Abstract
ABSTRACTAfghanistan has come to be seen as emblematic of the security threats besetting peace and security operations, and in this article we consider the response to such threats via the ‘bunkering’ of international staff. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative survey with aid and peacebuilding officials in Kabul, we illustrate how seemingly mundane risk management procedures have negative consequences for intervening institutions; for the relation between interveners and national actors; and for the purpose of intervention itself. Bunkering, we argue, is deeply political – ‘imprisoning’ staff behind ramparts while generating an illusion of presence and control for ill-conceived modes of international intervention.
Highlights
One day in August 2015, an employee of a large development agency was driving through a middle-class residential area in Kabul
A smaller number returned to Kabul, but they did not return to their old houses and lives. They had one hour to pack their things while an armored car was waiting for them
This incident is emblematic of the central concern of this article: the politics of the ‘bunkered’, high-security forms of intervention under way in many conflict zones today, from South Sudan (Duffield 2010) to Mali (Andersson 2016), and from Syria to Iraq and even Haiti (Lemay-Hébert 2018)
Summary
One day in August 2015, an employee of a large development agency was driving through a middle-class residential area in Kabul. Everyone had to be home in the evening and movements in the city were restricted to armored cars This incident is emblematic of the central concern of this article: the politics of the ‘bunkered’, high-security forms of intervention under way in many conflict zones today, from South Sudan (Duffield 2010) to Mali (Andersson 2016), and from Syria to Iraq and even Haiti (Lemay-Hébert 2018). Other authors – notably Duffield (2010) and Smirl (2015) – have put focus on the material and infrastructural dimensions of peace and humanitarian interventions, as has Fast (2014) in her critique of the predominant security-based responses to dealing with danger in humanitarian aid. The security infrastructures discussed by, for example, Duffield and Fast are often judged to increase distance to the society that is being intervened upon, as our own earlier work has shown (Andersson and Weigand 2015)
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