Prof. Sarah Phillips1, Dr Daniel Tower1
1The University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Sarah Phillips is Professor of Global Conflict and Development at The University of Sydney, where she is an ARC Future Fellow. Her research draws from years of in-depth fieldwork in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Kenya, and Jordan, and focuses on international intervention in the global South, and knowledge production about conflict-affected states.
Daniel Tower is an academic and engineer, whose work focuses on the intersection between the anthropology of religion and the geopolitics of armed conflict. He has done extensive fieldwork in the Middle East including in Iraq during the ISIS conflict. Daniel completed his PhD at the University of Sydney.
Abstract:
There is a wealth of literature about how development and security bureaucracies depoliticise their areas of operation to produce technical objects suitable for intervention and thereby exacerbate the problems they seek to address. We show how private security companies (PSCs) in Iraq attempt to generate security by filtering information for readily actionable detail that can be communicated to clients in maps, colour-coded zones, threat assessments, risk ratings, dashboards, and incident reports. While these products may provide granular data about security events and conditions, they omit the politics that drive the insecurity they report, particularly the question of who benefits from it. We argue that by rendering insecurity a technical problem that is solved through actionable information about specific locations, the beneficiaries of Iraq’s insecurity are erased. These beneficiaries include corrupt local elites, militias that control key organs of the state, and the international actors and systems that enable both. Their erasure from the security landscape allows PSCs and, more importantly, their powerful international clients, to conduct business, development projects, and diplomacy in Iraq while helping to facilitate the power and profitability of the militias that now dominate its politics.