Abstract
This paper compares the security paradigms for combating terrorism, drugs and irregular migration and argues that while these have largely failed on their own terms, they have also proven rather successful for the actors shaping them. Through a spatial political economy analysis of systems of intervention, the paper shows how vested interests have helped perpetuate counterproductive approaches, while risks (including that of human suffering) have routinely been ‘exported’ into geographical ‘buffer zones’. In analysing the stakes in such systems, we deploy the metaphor of games. This term allows us to highlight divergences between ‘official’ goals, such as ‘winning the war,’ and unstated aims, such as perpetuating security investments, relocating risk or stoking fear for political gain. Equally important, game terminology helps us highlight the spatial and social dynamics of collaboration, conflict and rule-manipulation within the system. In exploring these dynamics, the paper puts focus empirically on the complex collaborations between Western states instigating intervention and poorer ‘partner states,’ showing how a skewed geopolitical distribution of risk may tilt security interventions in the instigators' favour while maintaining ‘skin in the game’ for less powerful actors.
Highlights
Seventeen years from 9/11 and the start of a full-scale “global war on terror”, terrorist attacks have been tearing through communities from Paris and Orlando to Istanbul, Baghdad, Brussels, London and New York
After years of “combating migration” through border patrolling and wall-building, Europe experienced its most dramatic border crisis yet in 2014–15, while 2016 saw some 5000 deaths in the Mediterranean.1And in spite of a long-running “war on drugs”, the narcotics trade continues to thrive while drug-related offences keep driving mass incarceration in the US in particular and fatalities keep mounting in countries such as Mexico and the Philippines
We argue that the negative consequences of our three interventions have been very unevenly distributed, with key instigating countries and actors avoiding some of the worst risks and costs – turning the layered game back in the instigators’ favour
Summary
Seventeen years from 9/11 and the start of a full-scale “global war on terror”, terrorist attacks have been tearing through communities from Paris and Orlando to Istanbul, Baghdad, Brussels, London and New York. Rather than understanding such war as a “fight” between two opposing sides, we may be better off thinking of it geographically as a resourcerich zone into which a variety of military formations (rebels, government soldiers, peacekeepers, civil defence forces) are sent, whereupon they get “deflected” from their original – or at least originally expressed – aims In this sense, the “game” played in this kind of “war system” was what may be termed a double or duplicitous game in which, alongside a highly visible set of rules and an expressed objective of winning, there existed another set of “unscripted” rules and unstated objectives centring on a coveted geographical zone. It is in this nonhierarchised sense that the dimensions discussed below need to be understood
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