West Africa has been reported to be an important transit point in the global cocaine trade, bridging Latin American and European markets (Ellis Reference Ellis2009; Vigh Reference Vigh and Utas2012; Carrier & Klantschnig Reference Carrier and Klantschnig2012; Shaw Reference Shaw2015). International actors insist that the weakness of West African state structures encourages the development of transnational organized criminal activities like drug trafficking and terrorism, posing a threat to international stability. International actors have pursued capacity-building measures as a way to strengthen the governance of West African security institutions to respond to these borderless threats.
The existing literature on state-building and police reform has a difficult time analyzing international reform initiatives. Research either posits the dominance of international actors to impose reform in ways that impede or circumvent local political ownership, or, conversely, it maintains that local political interests derail international efforts to create a “transnational constabulary ethic” due to existing patron–client relationships and competing understandings of the role of violence in police work (Sheptycki Reference Sheptycki, Goldsmith and Sheptycki2007; Hills Reference Hills2009).
It is important to carefully assess on an empirical level the degree to which transnational initiatives prompt recipients of police reform to internalize global security norms. Doing so, however, requires a theoretical framework that places all actors involved in intervention processes on equal analytical ground. By mobilizing Foucault’s (Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977) explanation of disciplinary power, the article captures how reform interventions unfold by focusing on the relationality of multiple actors caught up in interactions premised by profound asymmetries of power. Through transnational capacity-building security initiatives, international actors approach intervention as a way to enact surveillance over West African law enforcement agents in order to change how the latter conduct police work. However, disciplinary interventions simultaneously create resistances that become inserted into wider sociopolitical contests over the nature, definition, and practices of security reform. By focusing on relations of power and resistance at the disciplinary mechanisms’ points of application, this analytical lens cuts into North–South relations of power while being sensitive to local political contests in which reform interventions become embedded.
To demonstrate these dynamics, the article analyzes the operation of the Container Control Programme (CCP) of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Customs Organization (WCO) in Senegal. CCP officials from the UNODC, in partnership with Western police liaisons based in Dakar, enact disciplinary techniques on Senegal’s law enforcement agents involved in the functioning of the CCP through mentoring, hierarchical examination, and correction according to Western standards of law enforcement, and by producing incentivizing strategies that coax Senegalese agents to internalize Western security logics. Nevertheless, the disciplinary mechanisms and techniques of the program play out on contested terrain and produce their own set of frictions and resistances. Political, economic, and religious actors in the country contest the objectives and priorities of the program. Their influence complicates how Senegalese law enforcement agents internalize security rationales outlined in the CCP.
Evidence for this research was collected in Dakar in the summer of 2012 and in January 2013. The author was given primary access to the working of the CCP’s interagency team at the port of Dakar, which was toured on several occasions. Interviews were conducted with over thirty law enforcement actors, consisting of U.N., E.U., French, and Italian officials, officers from Senegal’s law enforcement agencies, port officials, and economic actors. Interviews with U.N. officials were also conducted in Vienna in early December 2012, and follow-up interviews were conducted by phone in February 2015.
The article first reviews the literature on international police reform in Africa and presents the lens of disciplinary power to deepen our understanding of these relationships. It then describes the CCP and analyzes the forms of disciplinary power in its operation at the Port of Dakar (Port Autonome de Dakar, abbreviated locally as PAD). The final section demonstrates how the disciplinary mechanisms of the CCP produce multiple resistances, especially from political, religious, and economic authorities who exercise an important degree of influence in Senegal, and who contest the dominant security rationalities of the CCP.
International versus Local Power in African Police Reform
According to many academic assessments of the current state of law enforcement in Africa, “policing is in a state of crisis” and “needs fundamental reform” (Francis Reference Francis and Francis2012:20). Most of the academic literature on security reform efforts emphasizes the importance of one of two sets of actors: either international security experts, or local political actors and reform recipients.
Reform-minded literature argues that international efforts fail to develop the institutional capacities of police agencies in fragile states due to international actors’ poor planning and insufficient knowledge of local political cultures (Paris Reference Paris2004; Goldsmith & Dinnen Reference Goldsmith and Dinnen2007; Peake & Marenin Reference Peake and Marenin2008). There is now a broad consensus that the security reform process must be appropriately designed to suit local political contexts and to be “locally owned” by state authorities and local civil society, rather than driven by international actors (see Donais Reference Donais2009; Oostefeld & Galand Reference Oosterveld and Galand2012). Nevertheless, extant research has demonstrated time and again the critical disjunctures between the official discourse of local ownership and its practice on the ground, where the principle of ownership is consistently violated (see Chesterman Reference Chesterman2007; Booth Reference Booth2012; Gordon Reference Gordon2014). Bøås and Stig (Reference Bøås and Stig2010) demonstrate how international security sector reform (SSR) programs for Liberia have stressed the necessity of local ownership, but Western actors have governed SSR in a technical fashion with little Liberian involvement, due in part to their lack of understanding of the country’s history of social and political exclusions (see also Andersen Reference Andersen2010). Hutchful argues that overly complex international models have undermined the reform process in Sierra Leone, undercutting “any possibility of meaningful ownership” (2012:80; see also Marenin Reference Marenin, Goldsmith and Sheptycki2007; Bekoe Reference Bekoe and Francis2012). These assessments dovetail with findings from peacebuilding interventions. For example, Autesserre shows that international experts’ lack of in-depth knowledge of local political contexts creates local perceptions of intervener arrogance, stifling local ownership of international projects and making it likely that recipients “ignore, distort, or oppose foreign peace efforts” (2014:96). The analytical focus of these studies is on the output orientation (measured by the success or failure of reform) of international actors, whose models hinder local ownership since they are inappropriate for local African settings, and emphasize that success in SSR can only occur once international actors design projects geared to specific environments.
More radical critiques of security reforms in postconflict states, many inspired by the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, also stress the influence of international experts over local actors. State-building interventions in the global South reflect the hegemonic position of Western states at the expense of local politics, with ownership serving as a discursive smokescreen that obscures the power of international actors (see Chandler Reference Chandler2006; Duffield Reference Duffield2007b; Roberts Reference Roberts2010). Duffield (Reference Duffield2001, Reference Duffield2007a) argues that international initiatives like police reform in postconflict spaces involve intense forms of regulatory coercion, which serve to secure Western ways of life at the expense of local populations (see also Harrison Reference Harrison2004). The “hybrid peace” approach argues similarly that international reform initiatives do not sufficiently negotiate with the everyday practices of local actors. Richmond (Reference Richmond2014), Mac Ginty (Reference Mac Ginty2010, Reference Mac Ginty2011), and others stress that in reform interventions, international actors frame local responses as antiquated and illiberal, thereby reinforcing the former’s dominance by dismissing local populations’ concerns as irrational or corrupt. According to the radical view, the power exercised by international interveners is pursued by “imposition” (Richmond Reference Richmond2012:124), which often results in “a loss of agency on the part of local actors” (Richmond & Mitchell Reference Richmond and Mitchell2012:6). In short, radical critiques of security reform posit that the political autonomy of local actors is severely limited by “metropolitan monitoring, intervention and regulation” (Duffield Reference Duffield2002:1066). They maintain the prominence of international actors over local ones, sometimes ignoring local actors altogether in their analyses (see Sabaratnam Reference Sabaratnam2013).
Both reform-minded literature and radical critiques tend to overstate the power, authority, and causal significance of international actors over local ones. Reform-minded research assumes the power of international actors to build domestic institutions once they have paid adequate attention to local political contexts and have deciphered a formula to foster local ownership of reform. They tend to omit an analysis of the relationships of power and the practices that inform them (see Hameiri Reference Hameiri2010; Egnell & Haldén Reference Egnell and Hálden2009; Sending Reference Sending, Campbell, Chandler and Sabaratnam2011). The radical critique of capacity-building reforms equally aggrandizes the significance of international actors to an extent that the exercise of power by populations in sites of intervention is caricatured, fetishized, or not acknowledged at all (Charbonneau & Sears Reference Charbonneau and Sears2014). Footnote 1 It posits that recipients of capacity-building efforts either comply out of economic or security necessity, or willingly accept intervention policies because they are convinced that international experts do indeed have the correct formulas that will solve the problems of instability and poverty experienced by fragile states. By focusing on the preeminence and power of certain types of actors, “these accounts make unduly strong assumptions about the lack of power of other groups” instead of examining the relationships among them (Sending Reference Sending, Campbell, Chandler and Sabaratnam2011:65; see Jackson & Nexon Reference Jackson and Nexon1999).
Conversely, a more specialist literature on African police explains how local political orientations determine outcomes of capacity-building police reform interventions. Thirty years ago Marenin (Reference Marenin1986) demonstrated how U.S. actors responsible for implementing police assistance programs overestimated their capacity to change African policing practices and failed to recognize how reform projects became politicized resources for competing local actors. Krogstad (Reference Krogstad2014) impressively demonstrates that amidst claims of “lack of ownership,” Sierra Leone’s political and security elites adeptly pursued a policy of limited leadership and direct British “proxy governance” in order to secure greater resources, protection and stability, and global connections from the international donor community. Raynoux and Wilén (Reference Raynoux and Wilén2014) demonstrate that Congolese recipients of European Union SSR resist capacity-building efforts due to their competing understandings of the role that security institutions play in the country, and the unwillingness of the central government to concede to policies that do not align with their national priorities. Hills argues similarly that the “international police reform industry” is unlikely to exhibit practical results for improving the continent’s police because the governance of security agencies in African states is underwritten by the enduring logic of patron–client relations and regime security (2008:200; see also Hills Reference Hills2000, Reference Hills2007). Her assessment is that Nigerian political and security elites are “not committed to liberal knowledge and practice per se, but . . . [are] . . . politically and pragmatically committed to accommodating many aspects of that culture, and the resources associated with it” (2012:743–45; see also Hills Reference Hills2009). Klantschnig (Reference Klantschnig2009) notes, in an analysis of Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), that the processes of centralization, exclusion, and shifting bureaucratic interests that determine how drug enforcement is governed in Nigeria make the NDLEA the dominant drug enforcement agency at the expense of other bureaucratic challengers.
Empirical analyses stressing the practices and strategies of local actors are an important contribution for understanding the politics of police reform. They demonstrate the competing “vested interests and social realities” of African security actors and systems that constrain the efforts of international interventions (Hills Reference Hills2012:745). But even these analyses limit our understanding of the relationships of power that mark international police reform in Africa since they focus on the characteristics and behaviors of local actors while neglecting the practices, resources, and regularity of interactions that international experts bring to bear on their African counterparts. Footnote 2 In premising national or subnational policing cultures as the most significant reasons that international police reform does not yield results, this literature obscures the power of transnationalized techniques and practices that take the form of persuasion and surveillance within reform relationships which also shape the policing practices of security agents in Africa. Even if the nature of those changes is contingent, and constrained by local context, reform initiatives and the North–South relationships that they foster are still very consequential to African police agencies and individual officers, especially those that interact on a daily or weekly basis with international actors in countering cross-border threats. Nigeria’s NDLEA, Ghana’s Narcotics Control Board (NACOB), Senegal’s Office Central de Répression des Trafics Illicites et des Stupéfiants (OCRTIS), Mali’s Office Central de Stupéfiants (OCS) or the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN), and a host of others regularly interact with international policing counterparts in training and operational investigations. These specialized security actors are drawn into North–South relationships through formal and informal, common, and regularized interactions that significantly shape (if not immediately transform) how police work against borderless threats is understood and practiced on the continent. This is not to deny that patron–client politics and local context are an important factor influencing the politics of African policing. It is instead to note that specialized policing units in Africa have regular contact with international actors and take advantage of opportunities that push them to take the latter’s security practices seriously, often resulting in the internalization of global policing norms.
Analyzing the complex relationality of specific reform encounters between local and international security actors allows us to capture how global and local policing practices are being transformed in Africa. The approach taken here complements approaches that recognize the role of international actors in police transformation in the global South, and those that posit the centrality of local actors, settings, and politics through the application of Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power.
Disciplinary Power and International Police Reform
Foucault’s analysis of discipline deepens our understanding of the relationships of power that operate between international interveners and local political actors in police reform in Africa. Disciplinary power is enacted on individuals through diffuse means in order to change their behaviors and practices toward positive, manageable outcomes that increase their usefulness to governmental regimes. Through the logics that underpin the functioning of Europe’s “great essential institutions” like the prison, clinic, and factory, Foucault shows how individuals are exposed to a “machinery of power” and “calculated methods” that measure, break down, and rearrange existing self-understandings to produce docile individuals who can then be “subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977:211,136–38; see also Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan2003). Disciplinary power fosters improvements in individuals who come to govern themselves according to the logics of modernity.
Three overarching logics of discipline predominate: hierarchical observation such as “oversight,” normalizing judgment, and forms of examination and correction (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977). Hierarchical observation enacts a subtle form of coercion that induces changes in behavior due to power relationships centered on visibility, knowledge and “savoir-faire,” spatial dynamics, and prescription (see Roele Reference Roele2014). For example, international police reform initiatives are normally accomplished following fact-finding and “needs assessment” missions. Capacity-building experts and other partners observe the practices, dispositions, and organizational structures of police forces in potential recipient states and utilize their social distance, oversight, and positions as “objective experts” in security to develop a targeted set of modalities to produce social change in police work. Findings from these observations become the basis for future capacity-building and reform missions and constitute the social architecture of training projects (see Merlingen Reference Merlingen2011). Side-by-side training and mentorship by policing experts are a ubiquitous component of capacity-building that are relatively inexpensive, concentrated, and pervasive, and they permit “an internal, articulated and detailed control . . . that . . . operate[s] to transform individuals” through the social distance between capacity-building experts and reform recipients (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977:172).
African security forces are measured against Western norms of effective, democratic, civil-oriented police work (see Bayley Reference Bayley2001; Merlingen & Ostrauskaite Reference Merlingen and Ostrauskaite2005; Ellison & Pino Reference Ellison and Pino2012). Disciplinary normalization gauges the degree to which individuals are deemed in some way deviant in terms of that yardstick, and devises techniques to supervise and measure how to correct behaviors and practices that fall short of the norm. This can only be accomplished through regular examination and surveillance of routine practices. Surveillance allows for the capacity-building observer to evaluate changes toward the norm in trainees, and to assess and differentiate those positive outcomes from cases that deviate.
Assessments produce opportunities for correction. Correction is based on a series of inducements that reward practices that abide by the norm, while punishing deviant behaviors. Disciplinary power, therefore, functions “according to a double mode; that of a binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal),” which deciphers and classifies individuals (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977:199). Individuals classified as “normal” come to constitute part of that disciplinary mechanism by conforming to its justifications and interventions. The expertise of international police trainers, for example, establishes the benchmark to which “nonmodern” or “authoritarian” policing in the global South must change and adhere. Training courses provide forms of accreditation, status, and prestige (e.g., in the form of higher ranks or the acquisition of security certificates) for having successfully achieved international policing standards—or at least for moving toward them, which incentivizes the internalization of disciplinary techniques. Punishing deviation for not conforming to disciplinary power’s normalizing judgment requires constant repetition so that the reiterative exercise of training succeeds in eventually correcting practices that initially fall short of the mark.
Disciplinary power, however, is not monopolized in one location or “held” by only one set of actors; nor is it all-powerful. Recipients of reform may find some understandings and practices that international experts proffer to be arbitrary, constraining, and ill-adapted to local environments, as the local-oriented literature demonstrates. International police reform experts’ disciplinary practices and logics may compete with the priorities and practices of social control of alternative, connected political and economic actors, whose influence may impinge upon how local police recipients prioritize their policing duties. This can result in contestation of police reform projects, a matter that should be examined empirically. In such cases, capacity-builders continue slow, focused surveillance and side-by-side training and mentorship, combining these consistent efforts with several incentivizing strategies to foster a reorientation of the practices and knowledge of their disciplinary targets, if possible by pursuing their methods beyond the reach and influence of competing authority structures and relations of power. Indeed, Foucault (Reference Foucault, Burchell and Senellart2007) notes that at every point of application, disciplinary power fashions itself simultaneously into a site of confrontation, instability, resistance, and counter-conducts. The focus of disciplinary power, therefore, is on the relationality of multiple actors in the production of rationalities of “modern” forms of policing, which means that the practices of one set of actors cannot be elevated over that of others.
Focusing on relationality, the disciplinary lens allows us to analytically cut into the North–South relationships of African police reform. When this view is sensitive to the wider state–society contexts within which disciplinary power is embedded, it can account for how capacity-builders and recipients of reform efforts enact, appropriate, ignore, or resist one another’s security understandings and practices. This lens complements approaches that focus on bureaucratic or political struggles and patron–client relationships by demonstrating how persuasive, noncompulsory forms of power are performed in North–South relationships while also providing explanations of the outcomes of those interactions in specific contexts.
Governing Borderless Threats by Sea: The Container Control Programme in Senegal
In 2003, UNODC and the World Customs Organization (WCO) began discussions for the creation of a program to build the capacities of customs and other law enforcement agencies in the global South in order to manage the increased mobility of cross-border threats like drugs, improvised explosive devices, and chemical, radiological, and nuclear materials, which they fear can embed themselves in global methods of trade—notably containers. The outcome from these discussions was the Container Control Programme (CCP).
The CCP is a global border management interdiction program run in partnership between the UNODC and WCO as implementing agencies, and beneficiary countries in the global South. A pool of donor countries and organizations including the United States, Canada, the European Commission, and several E.U. member states fund the program and also often take part in CCP capacity-building activities (UNODC 2011). The program aims to enhance the security of the global supply chain by building greater state control “to minimize the exploitation of maritime containers for illicit drug trafficking and other transnational organized criminal activities” (UNODC-WCO 2012:2).
To do this, UNODC and WCO officials help recipient governments create joint-agency Port Control Units (PCUs) and align national laws related to organized crime with international conventions, which facilitates the work of these specialized teams. Footnote 3 International experts are then selected by the UNODC and the WCO to train PCUs in risk management, container profiling, and intelligence-led analysis of flows entering marine ports in order to target containers that exhibit a high-risk profile established from a set of risk indicators. This includes providing necessary equipment and tools required for profiling high-risk containers and enhancing information-sharing between law enforcement agencies and PCUs globally through the platform of the WCO’s ContainerComm and the Customs Enforcement Network (CEN) database on worldwide seizures information. These secure communications systems are used to exchange information among operational PCUs, other authorized users in Vienna and Brussels, and the WCO’s eleven Regional Intelligence Liaison Offices.
Since its creation in 2003, the CCP has spread to an impressive number of countries around the globe. Four countries were initially selected for the program’s pilot development: Ecuador (Port of Guayaquil); Ghana (Port Tema); Pakistan (Karachi and Port Qasim) and Senegal (Dakar), reflecting its initial focus on the interdiction of illicit drugs—cocaine from Latin America transiting through West Africa, and heroin transiting through Pakistan from Afghanistan (telephone interview, U.N. official, Feb. 27, 2015). These teams were not operational until 2007 (see Fazey Reference Fazey2007). By the end of 2014 the CCP was operational in twenty-four countries, and funding had been acquired for expansion of the program in twenty-seven additional countries (UNODC-WCO 2014).
Disciplining the PCU: Rivalries, Training, Surveillance
The CCP is designed and operated to discipline law enforcement officers. In Senegal, UNODC experts have used the joint-agency composition of the unit, ongoing training and mentoring, and ContainerComm as disciplinary mechanisms exercised on the PCU to monitor and correct its law enforcement practices and to prescribe routine practices that conform to the UNODC’s security logics.
According to its initial conception in Senegal, the composition of the PCUs should incorporate agents from each of the country’s law enforcement corps. Changes associated with the liberalizing of Senegal’s economy, tightened state budgets, and the proliferation of transnational mobility have intensified contests among the security agencies, each of which has a stake in defining how to counter borderless threats. Rivalries among these agencies are palpable and regularly hinder the reform efforts, a fact of which CCP officials are keenly aware. Corruption and political impunity within the security forces also loom large in the CCP’s assessments of the blockages that impede successful law enforcement in Africa (UNODC-WCO 2014). UNODC and WCO officials have designed the CCP to diminish precisely these tendencies. They argue that the need for rival agency participation is directly connected to the issue of corruption and that such participation is designed to mitigate its effects.
Corruption, for these experts, is an expected component of working in “fragile” states in which public servants may not be paid on a regular basis by the state (interview, former U.N. official, Vienna, Dec. 2, 2012; interview, UNODC analyst, Dakar, Jan. 31, 2013; telephone interview, U.N. official, Feb. 27, 2015). In such contexts, combating enduring practices like accepting bribes or seeking out patrons who facilitate economic connections in exchange for officers’ “looking the other way” requires breaking down chances for such opportunities. The PCU team composition and design are meant to do just this: by including agents from multiple law enforcement institutions, the solidarity among officers of the same agency is diminished and opportunities for corruption are lessened.
Interagency rivalries, rooted in contestation over how to govern police work, are thus built into the CCP’s design as a surveillance anticorruption mechanism. The design instills discipline through “calculated manipulation of its elements” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977:137–38) by creating a structure of co-supervision of PCU members based on the logic of their interagency rivalries. One U.N. official argued that there is no way for a gang of agents to develop a system of corruption in the PCU since agents come from different law enforcement backgrounds and organizational cultures: “The interagency model is central to how the CCP works, and part of this is because it is an anticorruption measure” (telephone interview, Feb. 27, 2015). CCP officials assume that as rival agents, PCU members will question and surveil each other’s efforts in the work of the unit. To deter suspicion and surveillance, it is assumed that PCU members will adopt the fall-back position of following the law enforcement procedures taught by CCP trainers, thus reinforcing the security logics of the program.
U.N. officials expected two forms of intra-PCU surveillance to exist in Senegal. First, since all of Dakar’s PCU members are trained in container profiling, it was expected that agents would question one another’s selection of containers to inspect. But such disagreements would most likely result in inspection, resulting in more consistent work for the unit (interview, UNODC official, Dakar, Jan. 23, 2013). Second, CCP officials recognize that entry and exit into ports in West Africa are not well regulated due to lax security controls and different levels of acceptance regarding labor informality. UNODC officials expected the interagency design of the PCU to create suspicion and a will to increase knowledge about who visits PCU colleagues, resulting in an eventual limiting of nonessential visits. Due to mutual interagency mistrust, CCP administrators envisage that PCU agents will be left with few other options but to manifest their rivalries through competition and enhanced professionalism in the performance of profiling and investigations, if needed, by reporting on the suspicious activities of PCU colleagues to international police liaisons based in Dakar. For CCP officials, rivalries will make members of Senegal’s PCU harder working and more professional law enforcement agents; rivalries will improve discipline in PCU practices.
The CCP design also facilitates direct disciplinary mechanisms of mentoring and monitoring by international trainers and officials. The design calls for frequent on-site visits and training, a deliberate, if not invasive, surveillance practice that is enacted through side-by-side mentoring. As a surveillance practice, such mentoring is an attempt to foster or co-opt PCU officers into monitoring their own job performance and values regarding the practices of effective law enforcement, with the UNODC standards acting as the guiding template.
Over the course of the CCP’s decade in operation, more than one hundred and fifty training events have taken place globally, in addition to three hundred mentoring visits by CCP trainers conducted with the intention of monitoring the performance of operational PCUs. In 2014 alone the CCP trained more than a thousand law enforcement officials (UNODC-WCO 2014). In Senegal in 2013, global customs experts selected by UNODC and WCO conducted periodic but ongoing mentoring and training at the Port of Dakar from February to March, and September to December (UNODC-WCO 2013). Similarly, training for the Dakar PCU was conducted in March, June, and November 2014 (UNODC-WCO 2014). In addition, regional training was conducted in Dakar for thirteen agents from PCUs of the West African subregion in October that year.
Frequent monitoring is crucial in this endeavor, as is the need for PCU agents to respect and trust the expertise, if not the personalities, of CCP trainers and administrators. Footnote 4 For example, in Dakar, a UNODC CCP regional coordinator regularly contacts and attempts to foster relationships of trust with the leadership of the subregion’s PCUs (interview, UNODC official, Dakar, Jan. 23, 2013). Footnote 5 UNODC officials based in Dakar stated that the PCU requires significant monitoring in order to shape its members’ basic skills of “thinking preventatively.” Specifically, this expert noted how Dakar’s unit, compared to the Ghanaian PCU, was stuck in the inefficient law enforcement mode of waiting and reacting as opposed to orienting their practices in line with the preventive objectives of the program to detect criminality. This meant that it was necessary to spend additional time visiting the unit to check whether or not its members were “thinking like real police.”
CCP advisors also develop relationships with Western police liaisons stationed in Dakar. Footnote 6 For UNODC regional experts, contact with both sets of law enforcement actors secures a network capable of quick, reliable communication and information exchange in criminal investigations. It also serves an important surveillance purpose. By fostering relationships with Western police liaisons who espouse similar understandings, CCP advisors attempt to extend a network of surveillance actors to follow up on the PCU to better ensure that they follow through with the micro-norms of the program, and that the tools provided by UNODC are being used for their intended purposes, or indeed used at all. The disciplinary surveillance practices of CCP trainers, therefore, are couched in a logic of distrust of the capacities and integrity of Senegal’s PCU members to perform the security functions outlined by the program.
Annual Progress Reports of the CCP emphasize this interpretation. In 2013 CCP officials argued that to improve container profiling and counter organized crime, “regular monitoring visits” are necessary, a statement that directly follows a short discussion of the potential lack of “credibility and integrity” within CCP operating countries (UNODC-WCO 2013:10–11). The primary role of the CCP regional coordinators is to correct the work of beneficiary law enforcement agents by showing them “best practices” in risk profiling, and by reinforcing the necessity and benefits of the interagency approach.
A central responsibility of programme personnel, including Coordinators at all levels, is to monitor and ensure that PCU officials understand and meet the expectations relating to their conduct as trained officials of the CCP. Officials not complying with the UNODC-WCO level of conduct will be excluded from future training and participation in the PCU’s activities. (UNODC-WCO 2014:21–22)
This distrust does not extend to Western liaison officers in Dakar, with whom UNODC officials share similar employment histories and beliefs in the values of “modern police work,” which they assume West African law enforcement officers lack (personal communications, UNODC official and British security official, Dakar, Jan. 21, 2013). As such, PCU officers are taught to aim for a law enforcement target based on a Western standard, which is differentiated from abnormal, ineffectual law enforcement measures they assume to be “par for the course” in African states. This ideal can only be accomplished by pursuing specialized training that regularly creates constraints of “conformity that must be achieved” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977:183) through mentoring activities and anticorruption measures (benignly termed “follow-up”) of CCP trainers and their European police colleagues (UNODC-WCO 2014).
Due to the rapid expansion of the CCP and the geographical spread of their surveillance and training responsibilities in the subregion, however, regional coordinators cannot perform side-by-side mentorship as regularly as they would like. Surveillance by remote control, however, is produced in the design of the CCP, which allows for more or less continuous visibility of PCU activities through its secured communications system. When unable to perform on-site visits to check on the activities of a PCU (and therefore to observe PCU officers when they are not necessarily “on their best behavior”), CCP officers use deterritorialized forms of surveillance by verifying PCU use of ContainerComm (interview, UNODC official, Dakar, Jan. 19, 2013; telephone interview, U.N. official, Feb. 27, 2015).
U.N. officials insisted that secure inter-PCU communications for information-sharing is a key modality required to combat trafficking. When PCU officers receive information on a container prior to its arrival at the Port of Dakar, they can assess its risk categories, request additional information on the shipper from the WCO or Western police liaisons based in Dakar, and communicate via ContainerComm in a secured way to transcontinental PCUs to preempt and secure potential threats before they reach the port. Nevertheless, ContainerComm is also a disciplinary tool that monitors PCU activities by tracking the regularity of containers profiled, screened, and searched. CCP officials use this data to evaluate the cooperation of PCU members and the consistency of its activities, and they devise subsequent strategies that ensure that the CCP operates as it should. Officials use ContainerComm to decide if the UNODC and other donors should continue with the program, and they can threaten via their assessments to suspend scheduled CCP activities altogether. Following examinations of how the Senegalese PCU uses ContainerComm, UNODC officials have asked senior government officials and bureaucrats to quickly adopt standards for the PCU to achieve and to remove PCU officers who fail to utilize CCP tools from the team (interview, Senegalese customs official, Dakar, Aug. 14, 2012; interview, senior PCU official, Dakar, Jan. 15, 2013; interview, U.N. official, Vienna, Dec. 2, 2012; telephone interview, U.N. official, Feb. 27, 2015). Nevertheless, a UNODC evaluation mission in late 2013 determined that law enforcement agency ownership of the program is “almost non-existent.” Without significant changes, and the establishment of a roadmap by Senegalese actors, evaluators insist that “CCP should pull out of Senegal” (UNODC 2014:xxi).
In response, UNODC officials have enlisted INTERPOL representatives, officials from the delegation of the E.U. in Dakar, and French police liaison officials to stress the need for Senegal’s security institutions, starting with the PCU, to place the Port of Dakar as a higher drug control priority, indicating an extension of surveillance practices by Western actors (interview, three European diplomatic officials, Dakar, Sept. 10, 2012). Furthermore, increased frequency in mentoring has been added to the schedule of the Dakar PCU activities whenever the profiling work of the unit has tapered off. In short, UNODC CCP actors seek to root out deviations from the type of specialized, professional law enforcement that the program intends to produce for Senegal’s security institutions.
Discipline via Inducements: Material and Symbolic Incentives in the CCP
Disciplinary practices do not always have their intended effect of producing law enforcement docility. International organization officials cannot command adherence to their requests, and in large measure they must rely on local security actors’ judgments and assessments. But while CCP experts cannot force their Senegalese counterparts to comply with the program’s law enforcement practices, it would be inaccurate to say that they lack coercive or bargaining power over the CCP’s operation in Dakar (Fazey Reference Fazey2007). To increase the likelihood of compliance, CCP officials combine disciplinary practices with practices of persuasion, creating material and symbolic incentives to coax reluctant PCU beneficiaries into changing their ways.
UNODC officials use many material and symbolic inducements for PCU officers to maintain its protocols and to ensure a level of consistency by retaining trained officers. Training workshops are used as material and symbolic incentives for Senegal’s PCU. For example, in the short term, trainees can earn per diems by participating in training. Meals in restaurants or hotels frequented by Senegal’s expatriate community are also a special perk for selected candidates. European police liaisons interviewed in Dakar stressed that local officers would rarely have the chance to eat in the city’s “finer” restaurants, and that this was a justifiable expense and less costly than per diems. Training sessions are held in Dakar’s luxury hotels, affording the trainees time in air-conditioned rooms—a welcome change from working in buildings without such amenities. Where large expatriate communities or U.N. missions or delegations are present, as in Dakar, the “bifurcation” of space dividing international experts from local populations is especially visible (see Lemay-Hébert Reference Lemay-Hébert2011; Smirl Reference Smirl2015). Transgressing such a division through an invitation to participate in training, UNODC CCP officials argued, is a unique experience for Senegalese trainees (interview, UNODC official, Dakar, Jan. 23, 2013; interview, U.N. official, Dakar, Feb. 1, 2013).
Training is also sold as a potential way to advance the life chances of PCU members who internalize the CCP’s security rationales. UNODC officials articulate how trainees can acquire professionalized law enforcement skills that will transform their employment trajectories. By teaching courses based on global security norms framed by U.N. conventions on transnational organized crime, terrorism, and human rights, UNODC trainers articulate how training can inculcate a culture of professionalism within the unit, which not only strengthens the Senegalese state to combat cross-border threats, but also strengthens individual CVs and employment strategies. The acquisition of these forms of global accreditation, itself an instantiation of global security rationalities being internalized, can then be converted into employment in an international organization (possibly as a CCP trainer, as has been the case for former PCU members in Ghana, or as the WCO’s Regional Intelligence Liaison Officer), in a large NGO, or as a consultant for a peacebuilding/security-related think tank or research institute, all of which pay significantly more than the Senegalese civil service (interview, French police liaison, Dakar, Aug. 8, 2012; interview, E.U. official, Dakar, Sept. 11, 2012). Footnote 7 By accepting the disciplinary forms of surveillance through the formal acquisition of training and by mastering its standards, PCU actors can then convert disciplined knowledge and expertise into economic gains.
Another inducement for PCU members is the opportunity to undertake study tours in “benchmarking ports” in Europe, North America, or throughout the region. Such tours offer several material inducements: international travel, staying in European hotels, high per diems, or potentially visiting friends who live in European cities. CCP officials argue that these exchanges provide an opportunity to witness firsthand the profiling practices, forms of inspection, and other “working techniques” performed by experienced officers based in ports with some of the highest volumes of in-going and out-going trade flows across the globe, and to transfer this knowledge to local ports (UNODC-WCO 2013). The tours also make it possible for PCU officers to create networked relationships with international security actors, and are therefore highly coveted by Senegalese law enforcement officers (interview with three Senegalese customs officers, Dakar, Aug. 30, 2012; interview with two OCRTIS officers, Dakar, Jan. 15, 2013; see Beek & Gopfert Reference Beek and Göpfert2015; Andreas & Nadelmann Reference Andreas and Nadelmann2006).
Successful completion of a training course in risk profiling or criminal investigation makes it possible for law enforcement agents in Senegal to demonstrate their security credentials and prestige, which can then be used to bolster their own particular social interests or employment endeavors in the medium to long term—for example to be transferred to high-profile customs, gendarme, or police divisions, or selection to participate in a U.N. peacekeeping mission. One former head of the PCU was able to secure multiple training certificates from courses completed in Senegal, in regional training workshops, and at benchmark port visits. After three years leading the PCU, and armed with an internationalized CV, this official became the head of the prestigious customs unit at the financially lucrative Rosso border-crossing with Mauritania, and was then selected to head the Communications Division of Customs headquarters (personal communication, former head of the Dakar PCU, March 3, 2015). This agent’s administrative abilities and profiling skills were attested to by his acquisition of recognized, prestigious training certificates, and vetted by a relationship with UNODC and WCO trainers internationally.
State–Society Dynamics in the Functioning of the Port of Dakar and CCP
Senegal’s PCU officers are indeed “wooed” by inducements from CCP trainers. The latter use forms of persuasion to enable a more concentrated application of disciplinary practices of surveillance onto PCU officers who become incentivized to follow the program’s security rationale of container profiling. Nevertheless, this does not guarantee the immediate internalization of the CCP’s security understandings and practices. Disciplinary power has its limits. As the PCU pursues the objectives of the CCP, the forms of disciplinary power enacted on its members produce multiple forms of resistance from Senegalese political and economic elites who contest the functioning of the program and the efforts of the PCU.
Powerful transnational groups tied to Senegal’s politico-economic elites contest the type of security governance that UNODC officials have designed for the country’s involvement in the CCP. Officers of the country’s security institutions often fall under the sway of these elites’ patron–client networks and the moral economies tied to the observance of social norms in Senegal (see Hameiri & Jones Reference Hameiri and Jones2015). Indeed, if members of the PCU were practicing the risk profiling techniques that they are taught, all forms of illicit shipments arriving or transiting the Port of Dakar would be scrutinized, leading criminal and smuggling networks to choose other methods of entry of their goods to the subregion. Rerouting smuggling operations to other regional ports would diminish the potential profits from economic informality or illegality that the PCU is meant to stifle. At minimum, the PCU’s practices increase the costs of such ventures. Moreover, in a context of a cash-strapped, economically liberal state seeking to maximize its incoming revenues and tax collection, increasing the time of release of goods, or lengthening the processes of criminal investigations at the port, are disincentives to following the strict security procedures of the CCP. Thus the disciplinary methods of CCP officials are resisted by alternative structures of authority in the country, complicating how PCU officers internalize the initiative’s micro-norms.
Religious Authorities, Politico-Economic Authorities, the Port of Dakar, and the PCU
The role of religious and economic elite authority in Senegal demonstrates how state–society dynamics in Senegal have a direct impact on the disciplinary techniques that international actors place on PCU officers. The authority of these elites impinges upon the CCP’s anti-trafficking efforts and other security practices at the Port of Dakar.
Religious authorities are extremely influential in Senegal, providing an essential link between postcolonial era governments and Senegalese populations (Cruise O’Brien Reference Cruise O’Brien1975; Reference Cruise O’Brien2003; Villalón Reference Villalón1995; Guèye Reference Guèye2002; Dahirou & Foucher Reference Dahirou, Foucher, Mustapha and Whitfield2009). Islamic Sufi Confréries (Brotherhoods) historically provided political backing for political parties elected to national government. The authority of Senegal’s Sufi clerics (marabouts) is based on forms of recognized charisma, with marabouts developing multiple relationships of dependence with individual disciples (taalibes) (see Villalón Reference Villalón1995). This charismatic authority has prompted political and economic elites in Senegal to actively court Sufi marabouts of note, especially during periods of electoral contest, since a marabout’s endorsement may secure the allegiance of his disciples.
The centrality of religious authority is demonstrated by the importance of religious urban centers like Touba and Tivouane for national politicians. Political elites seek to secure their own allegiance to important Sufi leaders in return for the promise of political solidarity (Seck Reference Seck2010). While a marabout’s influence over the political choices of his disciples is not guaranteed, particularly when many of the latter have developed extensive socioeconomic resources through transnational trade, the marabouts’ political sway and social presence in the country are significant (Beck Reference Beck2008; Diop Reference Diop1981; Babou Reference Babou and Diouf2013; Ba Gning Reference Ba Gning and Diop2013).
The Mouride brotherhoods, which display the most rigorous application of the cleric–disciple relationship and have been entrenched in Senegalese matters of state since the colonial era, have become the most influential Sufi order in the country. One important reason for the brotherhood’s rise to prominence is that this relationship tends to function as resilient “conduits of redistribution” and economic support, which place key Mouride clerics at the center of vast political and economic networks and position them to have a direct influence on state economic policy (Villalón Reference Villalón1995:187; Diop Reference Diop1981; Ba Gning Reference Ba Gning and Diop2013). Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mouride cross-border economic networks, based in large part on the smuggling of licit goods, became some of the largest and most resilient in West Africa (Bako-Arifari Reference Bako-Arifari, Blundo and de Sardan2007; Golub & Mbaye Reference Golub and Mbaye2009), and they have become a source of “indispensable intermediation” with state officials to facilitate economic transactions in the subregion (Ba Gning Reference Ba Gning and Diop2013:517). In return, Mouride economic actors provided access to sources of credit to small traders at the behest of Mouride religious elites, who then also would begin their own smuggling operations (Golub & Mbaye Reference Golub and Mbaye2009).
Due to the centrality of the port of Dakar in Senegal’s liberalized economy, it has become one of the most important political nodes for Mouride brotherhood intra-elite competition for political influence and economic advantage. Since the 1980s Mouride migration has expanded rapidly into Senegal’s urban areas or farther afield to Europe and North America. Transnational migration has linked Mouride business interests abroad with Mouride merchants in Senegal, who dominate the country’s economic opportunities (Seck Reference Seck2010; Buggenhagen Reference Buggenhagen2012). Operations at the port have thus become a central economic concern for the Mouride brotherhoods’ commercial networks based in Touba and linked to Senegal’s massive import-export economy.
The administration of the Port of Dakar has also become enmeshed in the political field strategies of Senegal’s multiparty democracy actors. The leadership of the port is a coveted position in Senegal due to its economic importance and prestige, which has only increased with the enhanced speed and profitability of its public and private operations (interview with Senegalese journalist, Dakar, Jan. 23, 2013). Footnote 8 Since the privatization of the port’s management in the late 1990s, the director general of the port has been appointed by the president of Senegal. Director generals have thus been staunch supporters of President Wade, and after 2012, the former Wade apprentice and now vehement political rival, President Macky Sall. Holding the position of director general is nevertheless precarious due to the shifting allegiances and webs of support among political party members, commercial actors, and factions within Senegal’s religious elites.
Mouride notables in Touba, Thiès, and Dakar regularly court port officials to achieve a quicker release of imported goods and less interference from Senegalese customs. Mouride brotherhoods enjoy a special tax-free status, which allows for the maintenance of thriving informal market activities in Touba and even higher profits on goods sold at markets when customs duties are reduced or ignored at the port (Cruise O’Brien Reference Cruise O’Brien2003). Compared to the entrenched position of Mouride economic and religious networks, then, the introduction of the CCP to the port is a relatively recent development. This places customs agents in a very difficult position. It is their responsibility to establish and collect the import duties on all goods coming into the port. However, imported goods are often listed as the property of the Mouride brotherhood leadership (the Khalife), or as materials destined for use at the central mosque in Touba, a status that makes them duty free. Moreover, customs officers themselves can list imported goods on state forms as headed to Touba, regardless of any other declaration, provided that “an arrangement” between the importers and the officers can be brokered by the clerics (interview, Mouride businessman, Dakar, Jan. 21, 2013; Bako-Arifari Reference Bako-Arifari, Blundo and de Sardan2007). Footnote 9 Thus everyday forms of corruption that are systemically diffused through West African societies mitigate the CCP’s chief function of blocking and interdicting the passage of goods—both licit and illicit and including those considered borderless threats—entering Senegal via the port (Olivier de Sardan Reference Olivier de Sardan1999; Blundo & Olivier de Sardan Reference Blundo and de Sardan2007).
This is not to imply that Mouride economic and religious elites are necessarily involved in the smuggling of illicit goods like narcotics. There is no immediate evidence to support such a claim, despite the suspicions held by some divisions within the Senegalese Customs Agency and by European police liaisons based in Dakar. Footnote 10 UNODC-WCO officials who provide CCP training to PCU members do stress, however, that if the program is working as designed, any container that exhibits high-risk characteristics, including those that may contain illegal or fraudulent goods, must be profiled, scanned, and searched by the PCU. Thus the CCP is not solely interested in interdicting cocaine, but also fraudulent or fake pharmaceutical drugs, cigarettes, toothpaste, batteries, and so on. Indeed, fraudulent pharmaceutical products are found in every major market in Senegal (interview, senior police official, Dakar, Aug. 4, 2012; interview, French security official, Dakar, Jan. 25 2013; Howson Reference Howson2012; Diarisso & Goredema Reference Diarisso and Goredema2014), and the passage of such goods contravenes the legal and formal apparatus of duties collection of the Senegalese state, which the CCP is supposed to curtail. Thus, authorities in Senegal’s religious field resist and circumvent the disciplinary efforts of the CCP since their vetted interests are potentially compromised when the PCU follows the rationales designed in the program.
Port Administrators, Security, and the Work of the PCU
PCU team members are well aware of these religious and political-economic dynamics, and the need to balance their private allegiances with the work of profiling and searching suspect containers. While the members of the PCU are officially beholden to their specific chains of command (customs, police, gendarmerie), and informally to possible religious elites, they also recognize the need to follow the regulations and suggestions that come from the Port of Dakar administration. In line with best practices in port management as outlined by international financial institutions (especially the World Bank), the public–private partnerships in the port have emphasized and planned for the need to reduce the administrative burdens associated with customs regulations and to increase the speed of the release of imported goods (see Hibou Reference Hibou2004; Chalfin Reference Chalfin2010). Adding an additional security measure to the port’s operations conflicts with the economic imperative to increase the speed of arrival and release of shipping containers.
The concern for speed is well understood by UNODC administrators. In its 2012 Annual Progress Report, the UNODC and WCO emphasized that its mission is to provide
efficient and cost-effective law enforcement systems and practices—a basis for the national security—recover lost revenue and create a favorable investment climate, ultimately leading to a safe environment and prosperous economy . . . whilst facilitating the free flow of legitimate trade. (UNODC-WCO 2012: 1,10)
The program is sold strategically to both donors and recipients as a “winning solution” that enhances security and trade simultaneously by not adding additional “kinks” in the trade supply chain, which would “kill trade” (telephone interview, U.N. official, Feb. 27, 2015). Nevertheless, for port managerial officials embedded in Senegal’s political and economic elite, CCP activities still lead to delays as containers are held in the port for scanning and possibly kept there while the PCU pursues criminal investigations.
Moreover, if the security rationale behind the CCP is to have PCUs conduct criminal investigations regarding the smuggling of fraudulent and counterfeit goods, or the trafficking of narcotics, it is not immediately evident that port officials or the political elite of which they are part share in this security understanding. Due to the lucrative nature of these economic activities, and the less than immediately clear social danger that they pose, curbing smuggling of any of these commodities through the port may not be a shared priority (UNODC 2005; Ellis Reference Ellis2009). This puts the port’s leadership at odds with the CCP functions. PCU officers who do not follow the advice of port officials put their careers in jeopardy because of the important political connections that the latter enjoy. As a result, members of the PCU often complain of being “stuck between the hammer and the anvil”: they need to facilitate the rapid flow of commerce into the country while at the same time securing the country from potential threats, which they view as opposite goals (interviews, three PCU officers, Dakar, Jan. 31, 2013). These PCU officers understand the security logics of the CCP and demonstrated a desire to follow through with its practices, but recognize the resistances that such practices create for those at the port who do not share the same security priorities and visions.
Administrators at the Port of Dakar seek to make the port work as efficiently as possible given the existing logistical constraints. This means that the actual functioning of the port is in stark contrast with the examples presented to the PCU members in their training and visits to European ports. For example, in extensive tours of the port with PCU members, they demonstrated that there were no CCTV cameras there. Measures to restrict access to the port are extremely lax, as the gendarmerie tasked with controlling entry to the terminal where containers are searched rarely perform their function. Footnote 11 As a result, port employees, their friends, hawkers, individuals seeking daily work, and visitors, in addition to state bureaucrats and port administrators, all enter sections of the port more or less unhindered. For port officials, given the circumstances, this is a necessary evil, especially because unskilled workers are required in many areas in order to increase the speed of release of goods (interview, PCU officer, Dakar, Jan. 28, 2013).
Compared to the rigid controls that PCU members witness in their work-study tours in Le Havre or Rotterdam, the Port of Dakar looks more like a market than a port. While the CCP is designed to tighten this mobility bottleneck and to channel and control for high-risk goods arriving by container, the PCU members view the daily operations of the port as loosening and opening up those controls. PCU officers are unable to evaluate the risk levels of all those individuals entering on a daily basis, and whether they may be complicit in trafficking operations via the port. A senior PCU officer described the “thousand[s] of people running around the port, all coming and going” and compared this to “Rotterdam, [where] you don’t see anyone.” His conclusion: “It’s not normal . . . it is bizarre” (interview, Dakar, Jan. 28, 2013). The CCP practice of sending PCU officers on work-study tours has a disciplining effect: it inculcates in team members a reflex to point out abnormalities in how the port of Dakar is run when compared to benchmark ports, leading the team to question the port’s security procedures and their vulnerabilities to borderless threats.
In practice, port officials willfully bend some security protocols involving the internal functions of the port since they do not share the same interests as PCU members. Port officials seek to accrue profits through the increased speed of the release of goods entering and leaving the port. To do so involves allowing the entry of hawkers, women selling food, and especially day laborers to ensure that the port remains adequately staffed. The priorities of port administrators reflect an understanding of wanting to make the Port of Dakar the most competitive and efficient logistical venue for trade in the West African region above other ports of the subregion like Abidjan or Tema, a title coveted by the Senegalese government through its globally extraverted and economically liberalized orientation. PCU officers view their colleagues in the port, who have not worked alongside UNODC, as subverting their work through lax application of security protocols.
The end result of these competing security values for the CCP in Senegal is a frustrated PCU team. PCU members are tasked with implementing the goals of the program and its vision of security, but know that they are unable to do so due to the complex state–society relationships and forms of resistance imbued in how the Port of Dakar operates and its associated political economy. This only drives individual officers to choose between local and global allegiances in order to advance their careers: either to abide by the disciplinary techniques of global security experts and trainers from UNODC and E.U. donor countries, mentors who provide training and support that may lead in turn to training abroad or employment in a U.N. agency; or to follow the directives of their national leaders in the hope that such a path will place them in more lucrative customs or gendarmerie positions in which they will benefit from increased contact with economic and religious elite and the economic resources that they offer.
One PCU official from Senegalese customs, while taking the author on a tour through the port, lamented his need to get out of the position, which he had held for over three years, and to be reassigned elsewhere. While there are benefits to being a member of the specialized unit (e.g., connections to homologues in other CCP countries and with experts in Brussels and Vienna, access to per diems and other material benefits, and the prestige that comes from the possession of training certificates), the work put him in a position that limits his financial opportunities in the short term. Financial benefits from the routine “arrangements” of daily work conducted by customs and gendarmerie may be hard to give up in exchange for a position of putative transnational importance and anticipated future rewards. For this reason, recurrent turnover of the leadership of the PCU in Senegal has been a constant frustration for UNODC officials. Senegal’s Dakar port PCU is understood as one of the most challenging PCUs in the program, and one that requires more constant surveillance, retraining programs, and correction by UNODC trainers.
Conclusion
This article has analyzed international police reform projects in Senegal that target the governance of cross-border threats like drug trafficking. The emphasis on disciplinary power complements and deepens other accounts of how international police reforms unfold in practice by putting relations of dominance and resistance of international and local actors on equal footing. The international police reform process produces complex relations between international capacity-builders and local police actors. An emphasis on disciplinary power allows us to examine the interactions and contests, techniques, practices, and resistances of actors as they are embedded in wider state–society relations, without necessarily emphasizing the causal significance of individual actions or the power of some actors over others.
The CCP evinces a sophisticated transnational design intended to rescale security governance beyond the national level by reforming how Senegalese law enforcement institutions tackle cross-border threats through a set of disciplinary practices of surveillance. Some of these practices are rooted in local physical space (via the PCU, interagency design, and mentoring/training), and others in a deterritorialized form (monitoring the use of ContainerComm). Disciplinary surveillance mechanisms of hierarchical observation and oversight, normalizing judgment, and examination conducted by global security experts, like those of the CCP on Dakar’s PCU members, create rewards and incentives (or conversely, corrective and repetitive punishments) to change recipients’ law enforcement practices according to a Western template. These mechanisms exert forms of power that are productive—but not totalizing.
The CCP’s disciplinary mechanisms reverberate beyond their PCU targets of application. Competing authority structures in the country’s religious and political fields hinder the objectives of the program, and complicate how PCU officers internalize CCP discipline. Coalitions of religious, economic, and political elites hold financial and political interests that run counter to the CCP’s practices. The rescaling of capitalist economic governance in Senegal, and the centrality of the Port of Dakar within this complicated process, competes with the transformation of security governance introduced by UNODC CCP actors and the Western officials who support the program. It is debatable whether national nonsecurity elites even believe that smuggling or trafficking in the forms of goods that the CCP is designed to control is a threat at all (see WACD 2014). If they do not, then they see the work of the PCU only as harming their economic interests. Alternative configurations of authority, therefore, have a direct influence on the functioning of the CCP. This shows how the CCP, as an international police reform initiative, is embedded in wider state–society relations that inform the performance of disciplinary surveillance, possibly blunting its intended effects. While the international disciplinary gaze is tempered consistently by African agency, the frustration of the PCU officers, their recognition of CCP officials’ expertise in law enforcement, and their understanding of what a maritime port should “normally” look like indicate that they have indeed adopted some law enforcement practices and understandings enshrined in the CCP initiative.
