Transnational Companies and Security Governance ─ Hybrid Practices in a Postcolonial World

This book examines non-state governance in areas of limited statehood by looking at the security practices of multinational companies. It investigates the everyday security practices of mining companies in Subsaharan Africa to illustrate a much broader and highly relevant phenomenon: hybrid transnational security governance. Such hybridity and its ambiguous effects characterise external security practices in many other arenas of intervention in our postcolonial world.

Since the end of the Cold War, multinational companies from the extractive industries have expanded substantially into Africa, Latin America and Asia. In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 50% of foreign direct investment goes into this sector. The book analyses the techniques, nodes of actors and spaces associated with transnational companies’ security governance in this sector. Using the cases of mining regions in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in both the early colonial and post-1990s periods, the book offers an alternative explanation for the similarities, differences, and in fact contradictions, in hybrid security practices in arenas of intervention. It argues that different collective meaning systems that work across state boundaries structure local actors’ perceptions and the security techniques they choose to employ.

This book will be of interest to students of politics and IR, security and governance, discourse and practice theory, business studies and African politics and area studies.

Jana Honke is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a senior research associate with the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 700 at Freie Universitat Berlin.