Laying bricks with guns

image source: http://katakamidotcom2.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/children/

The linking of security of development manifests itself in two ways.  I explored one of these manifestations in my last post, that of linking development with the desire on the part of donor countries to increase their own security.  Put another way, this amounts to the assertion or belief that ‘we’ can “develop our way out of [insecurity]”(Beall et al. 2006:64). The second implication of the development-security linkage is a shrinking of humanitarian space and a blurring of the lines between military and civilian actors in countries where development is taking place (Jacoby and James 2010). I want to focus on this second point in this post.

In both Afghanistan (since the 2001 US invasion) and in Iraq (since the 2003 US invasion), reconstruction of both the state and infrastructure have been carried out in the context of ongoing military conflicts and considerable military presence. In Pakistan, along the Afghanistan border, development projects have been implemented in the context of considerable insecurity and instability and subsequently have required remote management by development managers bunkered in their offices in the capital, far from the locations where development activities, such as infrastructure development, are being carried out. In Afghanistan, where heavy military presence continues in most provinces, physical reconstruction and other development activities have been carried out by Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) made up largely of military personal of foreign security forces under NATO command. In these cases, the military are doing development and the distinction between military and civilian, between multinational and unilateral aid, are nearly lost altogether.

The humanitarian community, such as the International Committee for the Red Cross and other organizations, have long aspired to the principles of impartiality and neutrality, committed to operating in conflict or other politically charged contexts without taking sides and focusing on helping those most in need.  The UK’s Department for International Development, created in the 90s, explicitly embodied a legal requirement that UK foreign aid be divorced from its political (diplomatic) and military (defense department) spending and agendas.  As Jacoby and James (2010) point out, these ideals are being severely tested in the contexts of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, I would argue, in the broader context of the fragile states agenda, as discussed previously.

A military is expressly maintained and deployed in the national interest of its country.  It can, in no way, act neutrally or objectively.  And even acts such as building roads and schools are not, somehow divorced from the political and social complexities of all development activities and programmes.  The use of military in development not only obliterates any hope of maintaining neutrality, it belies a positivist, top-down, apolitical view of development.  Development cannot be deployed like an airborne division and somehow fix insecurity or instability as it is rolled out on the ground.  This point links with Kurtis’s insightful comments in last week’s post about the complexity of development contexts and the futility of trying to control or manipulate them from outside. Robert Chambers called these kinds of development contexts, complex, diverse and risk-prone (CDR) and they require a different approach.  I’ll have a closer look at possible alternative modes of development in my next post.