Security and the Privatization of Force and Violence
Private security in Africa has a long, complex, and controversial history. Early European expansion on the continent was facilitated by private force, with chartered companies like Cecil Rhodes’s British South African Company recruiting their own armies, and later colonial commercial enterprises like De Beers employing private police to secure their concessions. After independence, and particularly during the height of the Cold War, Africa became the favourite playground for the world’s soldiers of fortune, with mercenaries involved in numerous civil wars, conflicts, and military coups d’état. In the 1990s, the South African mercenary company Executive Outcomes was hired by beleaguered state rulers to intervene in the civil wars of Angola and Sierra Leone, inflicting significant loss of life while banking high profits and lucrative diamond concessions. Today, private security is arguably more pervasive than ever before. A plethora of different private actors, ranging from global private security companies to local vigilantes, now inhabit the security field, raising important questions about the African state, its sovereignty, and its relationship to the security of citizens.
In Max Weber’s classic definition the state is a set of enduring institutions with a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence within its territory (Weber 1958). The ideal-typical Weberian state in perfect control of the legitimate means of violence is always and everywhere just that – an ideal type rather than an empirical description of actually existing states, whether in Africa, Europe, or elsewhere. Nevertheless, this notion of the state continues to exercise a powerful hold on our political imaginations and practices. So much so that the history of European state formation is told as the story of the centralization of force in the hands of the uniformed agents of the state. African states came to independence with a state security apparatus fashioned from the same Weberian cloth: a police force focused on maintaining domestic law and order and a military dedicated to defence against external enemies. Some 50 years after independence, it is the increased role of private actors that many fear is eroding this public monopoly on violence – and with it, the state itself.
Ever since Executive Outcomes (EO) intervened in Angola and Sierra Leone, private security on the African continent has been associated with state weakness and potential state failure. Even as direct military actions by mercenary armies appear to have subsided, anxiety and unease continue to follow in the footsteps of private security actors. As commercial security companies and local vigilantes proliferate across the continent, the power and authority of the state is perceived to decrease in almost equal measure, as if the rise of the private sector is necessarily at the expense of the public. In the most despairing visions, social and political fragmentation is the inevitable endpoint of a downward spiral in which the wealthy retreat to their privately fortified enclaves, the poor rely on vigilante justice, and the state abandons any notion of security as a public good equally available to all.
This chapter unravels the relationship between the African state and the privatization of force and violence, and uses private security as a lens through which to explore broader transformations of the contemporary state. While there are many reasons to be concerned about the growth of private security on the continent, the chapter argues that what is at stake in security privatization is much more than a simple transfer of previously public tasks to private actors. Instead, it involves a complex reconfiguration of the public and the private, with important implications for how we understand the state and its sources of legitimacy and authority. By approaching the public/private distinction as both historically constructed and as foundational to our conception of politics and political community, the chapter shows that the rise of private security actors cannot be understood simply with reference to state weakness or state failure, wherein the rise of the private is necessarily at the expense of the public in a zero-sum power struggle. Instead, it shows how the public/private distinction has always been highly contested in debates about the African state, and how the contemporary rise of private security actors is as much about transformations of the state and forms of governance as it is about privatization or state failure in any narrow understanding of those terms. Security privatization, in all its various forms, is thus best understood and analysed as part of Africa’s ‘real governance’ (Olivier de Sardan 2008), and rather than treating the state and its monopoly of security as fixed and unchanging, the chapter argues that contemporary security provision and governance take place within global security assemblages that include a multiplicity of public and private, and global and local actors (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011).
The Public/Private Distinction
It is no exaggeration to say that the public/private distinction is at the heart of most debates in the study of African politics, especially as they relate to the state. Again, these debates take their inspiration from Weber’s classic notion of the legal-rational state. For Weber, legitimate authority in the modern legal-rational state arises in part from the clear distinction and separation between public office and private interest, thus distinguishing legal-rational legitimacy from his other ideal-types of legitimation – charismatic and patrimonial. As the colonial era came to an end on the African continent, the newly independent states inherited bureaucracies that were formally (and hastily) organized along legal-rational lines. However, it soon became apparent that the distinction between the public and the private did not readily map onto African realities, as public office was frequently awarded and executed on the basis of personal favour and interest. This gave rise to the concept of the neopatrimonial state, in which all the formal trappings of the legal-rational state exist but have been superimposed on societies and structures governed at least in part by private or personal loyalties (Erdmann, this volume). The African state is thus frequently described as a ‘hybrid’ state, wherein formal legal-rational principles and informal personal loyalties and obligations co-exist – and sometimes compete – within the same institutions and practices. While this dualism is often expressed in terms of a modern/traditional divide, it is important to note that the practices associated with personal loyalties are as rooted in the contemporary as they are in some distant past.
It is not necessary to endorse the neopatrimonial description of the African state to see how it effectively illustrates aspects of the problematic nature of the public/private distinction, and the manner in which the two are more delineated in theory than in practice. The public and private realms co-exist and interact in multiple, complex ways, with the private at times firmly lodged within the public and vice-versa. In the security field, this finds its articulation in the widespread use of the public security apparatus for private gains or for regime security. As Hills argues, policing in Africa has generally been preoccupied with ‘the enforcement of order on behalf of a regime’, rather than with crime prevention and public protection (Hills 2000: 162). This preoccupation with regime survival has its historical roots in the colonial origins of the state and its police forces, and has been further reinforced by the lack of popular legitimacy of many governments. The period of neo-liberal restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s is crucial in this context; by eroding the state’s economic ability to provide for its citizens, it alienated ever-larger sections of the population, thus intensifying the need for regime security yet further. At the same time, political elites often showed little inclination toward tightening their own belts, and instead privatised elements of the state in the interest of their own survival and reproduction. The security apparatus thus came to be utilized more and more often for explicitly political purposes. In many countries an ostensibly public police force has been increasingly acting in defence of the narrow private interests of political elites, significantly problematizing any simplistic public/private distinction.
At the individual level, the use of public authority for private purposes is also evident. With declining public resources, the wages and status of public security officers deteriorated, sometimes to the point of significant hardship and deprivation. Inevitably, the temptation to turn the public authority arising from being the uniformed agent of the state into private coping strategies increased; as living standards dropped across the continent, elements of the police turned to corruption, bribery and collusion with criminals. The notion that the police are tasked with the protection of the public is thus increasingly at odds with the public’s actual experience, and in many countries the population encounters the police primarily as a source of intimidation, extortion, and insecurity. The net result is a progressive erosion of public trust in the police.
Approached from this perspective, the proliferation of private security actors appears primarily as a reaction to the failure or neglect of the state to provide the public good of security: as the state has been unable or unwilling to provide adequate protection, people have turned to (or become subject to) other responses and actors, be they neighbourhood watches, traditional policing structures, militias, vigilantes, or commercial security companies. On the one hand, such initiatives respond to the perceived security needs of specific groups and populations, filling a gap or void left by the retreating state. On the other, their multiplication creates the conditions for predatory violence, protection rackets and generalized fear, as all security actors, whether public or private, are also potentially actors of insecurity.
Against the canvas of the Weberian state, these developments appear as an unquestionable indication of state decline or state failure. Discussions of security privatization rarely miss the opportunity to highlight the links between state failure and private security, be it as cause or effect. It is undoubtedly the case that many African states deviate substantially from the Weberian model of providing a full range of public services, including security. Approaching security privatization primarily as a reflection of and contribution to state decline and failure, however, is problematic. Although it clearly captures some aspects of an explanation, it also comes with severe risks. The discourse of failure encourages a focus on absences, on what Africa lacks, rather than on what is actually taking place within these areas. Like the neopatrimonial perspective, the danger lies in overly negative and culturalist interpretations, wherein Africa and its politics is not only judged according to Western standards, but also somehow perceived as trapped within a static and all-encompassing culture of primordialism and failure. By focusing on the absence of a fully functioning state, the state itself becomes reified, a fixed and ahistorical entity, thus blinding us not only to its evolving and historically constituted character but also to the manner in which governance and security are actually produced and assembled in interactions between public and private institutions.
Analytically this points towards the merits of a less state-centric perspective, wherein the question of how authority and order emerge and are maintained is open to investigation. Several recent studies, for example, have drawn attention to the continuation of service delivery in states frequently perceived as failed, demonstrating that even where the state has retreated from public provisions, alternative services emerge, and order and authority prevail in some form that does not necessarily threaten or further undermine the state (Trefon 2004; Lund 2006). Applied to the security sector – whether in so-called failed or successful states – this raises the possibility that private actors do not necessarily act at the expense of state authority and legitimacy, and that private security is not always and everywhere an indication of state weakness or impending collapse. The relationship of the private to the public becomes instead an empirical question to be investigated through careful analysis of how public and private actors interact, negotiate, and compete to produce and govern security. As the discussion below reveals, most private security actors stand in some relationship to the state or the public, and some are actively encouraged and promoted by states and global trends in security policy. Others legitimate themselves by reference to the state, and even those that emerge in explicit opposition to the state’s failure to protect do not necessarily threaten its authority. Approached in this manner, security privatization emerges as a more complex process and as an expression of broader transformations of governance, where the private is increasingly lodged within the state and has various degrees of authority and autonomy.
The remainder of this chapter provides a bird’s-eye view of private security actors in Africa. The category of private force and violence is to some extent too vast to be meaningful, and the differences between a private soldier fighting a foreign civil war, an unarmed guard half-asleep outside an up-scale shopping centre, and a local vigilante patrolling his village or neighbourhood are obvious. By the same token, there is no one common causal logic underlying the rise of these disparate actors, nor one unified analytical frame for understanding their implications. The ensuing discussion hence makes no attempt at comprehensiveness, but rather focuses on how the public and private interact and are negotiated to produce different forms of security and governance, and how, in the process, the very categories of the public and the private are being transformed.
Private Security in War and Conflict
Among Africa’s multiple private security actors, the mercenary and, above all, the South African company Executive Outcomes (EO) is the undoubted cause célèbre. EO’s spectacular and violent involvement in Sierra Leone and Angola have had an enduring impact on the interpretation of the relationship between private security and the state in Africa, and despite the fact that the company no longer exists, no discussion of private security is considered complete without revisiting EO’s operations (Avant 2005; Singer 2003). EO was founded at the end of the Cold War by senior figures from the apartheid military apparatus and primarily enlisted former soldiers from the various battalions and divisions that had spearheaded South Africa’s destabilization strategy in the frontline states. Approximately 70 per cent of EO’s soldiers were black Africans, including many Angolans who had fought with the South African Defence Forces during the apartheid era and who subsequently found themselves without employment. One of EO’s more long-standing operations was in Angola, where it trained and fought alongside government troops against the rebel movement National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) after its refusal to accept the 1992 election results. Its other main operation in Africa was in Sierra Leone in 1995, when the beleaguered government of Captain Valentine Strasser contracted EO to fight against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). In military terms, the EO intervention was highly successful. Within a month of its arrival, EO and government forces had cleared major towns of RUF forces and pushed the rebels to the Liberian border. Hundreds of RUF fighters were reportedly killed, while even more allegedly deserted. Later the same year, EO-led forces re-captured the all-important diamond mining areas, again inflicting significant losses on the RUF.
EO’s involvement in Sierra Leone and Angola exemplifies the extreme privatization and extraversion of the state, where rulers hire foreign private forces to maintain their power and strengthen the ‘shadow state’ (Reno 1998). Importantly in this regard, EO was paid in Sierra Leone in part through future diamond concessions, through which the country’s rulers mortgaged future income for their own immediate survival. Complex transnational networks of power and interaction, linking elements of the state, private security actors, and transnational capital enabled these rulers to lever foreign resources in their struggle against opponents and thus strengthen their personalized control over the state’s economic resources. At the same time, it is often claimed that the EO presence enabled sufficient stability for multi-party elections to be held, and thus potentially contributed to the possibility of a more democratic, legal-rational state. The newly elected President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah continued to rely on the services of EO until January 1997, but when the contract was terminated, the RUF advanced again. In the long term, the state’s ability to control the use of force seems to have been further eroded through the contract with EO and later with Sandline International, a British-based mercenary firm. The privatization of military power in states such as Sierra Leone and Angola thus appears to diffuse power and control toward the private military corporations (PMCs), as they gained influence over key political decisions. Military outsourcing in Sierra Leone also strengthened local social forces such as the Kamajor militias, which were trained and deployed by EO. As the Kamajors’ primary loyalty was not necessarily to the government, but to their ethnic chiefs, the contract with EO can be seen to have created future challenges for state reconstruction and consolidation. Importantly, political control and influence also passed to the outside mining companies which financed the military operations and subsequently received lucrative concessions. These operations thus draw attention to the unstable relationship of public authority to private force.
EO ceased operations in 1999, and the activities of most contemporary private security firms that operate at the military end of the spectrum bear relatively little resemblance to the combat roles so widely associated with events in Sierra Leone and Angola. To be sure, private armies and soldiers are still to be found in African conflicts, as witnessed by reports that Liberian mercenaries were fighting in Côte d’Ivoire’s post-election crisis and speculations that Saracen International, a company with connections to Uganda, South Africa, and the founder of Blackwater (known for its Iraq involvement) might be entering Somalia. At the same time, the face of the private military in Africa is today decidedly more ‘corporate’, and the rogue, active combat soldier finds his contemporary avatar in the employ of legally sanctioned private military companies. As Northern countries have become increasingly preoccupied with security and the so-called ‘war on terror’, the merging of development and security has opened up new opportunities for the private military sector. The vast expansion of reforms and training initiatives to strengthen and improve African security forces now routinely incorporate a plethora of private military companies and consultants working alongside public security officials. Companies like the American Military Professional Resource Incorporated (MPRI), DynCorp International, and Pacific Architects Engineers (PAE), as well as the British ArmorGroup (now part of Group4Securicor) have come to play key roles in efforts to strengthen the capacities of African militaries, reform police services, train anti-terrorist squads, and so on – often as part of broader security sector reform programmes funded by donor governments. Key examples are Liberia, where the United States contracted DynCorp International to restructure and rebuild the country’s military sector, and Nigeria, where MPRI has been involved in an extensive US-funded project to professionalize the military forces.
Arguably then, while the spectacular interventions of mercenaries have waned, the presence of international private military actors in Africa has increased since the time of EO, and their relationship to the state – both in Africa and overseas – differs in important respects from that of previous mercenary companies. While the latter operated on the fringes of legality, the former are often funded by overseas development and security programmes with the intention of strengthening the legal-rational state and its monopoly of force. The results and implications of such security arrangements are as yet poorly researched and understood, but they are indicative of a significant transformation in the manner in which military force is assembled in the contemporary security arena. Through such extensive programmes, private global security actors might be attaining important positions of power and authority within local public security institutions in terms of shaping security norms, practices, knowledge, and action. In the process, the distinctions between the public and the private, the global and the local are further eroded, problematizing not only our conception of the public but also raising important questions for democracy and accountability within state borders.
Militias and rebel groups constitute another diverse category of private security actors that have proliferated in recent years, particularly in Africa’s war-torn areas such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Liberia. Perceived simply as an expression of state collapse and disorder, militias are associated first and foremost with predation, greed, and ruthless self-preservation. While there is no denying the senseless violence perpetrated by many militias, recent studies have drawn attention to the manner in which they may also become incorporated and engaged in the production of governance and forms of regulation. In the midst of war and political crisis, and in the absence of public services, militias sometimes perform state-like functions such as the provision of security and the collection of taxes. On the Congo–Ugandan border, for example, Raeymaekers (2010) has shown how rebels did not just engage in economic predation, but sold protection to transnational traders. Both rebels and traders benefitted from sharing the spoils of cross-border trade, and the protection offered by rebels in turn enabled local entrepreneurs to provide services such as financing schools and healthcare, constructing and maintaining roads, hospitals, and even a local airport. The state was not entirely absent from these arrangements, and a range of state authorities participated in regular meetings to discuss security in the area. Put differently, security can emerge in a complex negotiation between public and private actors, wherein the power and authority of the private is not necessarily at the expense of the public but emerges through interaction and negotiation with it.
Similar observations have been made in the context of Somalia (Menkhaus 2006). Despite having been without a central government since January 1991 (the official but ineffective administration of the Transitional Federal Government notwithstanding), multiple informal systems of governance have emerged where key state functions such as security and law and order are performed and negotiated by a range of private actors. What these examples show is that even in war and conflict zones, in which the state is by definition struggling to maintain its hegemony and legitimacy, the implications of private security cannot be captured through simply equating them with state failure or weakness. Instead, they draw attention to the possibility of different modes of governance, where the state is one of many actors in the security field.
The Privatization of Everyday Security
Outside the military arena, the day-to-day delivery of security in Africa has also become increasingly privatized. While far from a new phenomenon, commercial private security companies (PSCs) have expanded at an astonishing rate in the last two decades. Their services, ranging from basic manned guarding, risk management, and CCTV monitoring, to armed response services, close protection, and cash-in-transit, have become an integral part of Africa’s security landscape. A few statistics illustrate the point: Group4Securicor, the world’s largest PSC, is present in 29 African countries, employs over 106,500 people on the continent and is, according to some estimates, Africa’s largest private employer. Measured as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), South Africa has the largest private security sector in the world: 6,392 PSCs employ 375,315 security officers with access to 80,000 vehicles. By comparison, the South African Police Service has 114,241 sworn police officers and only 37,000 vehicles. In Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, estimates indicate there are 1,500 to 2,000 private security companies. In Kenya, some 2,000 companies employ approximately 48,000 people. In Angola, there are at least 300 PSCs with about 35,000 personnel; in Uganda, the number of private guards equals that of police officers; and in many other African countries private security is one of few sectors of employment growth and expansion. In Sierra Leone, for example, there were only two private security companies before the civil war; there are now at least 20. There are no signs that the expansion of commercial security is slowing. By contrast, the market for private security in Africa – as well as in other so-called emerging markets – is expanding more rapidly than in the rich Northern countries. As a result, these areas are now targeted by the aggressive global expansion strategies of the world’s leading PSCs, who estimate that by 2015 emerging markets will account for 35 per cent of a global private security market that is forecast to be worth some US$230 billion (all numbers from Abrahamsen and Williams 2011).
The phenomenal expansion of PSCs on the continent demonstrates the extent to which daily security in Africa is in the hands of private actors rather than the uniformed agents of the state. For individuals and families, small businesses, large corporations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations, the first line of defence against theft, intrusion, and violation is not the police, but privately hired guards, often employed by global security companies. The United Nations’ (UN) instructions to its foreign staff in Kenya’s capital Nairobi are instructive in this regard: ‘in the event of a security breach at your home, you should call your own security company first, which will provide the fastest response’ (UN 2005). The statement is, on the one hand, a clear indictment of the Kenyan police and their inability to provide adequate security, whilst on the other, it shows the extent to which the growth of private security is linked to Africa’s globalization: with increased risk awareness, international personnel stationed abroad in the service of ‘development’ (or commerce) require ‘first world’ security.
While PSCs clearly thrive in the absence of a fully functioning or trustworthy public police force, it would be a mistake to regard these private security actors as existing in opposition to the state. Instead, security privatization frequently occurs at the instigation of the state, as part of policies of outsourcing, cost recovery, and efficiency. Security privatization is also a key aspect of international discourses of police reform and governance, whereby the public police is actively encouraged to enter into partnerships with private policing actors such as commercial companies, neighbourhood watches, and other so-called ‘stakeholders’. A striking example can be found in Cape Town, where security of the city centre has effectively been outsourced to the world’s largest security company, Group4Securicor, through the public-private partnership ‘Cape Town Central City Improvement District’. Group4Securicor provides 24-hour patrols of the city, on foot, horseback, and wheels, with a street presence that far exceeds that of the public police. However, the state police are not absent from this security arrangement and often work in close cooperation with the private company in terms of patrols, surveillance, and security planning. The Cape Town Central City Improvement District is representative of the global security assemblages and the new forms of security governance emerging on the African continent. Within such assemblages, power and authority cannot be fitted into the neat grip of the territorial nation-state or clear public/private distinctions. Instead, significant power and authority over domestic territory and security decisions reside with international actors (in this case Group4Securicor, but also international policymakers and discourses more broadly). As a result, security governance emerges out of a combination of the private and the public, the global and the local, highlighting the limitations of regarding private security as an automatic threat to the authority of the state.
While PSCs have become part of daily life for international personnel, the wealthy, and Africa’s expanding middle classes, the majority of poor people are unable to afford even the most basic of commercial security services. Faced with an unresponsive and/or overstretched police force, many communities and neighbourhoods have organized their own solutions in the form of informal, non-commercial security initiatives, often referred to as vigilantes. Again such initiatives appear to have proliferated in the last two decades, even if some groups clearly have a much longer history that stretches back to the pre-colonial period. The term vigilante conceals a wide variety of different non-state security initiatives, defined by Pratten as groups that focus on the ‘protection and care of the community encompassed within these boundaries’, and which ‘involves maintaining surveillance and taking action against threats to this community’ (Pratten 2006: 711). That said, vigilante groups that begin as popular schemes for imposing order in the absence of adequate state provision and control may subsequently degenerate into violent gangs, protection rackets, or militias that increase social and political disorder. They can thus be sources of security and insecurity at the same time.
The relationship of vigilantes to the state is far from straightforward. Vigilantes usefully illustrate the multiple ways in which the public and the private sectors are interlinked in Africa’s security landscape. Police officers might be vigilantes by night, just as soldiers might shed their uniforms in favour of rebel outfits at the end of a shift; and retired police commanders may own successful private security companies. Powerful political actors have also mobilized vigilante groups for political thuggery during election campaigns. In Kenya, for example, Anderson (2002: 542) has highlighted how vigilantes ‘all too easily become a political instrument in the hands of those with money to pay’, playing key roles in electoral and post-election violence so as to ensure a particular electoral outcome. Conversely, while the very term ‘vigilante’ seems to indicate opposition to the state and formal law – a defence of a particular community against the neglect or hostility of the state – this is not necessarily the case. Much recent research has shown that even those groups that have emerged as a reaction to the perceived failure of the state to provide adequate security have connections to the state and do not necessarily threaten its authority and legitimacy. In the case of the Sungusungu in Tanzania and Kenya, for example, local responses to the growing problem of cattle theft have been hailed as highly successful, drawing on traditional practices, but also the formal law of the state (Heald 2007). As such, vigilante groups can be seen to be involved in state-like performances, and their existence and activities are better perceived as a constant negotiation of the boundaries between the public and the private rather than an automatic threat to the authority of the state (Buur and Jensen 2004).
Private security, in all its various forms, has become ubiquitous in contemporary Africa. From capital cities to isolated resource enclaves, from shopping centres to rural villages, people often rely on private actors rather than the state for their everyday provision of security. While these developments are frequently perceived to lead to an automatic weakening of state power and authority, a less state-centric approach shows that this is not always and everywhere the case, nor is it necessarily the most productive approach in terms of understanding security governance on the continent. Rather than defining the state in an absolutist Weberian sense, where the public and private are fixed categories, there is much to be gained from abandoning the state-centrism that permeates contemporary political analysis in favour of a focus on how social and political order or governance is actually produced.
Approached from this perspective, security privatization becomes a lens on contemporary transformations in statehood on the African continent. Rather than approaching the state as an ideal-type with strict public/private boundaries, the state can be perceived as the effect of a wider range of dispersed forms of power, where various non-state actors can be seen to help produce and enact the state in the eyes of many of its inhabitants, making the state more real and tangible in everyday practices (Mitchell 1999). Although private security can work to undermine state power and authority, many private security initiatives operate with the active endorsement and encouragement of state authorities and within contemporary neoliberal strategies of governance. The private delivery and governance of security is thus, more often than not, part of state policy. Rather than existing in opposition to the state, today’s PMCs, PSCs, vigilantes, and other private agencies are often part of complex security networks that knit together public and private, global and local, actors. Private actors, such as vigilantes and militias, who have emerged in opposition to the (neoliberal) state or in reaction to its failure, often interact with public actors and give rise to new forms of governance and regulation. These complex security networks, stretched across national territories and continents, have given rise to the emergence of global security assemblages. These are settings where security is shaped and influenced by actors, values, and normative orders beyond the nation-state, and by the growing power of private actors who interact with the state to such a degree that it is often difficult to determine where the public ends and the private begins. Indeed, in global security assemblages the very categories of public/private and global/local are being reconstituted and reconfigured. What is at stake in security privatization is thus not merely a transfer of previously public functions to private actors, but instead a broader transformation of the relationship between security and sovereignty, as well as the traditional relationship between the public and the private, the global and the local.
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