The organization of sand extraction and trade in Kenya significantly impacts the nation's economic development and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Kenyans. This article aims to contribute to the emerging discussion on how sand commodity chains are negotiated and governed in contexts with absent or ineffective regulation. The sand trade is characterized by a range of informal yet effective rules and institutions, although these rules may be subject to the influence of economic and political dynamics elsewhere.Based on field research at trade routes along three prominent sand extraction sites—Kajiado, Kilifi, and Kedong—we identify the key actors, map the main value streams, and examine the rules and norms underpinning the Kenyan sand economy. Drawing on the scholarship on resource governance, this paper identifies pivotal mechanisms that regulate access to benefits in sand extraction and transportation. Social status, such as that of elders or brokers, sophisticated bottom-up labor organization, and access to wealth provide important impetus for making the sand trade in Kenya a contested yet surprisingly predictable venture. The resilience of the trade hinges on this structured informality, where every actor plays a part in sustaining a market that remains simultaneously regulated and unruly

In this research note, we argue that traditional geopolitical and geoeconomic arguments that seek to make sense of growing engagements between countries of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa often ascribe little significance to notions of culture and history that underpin the narratives of collaborations that have developed across the Red Sea. To address this shortcoming, we turn to the concept of geocultural power-understood as the mobilization of cultural and historical attributes, both symbolic and material, in the pursuit of foreign policy agendas-as a particularly useful heuristic for making sense of the wealth of historical and cultural claims invoked in foreign policymaking in the Red Sea region. We illustrate the utility of the concept through a short discussion of geocultural narratives related to Ethiopia's shifting relations with the Gulf States and Turkey's increasing engagement in the Horn of Africa. While the research note's primary contribution is to outline a research agenda for using the lens of geocultural power, we also argue that states are not the sole arenas in which geopolitical claims are formulated. Hence, future studies should examine how geocultural claims encounter affirmation, contestation, and subversion in different societal arenas. En esta nota de investigaci & oacute;n, argumentamos que las explicaciones geopol & iacute;ticas y geoecon & oacute;micas tradicionales que buscan dar sentido a los crecientes compromisos entre los pa & iacute;ses de Oriente Medio y del Cuerno de & Aacute;frica suelen atribuir poca importancia a las nociones culturales e hist & oacute;ricas que sustentan las narrativas de las colaboraciones que se han desarrollado a lo largo de la regi & oacute;n del Mar Rojo. Con el fin de intentar abordar esta limitaci & oacute;n, recurrimos al concepto de poder geocultural (definido como la movilizaci & oacute;n de atributos culturales e hist & oacute;ricos, tanto simb & oacute;licos como materiales, en la b & uacute;squeda de agendas de pol & iacute;tica exterior), el cual es una heur & iacute;stica que resulta particularmente & uacute;til para dar sentido a la riqueza de las reivindicaciones hist & oacute;ricas y culturales invocadas en la formulaci & oacute;n de la pol & iacute;tica exterior en la regi & oacute;n del Mar Rojo. Ilustramos la utilidad de este concepto a trav & eacute;s de un breve debate de las narrativas geoculturales relacionadas con las cambiantes relaciones de Etiop & iacute;a con los Estados del Golfo y del creciente compromiso de Turqu & iacute;a con & Aacute;frica. Si bien la contribuci & oacute;n principal de esta nota de investigaci & oacute;n es esbozar una agenda de investigaci & oacute;n que nos permita usar la lente del poder geocultural, tambi & eacute;n argumentamos que los Estados no son los & uacute;nicos & aacute;mbitos en los que se formulan las demandas geopol & iacute;ticas. Por lo tanto, los estudios futuros deber & iacute;an estudiar c & oacute;mo las reivindicaciones geoculturales encuentran afirmaci & oacute;n, impugnaci & oacute;n y subversi & oacute;n en diferentes & aacute;mbitos sociales. Dans cette note de recherche, nous affirmons que les arguments g & eacute;opolitiques et g & eacute;o & eacute;conomiques traditionnels cherchant & agrave; donner un sens aux interactions croissantes entre les pays du Moyen-Orient et de la Corne de l'Afrique accordent souvent peu d'importance aux notions de culture et d'histoire sous-jacentes aux r & eacute;cits de collaborations apparus de part et d'autre de la mer rouge. Pour pallier cette lacune, nous nous tournons vers le concept de pouvoir g & eacute;oculturel, ou la mobilisation d'attributs culturels et historiques, tant symboliques que mat & eacute;riels, dans la poursuite d'un programme de politique & eacute;trang & egrave;re. Nous le consid & eacute;rons comme une heuristique particuli & egrave;rement utile pour donner un sens & agrave; la multitude d'affirmations historiques et culturelles invoqu & eacute;es en politique & eacute;trang & egrave;re dans la r & eacute;gion de la mer rouge. Nous illustrons l'utilit & eacute; du concept par le biais d'une courte discussion des r & eacute;cits g & eacute;oculturels relatifs & agrave; l'& eacute;volution des relations de l'& Eacute;thiopie avec les & Eacute;tats du Golfe et aux interactions croissantes de la Turquie dans la Corne de l'Afrique. Bien que la contribution principale de la note de recherche soit de d & eacute;crire un programme de recherche pour l'emploi de l'angle du pouvoir g & eacute;oculturel, nous affirmons aussi que les & Eacute;tats ne sont pas les seules sc & egrave;nes de formulation d'affirmations g & eacute;opolitiques. Aussi les & eacute;tudes futures devraient-elles examiner la rencontre des affirmations g & eacute;oculturelles avec l'affirmation, la contestation et la subversion sur diff & eacute;rentes sc & egrave;nes soci & eacute;tales.

This paper explores the history and ongoing transformation of the South Sudanese Sudd marshlands as a buffer zone in a variety of subsequent projects of domination and their subversion. Its argument will be that the contemporary geopolitics of the Sudd cannot be understood properly without unwinding the historical layers of contestation and conflict around these projects of control and their reversal, projects which have sought to shape and have been shaped crucially by the area's specific ecology. For more than a century, different external ventures - colonial, nationalist, secessionist - encountered in the southern Sudanese marshlands a formidable buffer to the realization of their various projects of control. Ambitions of making the Nile water flow, establishing effective state authority, or building lines of communication, get stuck in the Sudd's difficult terrain. Building on the political ecology and wider social theory on terrain, resistance and warfare, we conceptualize the Sudd as a lively political ecology - one characterized by constant struggles and accommodations between the centripetal logics of state-making and the centrifugal propensities of vernacular political culture.

This article delves into the critical domain of sand mining and trade in the context of rapid urbanization and massive infrastructure development in Kenya. It joins the growing body of work in geography and political ecology that interrogates the social and political intricacies that govern the removal and forwarding of this 'mundane' mineral. More specifically, this article seeks to reappraise the concept of extractivism a term often applied in the discussion of mining of more inherently valuable commodities, describing a form of accumulation based on the depletion of resources in the context of unequal relations. The article focuses on Kedong Valley, a place of colossal sand removal operations, significant revenue generation, and enclave characteristics. It is an area where contestations around the environment, land ownership and use, livelihoods and political authority have long intersected and where sand mining ventures have raised the stakes for control over the land. However, uncharacteristic for extractivism, instead of a few dominant actors, the extractive agents in the Kenyan sand business are many, close and fragmented. The need for effective governance of sand extraction ties together different claims to regulatory authority expressed through norms, regulations, interests and coercion. The self-organization of loaders, for example, has built considerable leverage for collective claim-making, exposing the 'socially thick' relations of extraction practices. The paper demonstrates that the concept of extractivism realizes its analytical value when complementing its structural take with attending to how claims to political authority are made through extraction practices in concrete places.

Drawing on the literature on the temporalities of infrastructure, this article focuses on the cyclical assertion of centralized authority through road-building in South Sudan, where roads are repeatedly built, projects paused, roads ruined, and then rebuilt again. The landscapes of South Sudan are littered with the decaying infrastructure projects of previous governments and political visions, seemingly pointing to a past of failed futures and the limits of government power. At the same time, the recurrent proclamations of temporary power through infrastructure have come to embody a form of permanent order in itself.We specifically focus on two types of internationally-funded roads built around the country’s independence in 2011: the ‘oil’ road between Bentiu and Rumbek as well as the ‘stabilization roads’ in Warrap and Lake States. Initially, these roads displayed the promissory capacity of the new government to reorient politics and the economy to the new Juba-based centre of power. However, they quickly deteriorated. Still, the lack of permanence of the roads did not necessarily undermine the power of the government. In South Sudan, centralized authority is not only built through the road’s completion, but through its unending incompletion that allows both the endless presence of new road projects as much as the entrenchment of coercive forms of managing (dis-)order in the country’s infrastructural frontier. At the same time, people living along the roads often incorporated the short-livedness of the roads into their own visions of the future and more local political orientations.

This introduction to the special issue lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of the ‘infrastructural frontier’. We begin by considering infrastructures as material geographies of power, before moving on to highlight how broader processes of order-making and resistance often become operational at the material edges of states: the places where transport and communication networks peter out and give way to terrains less amenable to remote control. Weaving together insights from the contributions to this special issue, we then show how the concept of the infrastructural frontier productively intervenes in the wider discussion on material geographies, frontiers, and borderlands, by placing the interplay between unsettled infrastructures and unsettled configurations of power at the edge of the state at the center of interest.

In this paper, we show how communities in Northern Kenya proactively engage an unfolding megaproject and the temporalities it evokes-the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET). We argue that the latitude communities have in contending with megaprojects is broader and more dynamic than passive reception of or outright resistance against the futures promised. By introducing the concepts of entangling and fraying, we emphasise the agency communities create for themselves by appreciating their strategies and expressions of stabilising or troubling the "megaproject". While entangling refers to practices through which communities attach additional features to an otherwise rather stable vision of its "meganess", fraying, in contrast, describes the strands that splice off towards different spatio-temporal imaginaries. We discuss these practices in four instances of engaging LAPSSET: constructing temporary homes at project sites; engaging in land reform; disputing land acquisition at oil exploration sites; and contesting a planned resort city.

This is a literature-reviewing and conceptualizing article introducing a Special Issue that is addressing the broad field of 'peacebuilding amidst violence'. We take as a point of departure that peacebuilding (as we know it) is widely failing to deliver on its promises. Moreover, the atypical nature and persistence of violence in post-war phases are further undermining the prospect of linear transition from war to peace as typically expected in peacebuilding ventures. We extend, however, our argument and claim that in spite of creative 'turns', the concept has exhausted its adaptive capacity, and both conceptually and empirically has few options left. We investigate the three possible, as we see it, remaining options, which all include paradigmatic changes, namely the closure of, the refusal of the failure of, and the re-enacting of, peacebuilding. Although the 're-enacting' is the preferred way forward for the authors of this introductory article, it rather opens up for the ensuing articles presented in the issue than concludes of the desirability and feasibility of that path.

Driven by the momentous political and economic changes of the past decade and by the resurgence of popular resistance against globalization, the question of global supply chains has come back with a vengeance. Nearly two decades after the optimism around globalization fizzled out, the imperative of circulation remains so deeply ingrained in our world that it is almost invisible. Yet we are increasingly confronted with the realization that circulation also comes at a cost—it is both violent and fragile, in need of security, capital, infrastructure and constant maintenance; beyond its technical and economic aspects, circulation produces frictions, discontents, unwanted mobilities and shadow economies. It thus seems timely to articulate the varied and perhaps contradictory politics inherent in the ubiquitous imperative of making things circulate. Until fairly recently, the efforts to critically study logistics and circulation have been dispersed and fragmented. Michael Watts already insisted in 2000 that we must attend to the “violent geographies of fast capitalism” (2000: 8) and Nigel Thrift in 2004 identified logistics as “perhaps the central discipline of the contemporary world” (2004: 589). Yet it would take another decade for a more coherent engagement with logistics to emerge out of critical work on the thence pervasive neoliberal agenda of “globalization.” It is safe to say that if this particularly strong ideological agenda has taken a beating in the storm of populist politics, the drive to achieve ever-more sophisticated supply chains hasn’t. Supply chains dominate the global economy: over 80% of all global trade now take place in networks of subsidiaries and subcontractors steered by lead firms, and the drive to make it all

Do roads literally lead to peace? While seemingly a strange question to ask, today's peacebuilders certainly seem to think so. After decades of focus on questions of governance, today, instead, infrastructure primes in state- and peacebuilding missions in many fragile and conflict-affected societies. Peacebuilding efforts in places ranging from Somalia to Afghanistan to the Congo are, to a considerable extent, interventions in the built environment. While infrastructure has always been around in post-conflict reconstruction, today, infrastructure is mobilized during ongoing conflict, invested with aspirations of improving security and stability. To be sure, infrastructure played a big role in the formation of strong western states. But can we take this experience to try and forge political orders of concrete and steel? At a first glance, a theory of change that reorders societies by deploying the hidden powers of the built environment seems compelling, and measurable and concrete infrastructure outputs, additionally, fit perfectly within today's more pragmatic approaches to peace. However, based on examples from across the contemporary global peacebuilding landscape, we show that infrastructure neither amounts to a uniform force, nor is it clear what its impact on peace exactly is. What is certain is that infrastructure is profoundly entwined with contemporary peacebuilding, and that we therefore need to develop novel theoretical angles to come to terms with the ubiquitous politics of infrastructure.

Today, the US military is frequently involved in the field of reconstruction and development. In Eastern Africa, personnel of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa has carried out hundreds of small projects, ranging from veterinary support, medical clinics for local populations to the construction and repair of schools and health centres. Although these civil affairs operations constitute only a small part of the wider US military activity on the continent, they play a significant role in the US military's post counterinsurgency emphasis on stability operations. However, critical scholarship has paid little attention to this type of military practice, let alone the dynamics of giving and taking for the targeted beneficiaries. This article draws conceptually on perspectives of the gift and empirically on visits to project sites in Uganda and Kenya that received assistance by US civil affairs teams in order to explore how recipients engage the gift-bearing donor. By understanding aid projects as social relations that are characterized by hierarchy and efforts of reciprocity, gift perspectives help us to make tensions and contradictions in these encounters visible. While the relationship is one of inequality, these interventions are mediated. Local brokers have a significant role in negotiating and translating priorities of the civil affairs teams on the one hand and the needs of local recipients on the other. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A number of recent military practices, including contributions to humanitarian relief and reconstruction, as well as counterinsurgency and stability operations, emphasize socio-economic needs of distant populations as one of the key adversaries in this 'era of persistent conflict'. Such developments warrant a critical inquiry into the potential normalization of military approaches to societal issues. The aim of the article is to contribute to current discussions on militarization as a social practice through a study of the involvement of military actors in the delivery of humanitarian assistance and aid in Kenya and Uganda. The article zeroes in on three themes in relation to projects implemented by US civil affairs teams: first, how do military personnel make sense of this 'non-traditional' military practice; second, what are local recipients' expectations about the role of the military in societal issues; and, third, what are potential adversary effects of such 'productive' interventions in contexts that share a memory of military coercion? If we assume that militarization cannot be untied from questions of institutionalized coercion, and if the inquiry to be followed is process- and context-oriented, then attention needs to be directed to potential coercive moments engendered in the context of interventions presented as being benevolent. I assert that it is through a careful study of mundane military practices that we can further add nuance to the concept of militarization in the military-humanitarian realm.

Current Western security doctrines assert that state fragility, radicalization and humanitarian disasters in the global South feed into ‘persistent conflict’. Such a scenario consequently requires a closely coordinated and integrated response from political and military actors. In this context, Western governments have introduced the concept of stabilization in their approaches to ‘fragile’ states. This article aims to understand the expanding activities of the US military in sub-Saharan Africa, which are conducted under the label of stability operations. It will be argued that the vast spectrum of activities under this label – from health projects to drone attacks – can be made comprehensible through the concept of policing, understood as processes of regulating communities with the aim of establishing ‘good order’. Key pillars of the US military’s stability operations operations doctrine – namely, a focus on the welfare of the population (on a par with the minimum use of force) as well as an extended preventative engagement – overlap with concerns of police power. Presented by security strategists as vulnerable to instability, sub-Saharan Africa has become an experimental ground for the US military, where ideas on stability operations are tested. Empirically, the article discusses two manifestations of stability operations that warrant an analysis through the concept of policing: US Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) civil affairs projects and the US military’s active involvement in ongoing conflicts.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the ordering dimension of war: police interventions and the relationship between intervening forces and local populations. Rather than analysing rationales and practices of coercion and governance and order separately, the book examines how these destructive and productive technologies are mutually entangled and play out simultaneously. By investigating the history of air power, Neocleous demonstrates not simply its preventative and structuring purpose for British colonial policy, but elucidates the constituting role of air power in contemporary war: police assemblages. The book shows how 'war' is no longer a discrete or distinct event but instead a complex assemblage of exceptionality and normalcy, of the political and the apolitical. It shows how particular understandings of the 'tribal nature' of Pashtun communities, rooted in the colonial history of the British Raj, have resurfaced in the US-led intervention in Afghanistan.

This special issue sets out to analyze-from different epistemological perspectives and based on different case studies-tensions that have arisen in a number of recent security interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. The character of international peace and security missions in the Global South has changed significantly after the end of the Cold War. On the one hand, we witness a greater willingness to engage in order to terminate or prevent violent conflict. This willingness is grounded in a broader understanding of security in which the protection of the population is prioritized over the claim to security of a sovereign state. A state's sovereignty is increasingly interpreted as entailing a responsibility to protect the citizenry. On the other hand, a broadened international will to intervene in conflicts in the Global South raises a number of controversial questions regarding when and how and on whose behalf to intervene. What should be the projected end state of such liberal interventions? What does a responsibility to protect entail, conceptually and in practice? Who are the principal actors in complex and ambitious missions aimed at creating stability, peace, or (human) security? When should a stabilization mission end? What are the consequences when (short-term) security or humanitarian interests and (long-term) state-building or development interest are all legitimized through a discourse of protecting vulnerable populations? And, perhaps most importantly, what stakes do the actors directly affected by the conflict and the international response have? These are some of the questions the contributors address and analyze in this special issue.

Considering the growing influence of studies of governmentality within international relations, this article proposes a stronger engagement with the dynamics that happen in the arenas where dominant rationales are put into practice-in the interstices between programmes and their realization. Conceptual tools discussed in the anthropology of development have provided useful insights on how discursive and material interventions are negotiated, translated and appropriated by the actors involved. The case of international counterterrorism engagement in Kenya, in particular the Danish 'Peace, Security and Development Programme', illustrates how local mobilization against controversial security practices in Kenya has influenced the Danish counterterrorism agenda. However, the project's subsequent focus on ownership and empowerment remained entangled with more disciplinary forms of engagement.