African Affairs Advance Access published July 17, 2014

African Affairs, 00/00, 12 The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University

Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved

BOOK REVIEW
Transnational Companies and Security Governance: Hybrid practices in a
postcolonial world, by Jana Hnke. London and New York, NY: Routledge,
2013. xiv + 234 pp. 85.00 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 41562 206 6.

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One of the key transformations of the post-Cold War period has been the rising
signicance of multinational corporations in the liberalizing global economy.
Arguably the engines of economic globalization, multinational corporations have
also increased their political footprint across the globe. This footprint is the focal
point of a wide range of international governance initiatives, aimed at turning multinationals into good corporate citizens. Yet despite such efforts at the global level,
the local impact of multinationals at their sites of operations is often marked by
unequal power relations and imbued with violence.
A range of studies has emerged in the past few years that charts this political entanglement of global corporations with local governance. The tendency within both
academic and more policy-oriented literature has been to take sides, based on a
rather one-sided assessment of corporate impact on local lives. The literature either
demonizes multinational corporations for instituting accumulation and security
asymmetries to the detriment of local populations, or it plays down the negative externalities of corporate presence in the light of corporate adherence to global liberal
norms. Jana Hnkes book makes a welcome contribution to this debate by presenting a much more complicated picture of the way in which multinational corporations interact with their sites of operation.
Her point of departure is to engage with the remarkable convergence in security
practices by multinational corporations around the world. In order to do so, she constructs a heuristic analytical framework for the way in which multinational mining corporations secure their operations in areas of limited statehood in the post-colonial
world. The framework revolves around the key notion of hybrid transnational security
governance, with which Hnke wants to emphasize that the everyday security practices
of multinational mining corporations defy prevailing categorizations.
She applies her framework to an in-depth comparative case study of two transnationalised business spaces (p. 39): the copper mines of southern Katanga (Democratic
Republic of Congo, DRC) and gold and platinum mines in the Witwatersrand and
Western Bushveld (South Africa). The volume not only offers the reader a synchronic
comparison of these cases, but also contrasts mining companies contemporary security
strategies with those of mining companies at the same sites during the early twentieth
century. Extensive eldwork and careful documentary analysis allow her to situate contemporary transnational security governance practices historically across these cases.
Large Western mining corporations, Hnke shows, do not only enclave their
operations through a combination of private security companies and fortress-like
architecture, as so many critical studies of extractive industries in Africa contend.
Neither is their approach to security reducible to the disciplinary approach that
Hnke argues prevailed during colonial times both in the Belgian Congo and South

AFRICAN AFFAIRS

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

PEER SCHOUTEN
peer.schouten@globalstudies.gu.se
doi: 10.1093/afraf/adu037

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Africa, as critics often imply. Nor do mining companies rely solely on interaction with
local stakeholders or corporate social responsibility schemes to diffuse possible friction
with local populations. Rather, contemporary corporate security governance is truly
hybrid because it combines elements from each of these approaches. The author
explains the consistent hybridity she encountered in security practices in her two cases
as the product of evolving transnational meaning structures (p. 13). The approach
she develops to discourse and practice aptly captures how transnational meaning structures transnationally dominant ways of understanding security direct the perceptions and practices of security practitioners in these radically different contexts.
Throughout her analysis, Hnke draws on a rich variety of literature that includes
criminology, African studies, and branches of international relations concerned
with the transformation of security governance and political order in sub-Saharan
Africa. Her argument shows a particular afnity with the work of scholars such as
Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams, whose studies of private security companies similarly insist that we should understand local security congurations and, by
extension, political order in sub-Saharan Africa as thoroughly transnationalized
phenomena. Hnkes contribution is particularly clear within this eld of analysis,
and the fact that her observations vindicate many of the points raised in this burgeoning literature only serves to conrm that her analytical insights should resonate
within a much broader range of cases.
The unique strength of Hnkes argument lies, perhaps paradoxically, in refusing
to attribute to multinational corporations a straightforward role in local security governance in contexts of weak statehood. Showing how local security managers
combine different globally circulating security discourses and translate them into
hybrid local security strategies renders corporations more real (one could say more
human) than studies that grant seemingly unied global discourses unlimited
power over local practices. This means that her nuanced analysis of the security
practices of mining companies helps to dispel many prevailing myths, and is therefore a must-read for scholars who wish to understand the complexity of the role of
multinational corporations in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, the
careful interdisciplinary heuristic analytical framework that Hnke applies to her
case studies makes this book more generally of interest to anyone concerned with
studying contemporary governance beyond the state in terms of the interrelations
between global discourses and local practices.