Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses the question of how to make sense of the US military’s development practices and their effects in Eastern Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The US military is increasingly engaged in matters of governance and accentuates the needs of local populations. Africom has recently increased the number of "civil affairs" teams across Eastern Africa. Drawing on counterinsurgency doctrine, the US military furthermore makes cultural awareness central to their operations in Africa. Yet, this emphasis on the population and on governance issues is supplemented by an increase in drone attacks against terrorist suspects, the set-up of a surveillance network and the US' military's involvement in the LRA conflict. In other words, the use of coercion remains an important part of the US military's repertoire in its "peace time engagements" in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Conceptually, a Foucauldian understanding of police sheds light on these multiple practices mentioned above. Rather than denoting police as the modern institution for law enforcement, the notion pursued here rests on a concern with the production of order and welfare for the population through an expanding regulatory mandate and "reasonable" use of force. Yet, more importantly for this panel might be the question of how these external efforts of "social ordering", framed as stability operations in US military strategy, are met and responded to by local communities? The paper draws on field work at sites of US military civil affairs projects in Coastal Kenya and Northern Uganda. At the center of the empirical concern is the question of how benefitting communities perceive the practices of armed actors at the intersection of countering insurgency and countering poverty.