training modules (UNBSF 2003; UNASF 2006). Without passing these modules, you could not get a UN ID card and therefore enter UN compounds, board UN flights or travel in UN vehicles. You were condemned to exposure outside the archipelago of defended international space. The training modules came in two interactive CD-ROMs combining voice-overs, video clips and role-play exercises with multiple-choice end-of-level tests. The Basic and Advanced modules both culminate in a final examination. The identity of the trainee is password-protected and an animation along the bottom of the computer screen records progress through the various levels. Reflecting the tone of the training, the animation features a white UN SUV travelling along a twisting road bordered in places by trees that might conceal a threat. Correct answers incrementally advance your journey to the safety of the next gated-complex. Get it wrong and your SUV is knocked back, remaining longer in no man’s land. Each CD takes about an hour to work through. Upon successful completion, the software prints a named pass certificate.
Some questions provoked amusement among the aid workers with whom the training was discussed. In general, however, they enjoyed the experience and appreciated the advice given. It provided assurance that the UN was serious regarding duty of care. While there is an established practitioner literature on field security in hazardous environments (Van Brabant 2000; ECHO 2004; Stoddard et al. 2006; Stoddard et al. 2010), this work is part of the security apparatus itself. It does not problematize its subject or analyse its consequences. On the contrary, training is taken as a self-evident good. In wishing to step back to gain a more critical perspective, the point of contention is not whether a given situation is dangerous or safe, or if the advice given is good or bad. Something far more fundamental than these empirical questions is unfolding.
A liberal apparatus of security has emerged that has replaced an earlier orientation to risk based on the accepted existence of Homo economicus. The rational subject was trusted to make considered decisions on the basis of available evidence (Pupavac 2001). This was the culture current in the 1960s and 1970s, when the international was a space of political possibility. Security training exemplifies the institutionalization and governmentalization of risk management to produce conformist and inhibited subjects. The UN’s security training is not optional but a mandatory MOSS/MORSS requirement. Apart from access to the UN system itself, it is essential for claims under the UN’s Malicious Acts Insurance policy. Any loss or injuries suffered in breach of security directives are void. Coupled with aid agency fears of litigation claims alleging poor duty of care (Butler 2003), a powerful governmental apparatus for reducing autonomy and changing behaviour has emerged. Although limited to the global North–South interface, field-security training is an example of a far more general and widespread governmental apparatus.
Structured around the above prime message, all of the UN’s required behavioural change can be derived from it. In its opening section, the Basic Security CD-ROM quotes Mary Robinson, the former High Commissioner of Human Rights, to underline that ‘some barrier has been broken and anyone can be regarded as a target, even those bringing food to the hungry and medical care to the wounded’ (UNBSF 2003: Module 1: 2). In different ways and contexts, the prime message is repeated throughout the modules. Security training reinforces the idea that times have changed. Like it or not, aid workers now face pervasive threats from a calculating and unpredictable enemy. Since this enemy is faceless, follows no particular pattern and can strike anywhere at any time, security demands constant vigilance regarding the external environment. This relentless pressure also draws attention to one’s own inner vulnerability and psychological strength. The onus is on the resilient aid worker to demonstrate responsibility by making the right choices and thinking the right thing: ‘In certain countries, the advice will be to stop when your vehicle runs somebody over on the road; in another setting, the advice will be certainly not to stop until the next police post’ (Van Brabant 1999: 9).
Training imparts a particular way of experiencing and acting within a given environment. It covers things like travelling outside the work place, home and office security and personal safety, including how to respond under fire, or if hijacked or taken hostage. Regarding road travel, for example, things like check-point etiquette are rehearsed, together with how to behave with child soldiers and react to weapons. Reading the road is important, like slowing down on the approach to traffic lights in the hope of avoiding stopping. In selecting a home neighbourhood, the aid worker should look for positive environmental cues like the level of street lighting, numbers of pedestrians, traffic volume and parking facilities. Urban segregation helps because families ‘with similar income levels tend to share similar lifestyles and security concerns’ (UNBFS 2003: Module 2: 6). Inside the home, attention is drawn to locks, window bars and alarms. Similarly, in the office, things like a secure reception area for screening visitors, using the front desk as a defensive structure, having barriers in interview rooms and a secure office bolt-hole are recommended. Advice is also given on how to defuse tension and handle hostile crowds.
Working through this training involves completing numerous small tests and end-of-section exercises in order to get to the next level. For example, the actions that aid workers should take when first arriving at their duty station are rehearsed as a yes–no exercise. Questions requiring ‘yes’ include: do you seek a security briefing, meet your local warden, register your family members with the office, and enquire about medical services? In contrast, the ‘no’ questions are: do you ‘check the area around the office and your residential areas on foot?’, and ‘try food from local food vendors?’ (UNBFS 2003: Module 2: 16). In a similar fashion, the training module CDs go through a range of different scenarios and threat environments. In order to move to the next level, and complete the movement of your SUV quickly across the bottom of the computer screen, the desired responses reproduce the behaviour of a responsibilized, risk-averse, segregated and inward-looking subject.
While vigilance and risk management allow humanitarian rescue to be tasked, an aid worker’s prolonged exposure to suffering and uncertainty also creates cumulative levels of stress that undermine mental fitness and thus personal effectiveness (Blanchetiere 2006; Comoretto et al. 2011). Tackling this ‘vicious’ feedback loop is an important part of an organization’s duty of care and an expanding area of resilience training. Inner resilience is important. Indeed, in the absence of an outside world structured by history, politics and causation, strong mental resilience among individual workers is essential for the successful completion of an organization’s humanitarian mission. In a complex and uncertain environment, taking responsibility to nurture and strengthen one’s inner self is a determining factor. Having origins in the military, resilience training has spread across a range of practitioner and educational activities, including the humanitarian field (O’Malley 2010; Howell 2012). As a practice, the centrality of mental resilience privileges the fortified aid compound as a necessary physical refuge from outside uncertainty. Its walls and razor-wire, together with its enhanced connectivity, enclose a safe therapeutic space.
The importance of nurturing the inner self for coping with stressful environments has been intrinsic to field-security training since its early days (Van Brabant 1998). Prolonged exposure to the trauma of violence and loss can produce cumulative neuropsychological effects such as anxiety, flashbacks and depression, together with excessive alcohol consumption or similar risky behaviour, among aid workers. While most of the literature focuses on direct exposure, as an example of the social ‘generosity’ of psychology (Howell 2012), similar stress effects have also been claimed by remote technical volunteers, such as crisis mappers working on digital data (Jarmolowski 2012; Meier 2015). Stress effects are not just physiological, they are also neurological. Apparently, the brain itself physically changes as a result of prolonged extreme stress. Certain structures (the hippocampus and amigdala) are altered, resulting in the brain’s reduced ability to buffer shocks, while inappropriately triggering trauma responses – for example, at the sound of a car backfiring (IRIN 2010). We are unable to examine critically such claims here (see Stadler 2014). It is possible, however, to see how such a powerful, medicalized imaginary helps to shape behaviour and structure space.
In order to reduce negative stress, the common recommendation is to make life as ‘normal’ as possible (IRIN 2010). While organizations can do things like providing training, counselling and improving living conditions, much of this is down to individuals. What we are seeing in an anticipatory form is personalized biopolitics of the biohuman. Healthy eating, physical exercise and regular sleep while avoiding excessive, reclusive or risky behaviour. Having recreational or fun activities to pursue during down-time, together with arranging to personal taste the furniture and fittings of one’s immediate life, so to speak, is important (Achilles Initiative 2013). Work also needs to double as a social support system. A buddy system, for example, is important for the recognition of burn-out in oneself and others, as well as providing empathy and sympathetic support. Agencies should encourage and make it possible for aid workers to keep in touch with distant family and friends through email and social media (IRIN 2010).
The fortified aid compound is not simply a defensive structure against outside threat and uncertainty, it provides a physical refuge where regular living and positive therapeutic inner strengthening can be practised. The need for a barrier against the outside, and the down-time it affords, are also reinforced by another consideration. While PTSD discourse has now waned, one aspect of its medicalization of stress lingers on. Like an infectious disease, unless precautions are taken, the trauma of disaster victims can pass to aid workers. Having a humanitarian empathy for victims ‘does not mean sharing their diseases. To work effectively for others you need to be healthy’ (Dr Gro Harlem, former Director General, WHO, UNBFS 2003: Module 5: 2). The contagion of external suffering adds urgency to the need for a refuge where aid workers can switch off.
Resilience training goes further than supporting regular living and keeping in touch. Through the notion of positive thinking, it encourages the active suppression of negative thoughts and memories regarding the outside world (Achilles Initiative 2013). Besides the importance of meditation and relaxation techniques, this involves an emotional acceptance that some things cannot be changed. In addition to eating properly, exercising and hanging out with friends, positive thinking requires taking time to refocus on affirmative thoughts, small wins and good outcomes. Positive thinking is not simply reactive. Done properly, the aid worker can emerge personally stronger and more confident (IRIN 2010). In line with resilience thinking more generally, out of trauma and stress something new and better can emerge (Folke 2006). From disaster, you can ‘bounce back better’ (DFID 2011). What’s needed is for the individual to find out what works best for them and to practise it.
Emphasis on the inner self, and the need to protect against neurological brain damage, reinforces avoidance and remoteness from the world. They normalize segregation and reliance on increasing connectivity to bridge the distances and jump the spaces. While the fortified aid compound is shaped by security protocols and insurance requirements, it also answers inner needs and personal vulnerabilities. It provides a secure space for the governance of the self amid surrounding complexity. However, given what has been said about trauma and inner vulnerability, we are also faced with the dilemma that humans cannot be entirely trusted with the job. Humans can never be completely relied upon because, to a lesser or greater degree, they may be burnt-out or brain-damaged. Like many others in contemporary society, aid workers have come to self-identify with neoliberalism’s Homo inscius. This identification helps explain the now fashionable trend to include aid professionals themselves, not just beneficiaries, within any discussion of the cognitive constraints and challenges facing development (World Bank 2015). In the last analysis, the fortified aid compound is an architecture not of expansion but of retreat. As connectivity increases, together with the costs, recalcitrance and friction associated with ground presence, the fortified aid compound could well be a transitory phenomenon. The more people retreat from the world, the fortified compound, despite its protected layers, can start to look too close to danger and uncertainty.
By the late 2000s, not only was the widespread retreat of the ‘international community’ into fortified aid compounds and gated-complexes remarkable, the indifference of the agencies to the incongruities of the built environment they were actively creating was also notable (Smirl 2008). Defensive and segregated living had been normalized. Rather than evoking any sense of alienation or lost perspective, UNHCR’s Yei compound in South Sudan, for example, was typically admired for the superiority of its therapeutic ‘deep field’ facilities. Already regarded as a hardship posting, one reason for building such well-specified secure compounds was because experienced international staff would not otherwise come to South Sudan. As a node in a networked archipelago of international space (Petti 2007), the fortified aid compound is more than a defensive structure. It is an extension of inward-looking Western therapeutic culture into the post-colony.
As an object of architectural design, the outward banality of the fortified aid compound has little in common with the warped and fluid parametric architecture that is now appearing in metropolitan shopping malls, science centres and manufacturing parks. Douglas Spencer (Spencer 2016a: 65) has shown that such flowing and curvilinear design seeks to capture and valorize ‘an underlying, and essentially emancipatory, order of complexity’. While complexity is embraced in the metropole, and celebrated in the sensuous and unmediated exteriority of things, in the post-colony, in the wake of the failure of liberal peace, the banality of the fortified aid compound suggests that what is being valorized is inside. As a nodal point in a shrinking archipelago of liberal international space, it is the interior in the broadest sense that is valued – not just the enclosed support and leisure facilities but, more importantly, the bunkered therapeutic space that allows for a practised mental disconnection from the complexity of the traumas, threats and uncertainties circulating outside.
At the time of writing, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel about racism in the American south, had been pulled from the reading list in a Mississippi school because the language used ‘makes people uncomfortable’ (Agencies Mississippi 2017). This is one example of a growing trend for students in the USA and UK to demand campus censorship and ‘no-platforming’ for ideas or people who are deemed inappropriate or personally unsettling (Haidt & Haslam 2016). During the late 1960s, the university campus was envisioned as a potential liberated space where radical students could reach out to other radical forces in the interests of world revolution (Barnett 1968). Today, the university campus is more like a fortified aid compound – that is, a place of refuge where you can seal off the world and protect the inner self.
In 2010, when liberal interventionism was in retreat, I wrote that the fortified aid compound was symptomatic ‘of the aid industry reaching a strategic dead-end’ (Duffield 2010: 471). Today, this needs qualification. What had drawn to a close was the second wave of terrestrial globalization, of which the fantastic invasion and liberal interventionism were part. In retrospect, the development–security nexus (Duffield 2001) which provided a framework for analysing this expansion was, essentially, a ground-based apparatus. In a bid for global governance, it addressed terrestrial forces and physically present agencies. It was concerned with orchestrating direct relationships and marshalling material resources. Rebuffed and pushed back, the dead-end in question was this nexus of terrestrial forces. What I failed to realize was that this apparent impasse was in fact a point of departure. Following the computational turn, and the rapid spread of cheap mobile telephony throughout the global South, the cultural dead-end of the gated-complex marked a liberating and celebratory leap into the verticality of the electronic atmosphere (Elden 2013); the last unregulated global plane where capital accumulation, acts of piracy and one-sided political violence are still possible (Weizman 2002; Chamayou 2015 [2013]). The fortified aid compound, or at least the remoteness, inhibitions and mental vulnerabilities it embodies – the world alienation, if you will – signals that the present third wave of hyper-bunkered globalization is now well under way. The next chapter begins to address this new strategic plane.