Engaging the ‘ungoverned’: The merging of diplomacy, defence and development
| Author | Sam Okoth Opondo,Costas M Constantinou |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836715612848 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
612848CAC0010.1177/0010836715612848Cooperation and ConflictConstantinou and Opondo
research-article2015
Article
Cooperation and Conflict
2016, Vol. 51(3) 307 –324
Engaging the ‘ungoverned’:
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836715612848
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defence and development
Costas M Constantinou and
Sam Okoth Opondo
Abstract
This article explores biopolitical practices that extend beyond national borders and take the whole
of humanity as their province. It looks at how attempts to secure and optimize conditions of living
in Africa are not merely governmental in scope but also diplomatic in their conceptualization and
conduct. It specifically examines the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (or the 3Ds),
which purports to optimize life and shape ways of being in areas that cannot be ‘fully governed’
or resist domestication. It assesses the impact of diplomatic pluralization, characterized by the
militarization of diplomacy and development, the diplomatization of the military, and new forms
of diplomatic outreach, as practised by agencies such as AFRICOM. At stake in this exploration
is an ethico-political critique of 3D engagement through which lives, conducts and relationships
are negotiated in the postcolony.
Keywords
Biopolitics, global governance, new diplomacy, postcolonialism, AFRICOM
Introduction: Optimizing life in ‘ungoverned’ spaces
On 14 May 2008, the US Ambassador to Ethiopia, Donald Yamamoto, visited the village
of Jeldessa where he met and greeted ‘the community members who gathered with their
goats, sheep, cattle, donkeys and camels’ before assisting a team of veterinarians to vac-
cinate the animals.1 While a US ambassador’s visit to a remote African village is not a new
phenomenon, the relationships, objectives and constitution of his delegation are revealing
in interesting ways. To begin with, the ambassador’s visit to Jeldessa was part of a US
military-led Veterinary Civil Action Project (VETCAP) where Ethiopian veterinarians
and US military service members assigned to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of
Africa (CJTF-HOA) inoculated and treated animals in several villages surrounding the
Corresponding author:
Costas M Constantinou, University of Cyprus, P. O. Box 20537, Nicosia, 1678, Cyprus.
Email: constantinou.m.costas@ucy.ac.cy
308
Cooperation and Conflict 51(3)
city of Dire Dawa. Among other things, the VETCAP project sought to provide pastoral
care to the pastoralists through activities that improved animal health and ensured the
general wellbeing of communities in need of development, technical support and capacity
building. The project thus established civil–military partnerships – engaging ‘ungoverned’
communities, or people that could not ‘properly govern’ their lives, habitats and livestock
– fostering their endangered livelihoods.
The militarization of diplomacy and development and diplomatization of the military
in the VETCAP project are not unique to this event. In neighbouring Kenya, a similar
concern with the lives and wellbeing of the community had been enacted in the August
2011 Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) in the villages of Mnazini and Assa in
the rural Tana River district.2 Carried out by medical providers from the US and Kenyan
Military working in conjunction with several non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
the MEDCAP project can be read as an extension of US providence where African state
power has not been in a position to effectively govern. These military–civic partnerships
form part of an incipient diplomatic paradigm that employs new agents and networks.
They follow – yet also depart in specific ways – from the more formal military diplo-
macy ‘of negotiations and other relations between nations, nations’ militaries, and
nations’ citizens aimed at influencing the environment in which the military operates’
(Willard, 2006: 6–7). Through projects like the VETCAP and MEDCAP, the military
expands its moral domain by exercising ‘soft power’ while experimenting with new dip-
lomatic methods that extend the reach of its ‘hard power’ to domains that were hitherto
unmilitarized.
Ultimately, this military-diplomatic apparatus presents something more than a state’s
or empire’s attempt to ‘enhance its value’ at the periphery of the international system. By
managing poverty and scarcity and supporting ‘good’ living conditions around the globe,
the apparatus maintains old and extends new ‘relations of subjection’ and governance
while creating new sites of diplomatic engagement that exceed the governmental domain
(Mbembe, 2001: 24). Connecting domains of administration and negotiation, but also
violence and multiple attempts to curtail it, the apparatus is part of a milieu in which
governmental and diplomatic practices are synergized and instituted. Beyond its strate-
gic concern with the optimization of lives and livelihoods, the entanglement of govern-
mental and diplomatic conduct registers, we believe, an ontological shift from biopolitics
to biodiplomacy.
Emerging from the liberal will to self-regulation and governance and specifically
addressing the politics of life, biopolitics, Michel Foucault tells us, involves ‘control over
relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar
as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live’ (Foucault,
2003: 245). Going beyond the juridical conception of sovereignty and law enforcement,
biopolitics concentrates on the management of populations through the production of
knowledge about life and ways of living, as well as the enhancement of methods of sup-
porting and controlling them. Unlike juridical sovereignty, which was predominantly
defined by the right of rulers to ‘take life and let live’, biopolitics follows a governmental
logic of ‘making live and letting die’ (Foucault, 2003: 247). Whereas biopolitics has
expanded its reach and deepened its governmental methods to multiple domains around
the globe – not only enhancing conditions of living but also determining who is made to
Constantinou and Opondo
309
live and who is let to die – biodiplomacy underscores the continuous negotiation of life
that accompanies this global expansion and that has brought shifts in strategies of con-
trol, discourses of legitimation and forms of co-optation and cohabitation beyond
governance.
We have examined the theoretical and ethical ramifications of biodiplomacy in more
detail in a separate article (Constantinou and Opondo, 2014). The focus on biodiplomacy
provokes us to ask if there is something more going on beyond ‘liberal governance’, the
‘liberal way of war’ or the ‘merging of security with development’. Specifically it allows
us to inquire how groups, like the Jeldessa villagers or other groups who are acted upon
by the powerful, play out their agency and the forms of diplomacy that enable them to do
so. Do they create new diplomacies as they enact their lives in the spaces and times
where biopolitical regimes operate? Or is the biopolitical formation creating new forms
of diplomatic subjects? Posing the question not only of biopolitics but of biodiplomacy
makes it possible for us to seriously think how lives and worlds are not just ‘governed’
but ‘negotiated’, how certain lives and worlds become plausible, and others implausible,
and this not through centralized command, control and exercise of power.
To be sure, biodiplomacy does not ensure symmetrical negotiation, particularly where
the USA is involved. Over the last 10 years, the cultivation of outreach and the exploita-
tion of new civilian partnerships have been keenly pursued through the US Transformational
Diplomacy initiative, extending operations beyond the traditional centres of power and
intergovernmental relationships. For instance, a plethora of projects have been promoted
under the auspices of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in a manner that exemplifies
both the biopolitical and biodiplomatic dimensions of the military-diplomatic apparatus.
Such projects are sometimes frank and cynical about their goal. VETCAP, for example,
currently operates in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania and Uganda and aims
to ‘deliver veterinary programs in support of strategic military objectives’.3 Although
there is no public explanation as to what the specific strategic military objectives are in
each country and how they are linked to the vaccination of livestock, the engagements are
indicative of the new civilian partnerships that the US Defense and State Departments are
developing worldwide as well as of what has been termed as the merging of diplomacy,
defence and development (3D) – the ‘three pillars’ of US foreign policy in the post-9/11
era. In short, there is a clear policy reorientation towards supporting ‘foreign’ life that is
openly admitted and promoted, but whose global implications and replications are yet to
be fully understood.
To begin to grasp the significance of this ‘transformational diplomacy’, it will be use-
ful to consider the forms of life and worlds that emerge when diplomats abandon their
traditional spaces of encounter, ‘get their boots dirty’ and seek to bring real change where
societal transformation is urgently ‘needed’. These attempts at diplomatic innovation
have been presented as part of the 21st Century Statecraft initiative in the USA, which
tries to ‘leverage the...
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