Ungoverned Space Research Articles

Conceptual and Empirical Nexus Between Kidnapping Hotspots and Ungoverned Space Along Nigerian Expressways

Conceptual and Empirical Nexus Between Kidnapping Hotspots and Ungoverned Space Along Nigerian Expressways

Regionalism and the fight against terrorism in southern Africa: reflections on Cabo Delgado in Mozambique

Post-independence Africa has often depicted Southern Africa as a formidable region spared by the calamities of Islamic insurgencies and terrorism. However, unfolding events in the last five years have demonstrated the limitation of SADC to terrorism exceptionalism. A combination of relatively weak states perpetuating poor regionalism, ethnic and religious diversity, poverty and the existence of the ‘ungoverned space’ are possible explanations in making the region a suitable habitat for insurgency groups. The recent invasion by terrorists of Cabo Delgado province in Mozambique has been a critical cause for concern for the stability of the region. The military intervention of the Southern African Development Community Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM) and Rwanda presents an opportunity for academics to explore regional prospects for peace and security. This paper uses insights gained from a qualitative study on terrorism, counterterrorism and regionalism to investigate the concept of regional security cooperation in the SADC region and the authenticity of institutional responses in Northern Mozambique. The study concludes that the launch of the SAMIM, despite several obstacles, represents a step in the right direction. More so, creating durable security institutions is the starting point towards realising meaningful regional security cooperation, which guarantees feasible regional economic integration.

The National Security Debacle: Escalating the Bald Conversations on Rural Banditry in Northern Nigeria

Scholarly preoccupation with socio-political development in Nigeria appeared to have dwelt more on the fulfillment of great expectations and much less on the uncertainties of social change brought about by democratization in Africa. Thus, when Huntington reflected on the possibility of reversal following the onset of ‘Third wave’ in Africa, the emphasis on social conflict is very instructive in the democratization process of many states in Africa. Whereas some democracies have managed to consolidate or are still democratizing, a few others have relapsed into reverse wave or at best, are caught up in what Thomas Carothers described as “The gray zone”. In Nigeria for example, after almost half a century of democratization, there is rising wave of atavistic consciousness or what Engels described as the “Lowest instinct or passion in man”, where the political space is characterized by rampaging non-state actors. In specific terms, the new wave of dramatic reverses relates to terrorist attacks, ethnic violence, armed banditry, farmers-herders imbroglio, cattle rustling, kidnapping for ransom, and unknown gunmen. In the circumstance, marauders and brigands now reign supreme over what is described as ungoverned space, prompting a convergence of expert opinions that Nigeria is fast degenerating unto a failed state. Among the various descriptions of criminal enterprises in Nigeria, there is scholarly preoccupation with the nuances and pattern of armed banditry. This paper seeks to deepen this preoccupation by scoping the infamy of rural banditry in northern Nigeria. It argues that, beyond the much-touted ethno-religious sentiment and convoluted diversity, the worsening human condition occasioned by the increasing parlous governance situation in the country, are more persuasive in explaining the dramatic wave of criminal enterprises. The theoretical perspective of Cohen and Felson which treat crime as the consequence of the convergence of a motivated offender, a vulnerable target and the absence of capable guardian, comes close to a real-life connotation of rural banditry in northern Nigeria. The paper recommends among others, the urgent need to ups the quality of good governance in order to address the human condition, and that a collaboration among the leadership strata in the wider society must demonstrate sufficient commitment to compliment government efforts in a genuine governance project that seeks to emancipate Nigeria from her current sorry state.

The spatial antecedents for drone governance in Afghanistan

This paper problematizes the use of surveillance technologies such as drones for security governance in Afghanistan by foregrounding the spatial conditions of the possibility of such measures. How did the security architecture in Afghanistan become so fragmented to require technologies such as drones as extensions of the government security surveillance apparatus to govern ungoverned space? While much literature on drones considers how drones rewrite spaces in their theaters of operation, it is also true that space is rewritten to enact governance-by-drone in the first place. In Afghanistan, historical shifts in the global political economy resulted in spatially fragmented security architecture, thus laying the spatial pre-conditions for security governance-by-drone. This paper brings together debates on geopolitics and geoeconomics with those of roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over neoliberalism to construct a genealogy of spatial reconfiguration in Afghanistan. It begins by exploring earlier geopolitical forms of statecraft in Afghanistan, which focused on augmenting state power through large-scale development projects. It then moves on to show how these were replaced by geoeconomic forms of statecraft that emphasized the rolling back of government involvement, heavy privatization, and foreign investment, resulting in deeply fragmented security architecture. Finally, neoliberalism's roll-out and roll-over phases correlate with reviving geopolitical forms of statecraft aimed at territorial consolidation. The new geopolitical, however, is a form of statecraft that tends toward territorial power through compensatory technological means like drones as opposed to meaningful development. Rulership was leaning toward this new authoritarian, technocratic model well before the capture of these technologies by the Taliban after its transition to power following the 2021 US retreat.

‘Forever wars’? Patterns of diffusion and consolidation of Jihadism in Africa

ABSTRACT The article will discuss the patterns that jihadism has followed when spreading throughout sub-Saharan Africa, addressing the major scholarly debates but also to bring forward the elements that various African cases seemingly have in common. The discussions over African Jihadism has seen several great debates, over the ungoverned space theory, a dichotomous discussion of the local and the global as opposing explanatory models, and a discussion of the role of ‘greed’ and economic incentives. The article argues that these discussions need to be transcended, and that dichotomous discussions fail to see more complex patterns of interaction between various factors, and the complexity of social relations that at times depend on the different contexts we study. Understanding how global networks can harness local conflicts to gain support is key to understanding African jihadist groups, and how those harnessing strategies can be limited. The article also suggests that there is an emerging consensus over several of the factors that do occur in sub-Saharan African jihadism and present the implications of these findings for the ongoing conflict in Mozambique and Tanzania.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (review)

John Horgan who has written a foreword here) to protest loudly the ‘profound social, economic, political and technological’ implications of developments touched upon in the volume – the sum is not greater than the parts. Other parts here include Elaine Callinan’s consideration of responses in the regional press to Redmond’s call to war in 1914 and Ray Burke’s reflections on the changing relationship between that press and ‘the national broadcaster’ RTE, as well as Donal Ó Drisceoil’s look at ‘censorship, suppression and the Irish regional press, 1916–23’. In a final essay Anthony Cawley refers to corporate developments that have seen once proudly independent county papers succumb to takeovers by groups such as Independent News and Media, Thomas Crosbie Holdings, Celtic Media Group and Johnston Press. It is also a final reminder that the editors have perhaps tried too hard to fit a quart into a pint pot. They have, nonetheless, succeeded in underlining the central place of Irish regional papers in many people’s media world for much of the twentieth century. This book is a welcome addition to the growing volume of research on developments in the print media that were until quite recently neglected but that, thanks to scholars such as the contributors to this volume and groups such as the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland, now receive greater attention than they did before. Professor Colum Kenny’s latest book, The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: ‘Father of Us All’ (Merrion Press) has just been published. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff (London: Profile Books, 2018), 704 pages. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the high priests of Silicon Valley gloried in their ability to ‘move fast and break things’, riding roughshod over individual privacy, government regulations and paying as little tax as they possibly could, often through dubious methods. Now that the inevitable ‘techlash’ is gathering momentum, the high priests are huddled in Esalen – where else? – at private cuddle parties – why not? – and, according to a recent New Yorker article, they have settled on a new mantra: ‘move purposefully and fix things’. Hmm. Studies • volume 109 • number 433 104 Spring 2020: Book Reviews Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 104 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 104 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 The reason why the tech companies, mainly the two most powerful, Google and Facebook, are coming under pressure is that people are beginning to realise the extent to which privacy is being abused and governments are beginning to emerge from their torpor and exert the rule of law on the online world, the world’s largest ungoverned space. They may also be beginning to feel the heat from Shoshana Zuboff’s ground-breaking, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published earlier this year. Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, is a social psychologist and philosopher who has been studying the mechanics and effects of the digital platforms for many years. She has produced a devastating critique of a digital revolution which tracks and records our every move and sells the resulting data to advertisers. In the beginning advertisers created ads, then bought space from media owners and placed ads in that space – the press, TV, radio stations and billboards. Now advertisers buy data from the digital platforms, which not only provide the space for advertising messages but tell the advertiser what the most effective message will be for a particular individual and advise the most opportune time, when that individual is likely to be most receptive to the message. (There is increasing evidence to suggest that this may not necessarily be the most effective use of advertiser’s budgets, but sin scéal eile ... ) If the initial phase of the tech businesses’ ability to amass unprecedented profits in the first decade of the twenty-first century was based on their ability to target sales prospects at an optimal time, the second phase in the second decade was even more outrageously ambitious: the ability to modify the public’s behaviour in accord with the commercial interests of their advertisers. This brings us back to the famous (infamous?) twentieth...

Boko Haram insurgency: a decade of dynamic evolution and struggle for a caliphate

Is Boko Haram consistently motivated by the need for a territorial caliphate? That is, the creation of the Community of Ummah rather than religion as their envisioned motivation. We seek to take this question seriously due to a series of studies that have started drawing conclusions on the territorial goal of most terrorist organisations. One of such body of literature focuses on the relationship between terrorist groups’ proclivity for territory and ungoverned space, or the axiom that politics includes legitimate dominion over a spatial extension. Drawing extensively from the territorial assumptions as well as critical discourse analyses of speeches, we argue that the Community of Ummah in West Africa partly informs Boko Haram’s objective. This assertion found its clearest expression in the administration of Kannama village, the declaring of Gwoza as the Caliphate Headquarters and the use of Sambisa Forest and Lake Chad areas for sanctuaries, planning and executions of attacks and threats. Understanding Boko Haram’s geographical motivation has its merit of adopting a more offensive and proactive counterterrorism that aims at destroying terrorist resources, eliminating safe havens and undertaking actions that improve the retention of liberated spaces.

The emergence of ungoverned space in the British countryside

Police and farmers in Britain have differing views on the effectiveness and measures of effectiveness of the policing of rural and farm crime. Farmers are increasingly feeling abandoned by the police while the police are trying to resource rural policing against a backdrop of budget cuts, inadequate strategic guidance and a lack of understanding of the impact of rural and farm crime.
 To obtain information on issues about farm crime, interviews were conducted with Police and Crime Commissioners and Crime Prevention Advisors across four rural police forces in England. Interviews and focus groups were also conducted with farmers.
 The research found that farmers have low levels of confidence in the police, which resulted from the police providing poor response and feedback on incidents. This in turn results in low levels of reporting of crimes by farmers. The police are dealing with increased demands with much lower budgets and few opportunities for specialist training. Combined with ineffective strategic responses and a lack of understanding of farmers’ situations regarding the impact of farm crime, the police are perceived as ineffective in deterring rural criminals.
 This paper explores these policing issues and suggests the need to improve confidence among farming communities to encourage the reporting of farm crime, enabling a better understanding of the extent of farm crime in Britain.

The Challenges of Safe School in Nigeria: The Role of Security Agencies

Safe school in Nigeria in the last decade has come under security threats. This is as a result of terrorist activities targeted at schools resulting in the destruction of school infrastructure, abduction of teachers and students, closure of schools and increase in internal displacement of persons in affected areas prone to security threats. This study looked at the challenges of safe school in Nigeria and the measures that can be taken by security agencies to promote safety of schools from frequent attacks by terrorist and other non-state actors. The paper adopted qualitative research design approach with the use of secondary sources of data. The data gathered were analyzed through content analysis. By adopting Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as theoretical framework for analysis, the paper explained why safety and security needs of teachers and students are under threat. The study noted that the roles and responsibilities of law enforcement agencies were hampered by large “ungoverned space” which Boko Haram insurgents group and other criminal groups take advantage off in perpetrating various crimes and criminality. The study among other things recommended that for schools to be safe from attacks, counter-terrorism rather than anti-terrorism approach must be adopted in combating Boko Haram Insurgency and other similar activities by armed criminal groups. This can be achieved by the effective use of strategic intelligence and reconnaissance activities through effective policy measures and preventive measures. Also stepping up intelligence-led policing certainly will aid the effective use of early warning signals and also ensure that early response mechanisms are properly instituted and situated in the overall diagnosis of issues generating security concerns in the country by the relevant authorities.

Between the Cracks: Actor Fragmentation and Local Conflict Systems in the Libyan Civil War

After nearly four years of civil war, Libya continues to be described as an ‘ungoverned space’ where the collapse of state institutions reignited tribal, political, religious and ideological tensions. These accounts, however, obscure Libya’s complex subnational governance, and the role of non-state armed groups in shaping the emerging political orders. By contrast, we contend that distinct subnational political orders have emerged in Libya since 2014 in which actors engage in state-making practices driven by local interests. Using empirical evidence to explore the activity of non-state armed groups during the Libyan civil conflict, we highlight that the local conflict environments in eastern, western and southern Libya provide specific incentives that shape the process of armed group splintering and patterns of violence. The findings demonstrate that claims to authority and notions of statehood extend far beyond the state whereby governance relations are negotiated between state and non-state actors. Conflict patterns, (in)stability and the prevailing political order are therefore conditional on the nature of the dominant actor, their strategies and modes of violence within their areas of influence. Through this analysis, the paper provides a more granular understanding of the local political dynamics that drive violence in Libya and civil wars more generally.

De facto governance: how authoritative assessments construct climate engineering as an object of governance

ABSTRACTAnalyses of climate engineering (CE) governance have accelerated in the last decade. A key claim is that CE remains a largely ungoverned space, with shared norms, institutional arrangements, and formal rules to regulate CE not yet present. In contrast, here it is argued that de facto governance of CE is underway, discernible in an ordering of this nascent field of inquiry by unacknowledged sources of steering. One key source of de facto governance is analyzed: high-level ‘authoritative assessments’ of CE. The focus is on how these assessments are constructing CE as an object of governance through demarcating and categorizing this emerging field of inquiry, and how this contributes to normalizing and institutionalizing CE research (and CE research communities). Scrutinizing the distinct nature and political implications of de facto governance, particularly of novel and speculative technological trajectories not yet subject to formal steering, remains a key task for governance scholars.

Obama and Afghanistan: a constructivist approach to shifting policy narrative and practices

This article adopts a constructivist approach to explain how and why the Obama administration shifted its policy narrative and practices towards Afghanistan from 2011 onwards. It recognizes that the ‘Global War on Terror’ narrative helped pave the way for a set of institutionalized militarized practices and collectively held beliefs that have structured the post-9/11 world. At the same time, the article argues that the Obama administration’s ‘selling’ of its Afghan policy provided the space for an evolving approach. This policy narrative involved the ‘existential threat’ of transnational militant actors operating out of an Afghanistan–Pakistan ungoverned space being downgraded to a ‘containable’ one. Three key factors prompted this change: the administration’s discursive decoupling of the Taliban and al-Qaeda; the changing perception that the threat posed by ‘al-Qaeda and its affiliates’ was a decentralized one; and the United States’ changed conception of Afghanistan as a ‘safe haven’ for transnational terrorists.

Things Fall Apart: Identity in the Digital World

ABSTRACTWe are in the midst of a data revolution that has penetrated the daily life of most of the world’s population so suddenly and deeply that it is impossible to grasp the extent of its impact on the concepts of self and identity. At the same time as accessing the ever-expanding realm of data via our networked devices, we are also contributing to it with every click or touch and generating a new kind of self in the free and open space of the Internet – ‘the world’s largest ungoverned space’. Can the new inclusiveness that digital technologies have given us be understood as the fulfilment of campaigns waged by critical theories in the late twenty-first century against the authority and centrality of mainstream narratives and the visions they promulgated of the world and ourselves? Or are we facing a new kind of imperialism as we fall under the spell of algorithmic culture – the monster we ourselves have created, nurtured and set free? This paper considers identity in the twenty-first century in terms of the tensions and contradictions between freedom and chaos, definition and dissolution, location and placelessness that are inherent in the digital world.

‘Pre-crime’, Prevent, and practices of exceptionalism: Psychotherapy and the new norm in the NHS

Section ’26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 places a duty on local authorities and public sector institutions to have ‘due regard to the need to Prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. Accordingly, NHS staff are now required to attend a Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP), ensuring they are trained to spot the ideological symptoms and psychosocial vulnerabilities thought to predict extremist activity. In this paper, I suggest that the insertion of counter-radicalisation duties into the work of psychotherapists and other mental health professionals is not simply to be understood as an attempt to forestall and avert extremist activity. Rather, drawing on the work of Georgio Agamben and Judith Butler, I argue it can be viewed as an innovative tactic of governmentality whose technologies of surveillance ensure a culture of conformity in the NHS through which a ‘state of exception’ can be established and normalised. I illuminate this by examining two interrelated aspects of the Prevent duty: one, the decision by the government to embed Prevent within the existing rhetoric and practice of ‘safeguarding vulnerable children and adults’; and two, its discursive representation of the consulting room as ‘pre-criminal space’. I conclude by suggesting that the government’s determination to allow ‘no ungoverned space in which extremism is allowed to flourish’ targets the limits of acceptable speech and so the very conditions for radical thought and critique on which psychotherapy depends.

Working toward a Stable Regional Order

Conditions in the Arab world since 2011 have brought about a perfect storm of national and regional instability: the Arab revolts challenged the authoritarian order in six Arab countries, and intense competition among regional powers has flared into an open proxy war. The combination has caused four Arab states to fully or partially fail. Their failure has created the ungoverned space and sociopolitical chaos that has allowed al-Qaeda to resurge and enabled the formation and spread of ISIS. This article examines the elements of today’s unstable Middle East regional order and suggests steps that the next U.S. president can take to help re-create a stable and less conflictual regional order, including in key states such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. This is key to ending civil wars, rebuilding failed states, and reclaiming ungoverned space from terrorist groups and denying ungoverned space to them in the future.

Identity crisis, State vulnerability and ungoverned space in the Sahel region of Africa: implications for Nigeria national security

-The ungoverned spaces of the Sahel region represent the physical areas where there is absence or weak capacity of states to make representation culminating in pervasive national identity crisis. This work interrogates the ethos of ungoverned space in Nigeria in relations to decades of misrule, neo patrimonialism and prebendalism in the governance process. The paper, relying on “Competitive control theory” describes the unfolding paranormal context between competitive actors (state and groups) Leveraging on the gaps in the governance system within the country. the work concludes that the seemingly lack of government presents in the ungoverned space engulfing the Sambisa forest in North Eastern Nigeria has created a weak link in Nigeria‟s national security. Criminal syndicates and terrorist organizations like Boko Haram have leveraged extensively on this weak link to champion anti state crusade within the region enjoying massive covert support from local indigenes. The work therefore recommends a bottom up re-orientation on national identity through the educational curriculum.

Development in Post-liberalization India: Marketization, Decentralization and Informalization in Gujarat

This article discusses the transformation of development practice following market reforms in developing countries through a study in Gujarat, western India. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork on market-driven development in India’s flagship state of neo-liberal reforms, and the delivery of state-sponsored microcredit through the intervention. The rise of profit-maximizing priorities in government-owned rural banks, the state’s deployment of contracting and subcontracting to implement development policy, and the devolution of implementation to elected local bodies are discussed. This led to the responsibility for local development being tacitly shifted to an ungoverned space in the locality. These practices reveal marketization, decentralization and informalization to be crucial features of the post-liberalization state.

Anticompetitive Market Distortions as an Ungoverned Space, and Prospects for Reform

Post-World War II international trade liberalization has eliminated many border restrictions and spurred economic growth. Nevertheless, there are certain types of activities with substantial negative implications for trade and competition that are not truly subject to national or international trade and competition strictures—these are in effect, “ungoverned spaces.” These harmful activities are the fruit of anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs)—rules imposed by the state that distort competitive interactions and, frequently, trade flows. Sanctioned by governments, ACMDs are far more difficult to combat than purely private restrictions. Recent scholarly studies highlight the magnitude of the harm generated by ACMDs. One promising approach to curb ACMDs involves empowering government officials who support regulatory reform (for example, antitrust policymakers) to intervene with other organs of government in order to encourage the eradication or curbing of ACMDs. The growth of internet-enabled business platforms, which are far better able to evade governmental limits on competition than traditional suppliers of goods and services, may strengthen reformers’ hands. In addition, armed with research on the economic benefits of reform, a coalition of willing nations might be assembled to negotiate a plurilateral trade accord to reduce and eliminate particular types of ACMDs. To the extent they succeed, national and multilateral initiatives to curb ACMDs would broaden the reach of competition and trade laws, thereby shrinking the scale of ungoverned trade and competition law space in a welfare-enhancing manner.

Ungoverned Spaces and Regional Insecurity: The Case of Mali

Across the Sahel and Sahara regions of West Africa, large swaths of territory are essentially ungoverned. Criminal organizations, militant Islamist groups, and ethnic separatist movements created and now enjoy these ungoverned spaces as bases of operation. The case of Mali is of particular interest due to the success of militant Islamist groups in capturing and holding territory, the impact of ungoverned space on the growth of such groups, and the means by which the international community and state checked the militants. In turn, this paper examines factors related to the creation, maintenance, and elimination of ungoverned space in the western Sahel region of Africa. Using the aforementioned case study, it will investigate how militant Islamist groups use ungoverned spaces to their advantage, the spaces’ impact on regional security, and the responses of states and international organizations to threats posed by such groups.

Managing Risk in Ungoverned Space: Local and International Actors in Somalia

Zones of state failure feature complex informal systems of security and local governance and are better understood as contested rather than ungoverned spaces. As the Somalia case demonstrates, this can be a very challenging environment for outside actors to understand and operate in as they pursue their own security concerns. Risk management strategies dominate local decision-making and can result in patterns of collusion, commoditization of security, and reliance on communal forms of protection and governance that work against efforts to build the formal security sector and state-based rule of law.