Books aid workers should(n’t) read

In his infamous book, The Anti-Politics Machine, James Ferguson argues that World Bank development policy and the practice of development projects in Lesotho were dominated by the effects of bureaucratic power. Following Foucault, bureaucracies like the World Bank, function to depoliticise a vast array of messy social and political phenomena rendering them amenable to technical solutions. The argument follows that the operation of bureaucratic power is necessary for the very functioning of such organisations, it is not saying that development practitioners intentionally depoliticise phenomena or advance their own biases, but that these effects are necessary if bureaucracies are to function in the first place. For instance Lesotho was treated as a kind of sealed container in which contributions from migrant labour in South Africa were discounted in economic assessments.

Here is a photo of James and his book.

How bureaucratic power operates in the day-to-day of development work can be better understood by considering two different ways in which knowledge can be produced: research and expertise. Expertise advances a privileged form of objectivity. Expertise falls back on a number of epistemological assumptions such that knowledge serves utility for those producing it.

These assumptions, usually found in development policy models, tend to include: the regularisation of units of analysis, that cause and effect relationships are largely deterministic, and finally that social and political phenomena exist in closed systems such that intervening causal variables or phenomena are excluded. These assumptions help form a positivist model of knowledge, useful for giving the appearance of hindsight and making the social world appear more stable than it ever could be. It helps make the case that various kinds of development projects will work, that we can predict accurately how they will work, and that any unintended consequences will be highly unlikely. When errors do occur they are usually rationalised as arising from some inescapable disconnect between policy and practice. The policy model itself isn’t wrong, only the execution of the policy is: “The policy is right, it’s just that, in practice, we can’t implement it successfully for X, Y, Z reason”. The policy model—and those who produced it—are elevated to a privileged position where their conceptual biases are never incorrect.

Post-conflict reconstruction in Sierra Leone is a case in point. In Sierra Leone’s National Recovery Strategy paper, co-author Karen Moore suggests:

“Society is in a plastic state, like half-melted wax, out of which anything can be moulded”

Such analogies are amenable to liberal peace-builders. They represent the image of a clean slate upon which initiatives like governance decentralization will operate effectively. Of course such expertise belies the research which points out customary institutions that preceded the civil war and that have proven resilient before, during and after conflict (Sawyer 2008; Logan 2009: 103, 2011) continue to enjoy a high degree of legitimacy across a number of governance functions, such as dispute resolution (Sawyer 2008: 396).

Max Weber, influential theorist of the state

Kristof Kurz (2010) has taken this further by demonstrating how humanitarian relief efforts in Sierra Leone perceives conflict and crisis vis-à-vis a neo-institutional logic that locates politics at the level of elites, reduces persons to individualised utility-maximisers, and that understands crisis as originating in a failure of formal-Weberian institutions, largely confining state history to the period during and after Siaka Stevens rule. Historical contingency, culture, identity, and more importantly, patrimonial relations; that constitute a politics of customary unwritten rules of the game, are effaced from humanitarian organisations’ conception of crisis, and yet these politics fundamentally account for Sierra Leonean’s everyday frames of reference. What matters for expertise, then, are particular forms of representation that depoliticize phenomena rendering them amenable to technical solutions.

The papers outlined below highlight this in a number of ways, particularly in Partha Chatterjee’s concern with “civil society”. In Sierra Leone, for example, privilege is given to concepts like “social capital”, the “Weberian state” and “community cohesion”, which arguably treat the embodied political experience of Sierra Leoneans as epiphenomenal to this conceptual basis. On obvious phenomena are the ways in which basic needs are structured by a ‘moral economy of needs assessment and benefit prioritisation’ in which recipients have a proclivity to perform certain needs in the interest of attracting humanitarian aid (Fanthorpe 2005: 40). Hoffman (2011: 46) stresses this disconnection creates unintended expectations among both ex-combatants and civilians.

For example the former Aberdeen Road camp in Freetown was synonymous with amputee victims and garnered wide media attention. Humanitarian aid targeted Aberdeen Road for funding projects and cash donations. Consequently camp numbers dramatically increased and ethnographic evidence purports that, despite the provision of artificial limbs and cash donations, many amputees still ‘developed a mode of narrating and displaying their violations prominently’ (ibid). A similar logic is seen in DDR programmes. Cash is received in exchange for handing over a weapon. Militia commanders rented surplus weapons to those who hadn’t participated in fighting, taking a commission for the service. Again, phenomena are depoliticised, rendered amenable to technical solutions. Danny Hoffman’s recent book highlights a number of anecdotes, such as one young boy claiming a pepper shaker is a hand grenade to claim money, see page 149 (I think).

Research, in contrast, considers knowledge production as only ever partial and always situated. There is no, as Donna Haraway’s argument for situated knowledge and the passionately detached research suggests, gods eye view of the world, rather knowledge production is analogous to fumbling around in the dark.

Donna getting passionate

Expertise is quicker, conceptually more reductive and tends to distort methodology in a variety of ways to make knowledge production suit the interests of the producer i.e. to make knowledge appear more useful than it is. Research takes longer, is more explicit in its conceptual and theoretical assumptions, and is at pains to achieve methodological vigour and transparency.

The examples presented below all, in different ways, return to the question of expertise in development policy and practice. Namely they consider what the functions (i.e. uses) of different forms of knowledge production are for different kinds of development agencies. This is not to say that development work does not have significant positive effects, but that the possibility for a proper critique of policy and practice from within such organisations is incredibly limited.

The Story of a not so DfIDent Development Consultant

In late 2002 David Mosse finished the first draft of a book, Cultivating Development (see here), detailing an ethnographic account of his time working with the Department for International Development (DfID) in India.

He worked on one of DfID’s flagship aid projects, from design to implementation, from 1990 until 2001. Mosse wanted to understand how particular modes of expertise and forms of administrative rationality informed development and aid work. He focused on the relationship between development policy and practice, in particular participatory approaches to development that were popular at the time. What followed were repeated attempts to delay the book’s publication on the grounds the book was ‘unfair, biased, contained statements that were defamatory and would seriously damage the professional reputation of individuals and institutions, and would harm work among poor tribals in India’. Mosse’s critique, in his book Cultivating Development, contains several important arguments.

First that policy models could not organise practice. How the agency was organised, and the system of relationships afforded by the agencies’ political logic and culture, led to project workers routinely contradicting official policy, targets and controls, substituting for anticipated community self-reliance in the organisation of practice.

Second, policy functioned largely to mobilise and maintain political support, rather than to guide practice. The contradictory interests of a range of actors were brought together by using a number of conceptual and linguistic devices that nullified these contradictions in policy, thereby making the execution of policy in practice impossible.

Third, development projects functioned to maintain particular systems of representation. Events were interpreted to fit theory, such that project work sustained particular policy models, not ‘directing action but following it’:

‘Through such expert discourse unruly practice is stabilized, and the gap between policy and practice constantly negotiated away.’

Finally, taking the above points together, “failure” is not seen by project workers as the inability to translate policy models and designs into practice, but of

‘a certain disarticulation between practices and their rationalizing models. Failure, as I discovered, is a failure of interpretation.’

Mosse is not evaluating development projects in terms of whether they helped or did not help the targeted recipients, but rather he is concerned with the ways in which the ‘success’ of development projects is socially constructed and produced. It is not to say such projects do not have positive effects for its recipients, but instead to highlight that the project did not work because of the way in which it was designed: ‘good policy was not implementable. None the less, policy is absolutely central to what happens in development arenas’.

It is confusion in Mosse’s colleague’s interpretation of the criteria for success and failure in his analysis, coupled with concerns that the evidential basis of his claims were weak given his failure to disclose the intentions of his work in a “participatory” manner, which dogs their objections. Mosse took up this point in a recent Malonowski lecture at LSE, you can find the accompanying article here. The point is reflected in one DfID members comment:

how could ‘the participation consultant [Mosse], not want to review the project experience in a fully participatory manner?’

Mosse’s analysis is aiming to critique socially constructed categories of analysis, not to conduct an evaluation according to them – something the project workers failed to understand.

What the emotional, and often quite personal, responses of Mosse’s former colleagues ironically revealed was the very confirmation of his thesis:

“it also occurred to me that my critics were themselves enacting the very argument they objected to, offering extraordinary confirmation of the key point that authoritative actors work hardest to defend projects as ‘systems of representations’, not only against the destabilizing contingencies of practice, but also now against competing (ethnographic) representations existing potentially within the same public space […]From their positivist perspective, talk of alternative points of view simply dealt in the currency of ‘spurious facts’ or ‘biased interpretations’ which, as I was told, ‘fail to meet the normal standards of social science research”

Paul Collier said it, so it must be true

Hobbes and the Congo is one of my favourite papers (see here). Severin Autesserre, perhaps taking inspiration from the first half of James Ferguson’s book, conducted a three year ethnography to analyse the discursive frames used by policy makers and practitioners for interpreting the causes and effects of local violence. These being the frames of reference, or common ways of understanding, which inform strategies of international intervention. Autesserre concludes that:

‘international actors labeled the Congo a “postconflict” situation; they believed that violence there was innate and therefore acceptable even in peacetime; they conceptualized international intervention as exclusively concerned with the national and international realms; and they saw holding elections, as opposed to local conflict resolution, as a workable, appropriate, and effective tool for state- and peacebuilding. This frame authorized and justified specific practices and policies while precluding others, notably local conflict resolution, ultimately dooming the peacebuilding efforts’.

Collier:

Particularly interesting are the ways in which postgraduate development studies programmes inform the thinking of aid workers. Autesserre finds that the majority of peace-building practitioners explained violence according to a crude interpretation of Collier and Hoeffler’s (2004) explanatory model: that local groups were motivate by greed (control of mineral resources) and so the causes of local violence should be addressed as a law and order problem by national authorities. Some NGOs in Sierra Leone still think the civil war was caused by blood diamonds…

You can bank on another coup

Boubacar N’Diaye’s paper, To midwife – and abort – a democracy, considers political transition after Mauritania’s 2005 military coup (see here). With a history of deeply entrenched military involvement in politics, a policy of “delayed self-succession” helped stall the path toward democratisation and creation of its accompanying institutions of governance. One of the factors N’Diaye highlights as perpetuating this trend is the World Bank’s lack of a political mandate, which privileges macro-economic stability but does not consider pre-existing political conditions.

99 youth organisations but a civil society org ain’t one

“Civil Society” is a popular, yet much abused, concept in development vocabulary. Often civil society broadly refers to a set of institutions independent of the state and family. It can encompass a whole host of non-governmental organisations, from “capacity building” to “advocacy”. It can, however, be appropriated by the state, as the case of GNGO’s (Governmental Non-Governmental Organisations) in Azerbaijan has shown. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India, Chatterjee argues in his book The politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world, that civil society lacks any real analytical or explanatory value, reflecting a privileged form of political organisation for the urban middle classes.

Political organisation in most of the world—“the politics of the governed”—is better understood with reference to political society. Chatterjee observes a two-fold shift in Indian politics during the 1980s.

First the emerging predominance of governmental technologies in providing welfare, which is independent of citizens’ participation in the sovereignty of state. Second, a shift from discrete well-organised political mobilisation (e.g. political parties) to more transient, loose and informal mobilisations around specific issues. Opposed to citizenship defined vis-à-vis civil society, these new forms of political mobilisation pertain to two broad characteristics.

First the governed mobilise around empirically defined and recognisable population groups. Such groups are organised into countable entities, reflecting categories constructed and enumerated (in surveys) by NGOs. A good example is the wide variety of different youth associations in Sierra Leone. Second, they constitute moral communities i.e. demands for services are framed according to some kind of moral discourse. This is often reflected in youth’s language of non-violence: “no fεt”, “wi ᴐl wan” etc. which arguably stem from a disproportionate number of violence sensitisation programmes, in which non-violence becomes a pre-condition for development. For Chatterjee such groups do not belong to civil society in the sense that Hegel and Marx posited. Instead, in demanding services, these groups often necessarily violate legal regulations, but do not ask that private property be abolished in principle. Rather they expect the state to make exceptions for particular activities, thereby producing a whole set of paralegal arrangements. He suggests:

“They do not demand that the right to private property in land be abolished or that the regulations on trade licenses and sales taxes be set aside. Rather, they demand that their cases be treated as exceptions. When the state acknowledges these demands, it too must do so not by the simple application of administrative rules but rather by a political decision to declare an exception.” (Chaterjee 2008: 61).

The slow metre-by-metre movement of Abacha street vendors off the street, whilst not entirely removing them, is a good example in Freetown. In the current decade, with a proliferation of new governmental technologies like NGOs, the effects of primitive accumulation—e.g. alienation, loss of livelihoods, land grabs—are, whilst somewhat inevitable, are unacceptable for those that govern. In combination with the aforementioned exceptions, a whole raft of measures and initiatives are put in the service of reversing the effects of primitive accumulation, in order to help support and maintain the livelihoods of marginalised groups. Such measures include loans and micro credits, and schemes aimed at the commercialisation of agriculture.

In this sense, Chatterjee proposes thinking about two forms of capital which underpin a more accurate definition of civil society. The first, corporate capital, operates through civil society in the interests of urban middle classes that propagate the imperatives of continued capital accumulation. The second, non-corporate capital, operates through political society; and while not eliminating the profit motive per se, is geared towards accumulating capital and organising politically in ways that maintain pre-existing livelihoods.

In all, Chatterjee is saying aid organisations carry a great deal of conceptual baggage; that, arguably covers for the fact they do not come close to challenging, or for that matter understanding, the root causes of poverty and inequality. Rather they act as a buffer, not challenging the status quo, but safeguarding against effects in society that are empirically and morally impermissible for those that govern.

The Politics of Famine

In his 1997 book ‘Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa’, Alex de Waal draws on the work of Amartya Sen (the capabilities approach) arguing that citizens have limited means for holding their governments accountable for famine. Unintentionally, humanitarian agencies further marginalise accountability by superseding responsibility to technical experts.

Such agencies, de Waal argues, are driven by their own institutional interests and narrowly defined interpretations of social responsibility. In effect, humanitarian responses fail to address the political causes of famine, often strengthening authoritarian regimes and leaving citizens powerless to hold government authorities to account.

Gangs of the World, Unite!

In their critique of the 2012 Word Bank Development Report (see here), Gareth Jones and Dennis Rodgers highlight how the Bank fails to delineate between conflict and violence, lumps different forms of violence together, and has an intriguingly parochial and self-referential biography. For instance, none of Charles Tilly’s works feature in the reports bibliography.

Metaphors of Mass Distortion: Putting Social Science to War

The PowerPoint presentation slide above was presented by RA Consulting, a London-based consultancy firm, to General Stanley McChrystal. It comprises an overview of post-conflict reconstruction and counter-insurgency strategy: a road-map for achieving stability in post-invasion Afghanistan. Whilst your first reaction might be a) What?!, or b) I feel sorry for the intern who tediously drew, copy-pasted and grouped the objects together, I hope to persuade you that; despite its seeming complexity, the slide represents exactly the kind of reductive logic necessary for social scientific research to be deemed useful in a military context. Namely I hope to argue that the metaphors human terrain, network and system, each drawn from a long history of military theory and practice, help in advancing a neo-positivist epistemology in military research that enables to have ‘utility’.

Death by Acronym: A Brief History of ‘Counter Insurgency’

Contrary to British boasting that counter insurgency tactics find their roots in the jungles of Malaya, counterinsurgency as understood today, more precisely dates to French military officer David Guala. Born in the French colony of Tunisia in 1919, Guala studied at the St Cyr Military College in France during the 1930s. Subsequently Guala pops up in a number of places, seemingly always at the wrong time. Most significant of these appearances, perhaps, is China in 1946 during which the communist guerrilla forces of Mao Zedong fought against the nationalist Koumintang (many later fleeing to what we now know as Taiwan). During this time Guala studied the tactics of Mao; which, forgoing an understanding of war as being fought between conventional armies, instead aimed to persuade local populations to accept the guerilla’s struggle as their own. In effect he began to understand the utility of using the population as a tool of warfare. As Mao put it:

“The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea”.

In 1956 Guala applied these lessons in Algeria to help French forces fight the National Liberation Front.

Here is a photo of Guala:

By taking a number of villages and protecting them, the idea was to use a range of psychological techniques in order to win over villagers, such that they could provide intelligence and fight-off hostile guerrilla forces. Guala dubbed these protected villages “Experimental Operation Zones”. France lost the battle, however, and Charles de Gaulle gave Algeria independence in 1962, leaving the FLN to take power. The evidence that emerged from many of these protected villages was not that of ‘soft’ techniques of power; but rather, the systematic use of torture and terror: a twisted logic lodged at the very heart of counter revolutionary theory. In effect, by learning guerre revolutionaire, the French had learned and applied the very tactics they purported to be fighting against.

Based on his experience in China and Algeria, Guala wrote a book: “Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice”. In the early 1960s he was invited to the US by Senator John. F. Kennedy—fan of the enlightening book “The Ugly American”—to advice on counter insurgency strategy.

To cut the story short, in January 1961, Kennedy set up “Special Group Counter Insurgency in the Pentagon (SGCI)”. Guala became a senior advisor at the RAND Corporation’s now infamous counter insurgency symposium: RAND claiming stake to the intellectual origins of the acronyms “COIN” (Counter-Insurgency) and “HAM” (Hearts and Minds).

Of interest here is that during the Vietnam War RAND developed ideas around a body of economic theory, broadly summarised as the ‘rational peasant’ logic (later outlined in a book called “The Rational Peasant”). By this logic peasants in Vietnamese society were held as atomised, individually self-interested utility-maximisers. As such they were said to respond rationally—in typical economistic language of the time—to changes within the structure of incentives. The incentive doctors were to be the CIA’s Phoenix Program; essentially groups of clandestine Special Warfare Operatives tasked with conducting an array of guerrilla warfare strategies during the Vietnam War. Or, as some commentators at the time suggested, they acted as the tool for deploying positive violence against their negative violence. Of course this all assumes that positive violence and/or “living with the natives” does change incentive structures, according to which peasants act rationally and self-interestedly.

This is very much at odds with the extended-family and clan networks that actually constituted Vietnamese society: the unforeseen consequences being an upsurge in retributive violence. It is this kind of disconnect between the messy complexity of human behaviour and how military thinkers continually conceive and abstract it throughout history which I want to consider more fully. Of importance in current military thinking, I argue, are three metaphors drawn from extant US military ‘theory’: the NETWORK, the SYSTEM, and the HUMAN TERRAIN.

Network-Centric Warfare

Network-centric warfare has, in recent years, emerged as the dominant theory of warfare practiced by military policy makers and officials. The idea first emerges in a 1998 article by Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka, entitled: Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future. In it, Cebrowski and Garstka reflect on the ways in which Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have revolutionized economic exchange and transaction, and as they claim, have become the central drivers of economic globalization. As such the U.S. military must adopt new organizational structures and operating concepts, as current methods—still lodged in the industrial-mechanised warfare of the twentieth century—lag far behind innovations in the so-called New Economy. Drawing on advances in the non-linear sciences, particularly chaos theory, the network is inaugurated as the organizing concept for new military thinking. For the military, network-centric warfare is:

‘an information superiority-enabled concept of operations that generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness […] and a degree of self-synchronization’ (Alberts et al 2000: 2).

At the root of this new thinking is the imperative to achieve information superiority. Here superiority is less about quality and interpretability of information, and more about the quantity of information gathered. This understanding of information stems largely from cybernetics and systems theory thinking, very much in vogue during the Cold War years (even through Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome, inaugurating the fiction of the “ecosystem”). The ontology of cybernetics can be boiled down to three concepts: information, circularity and feedback. Taken together, these concepts construct an image of the world that severs information from any definition that incorporates context and meaning. In short, it allows for the construction of universal patterns of human behaviour common to all forms of social organisation, which would otherwise render scientific quantification and general theorisation extremely complicated. These reductions have, as seen in the case of the rational peasant, extremely violent consequences. Coupled with increasing decentralisation of organisational structures in the military—essentially pushing information collection to the lowest level possible (i.e. the foot soldier)—military advisors purport to have streamlined the incorporation of knowledge regarding an adversaries’ culture into their military operations. As Bousquet’s (2007) brilliant thesis on military theory argues, US military strategy now rests:

‘on the basis of localized information, calculation and action that highly complex behaviour can emerge without any single entity possessing an overall knowledge of the system and environment […] it acts on the basis of only partial knowledge of its immediate vicinity’

As I shall demonstrate, however, the point is that in seeking local and partial knowledge, research practice is always necessarily reduced and simplified in the military context.

Anthropology Goes to War! The Human Terrain System

At the turn of the War on Terror a number of commentators raised concerns about the increasing use of social scientific research by military institutions, in particular the co-opting of disciplines like Anthropology, Geography and Sociology. Largely these ideas stem from General David Patraeus focus on population-centric warfare. Patraeus insisted these wars must equally be fought on the “cultural terrain”, which is for him a “force multiplier”. In 2005, Yale anthropologist Montgomery McFate and then-PhD student Andrea Jackson published a paper to meet this call, entitled: ‘An Organisational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs’. McFate and Jackson argue that, in these recent wars, the US military has lacked social and cultural knowledge: anthropology can change this. DoD needs a specialist department that can ‘produce, collect, and centralize cultural knowledge, which will have utility for policy development and military operations’. What later comes to be known as the Human Terrain System.

Such a system can successfully utilise, they argue, ethnographic field research, cultural training and advisors, and analytic studies in support of military decision-makers to build an organization capable of ‘captur[ing] operational cultural knowledge’. Flicking through the Human Terrain Team manual these operating methods draw on “ethnographic research design”, “social network analysis”, and “data maps showing specific ethnographic and cultural features”. There is even a handy diagram:

…and Geography tags along

Not wanting to feel left out, at the same time the American Geographical Society coordinated a geographical expeditionary program called The Bowman Expeditions. Its first expedition, in 2005, ventured to three indigenous regions in Mexico—Sierra Tarahumara, Huasteca Potosina and Sierra Juárez—funded by $500,000 from the U.S. Military’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO). Expeditions now take place in Columbia, the Antilles, Jordan and Kazakhstan. The México Indígena concept, as it became known, is implicitly motivated by geopolitical aims, for, in the words of the American Geographical Society in 2009, improving “U.S. understanding of foreign lands and peoples and, thereby, to reduce international misunderstandings [and] provide a knowledge foundation for peaceful resolution of conflicts”.

The researcher’s on the expedition aimed first to ‘develop a multi-scale geographical analysis or political ecology of how Mexico’s new property regime [PROCEDE] influences indigenous land tenure and natural resource use’. Second the México Indígena expedition devised a ‘global GIS place-based field research prototype for obtaining, interpreting, and presenting open source geographic information on a country’. Geographers conducting the Bowman Expeditions link their research aims explicitly to their Human Terrain counterparts, arguing that ‘human terrain is at the very core of geographic scholarship, being all but synonymous with cultural landscape’. Indeed, the main output of the México Indígena expedition is a digitalized, Geographical Information System containing this new human terrain data: a ‘so-called digital human terrain’.

Metaphors of Mass Distortion

‘when a new metaphor enters a conceptual system that we base our actions on, it will alter the conceptual system and the perceptions and actions that the system gave rise to’. Lakoff and Johnson (1990: 145-6).

1. Visualising the Human Terrain: “Mappable Culture”

Researchers with the Bowman Expeditions frequently link the Human Terrain metaphor in their work to Carl Sauer’s (1941, 1956) study of cultural landscapes. Sauer’s (1941: 24) principle claim is the need to ‘make cultural processes the base of [geographic] thinking and observation’. One group of Bowman researchers, Herlihy et al (2008b: 409-10), have argued that a digital human terrain must ‘integrate both natural and human elements’ in order to map the ‘cultural landscape with spatial and analytical precision’. These perspectives are reflected in Sauer’s (1941) methodology for the historical reconstruction of cultural landscapes. A rationale which argues for ‘knowledge of the functioning of the given culture as a whole’, where culture represents a stable areal unit, of which the spatial relations between actually existing phenomena are analogous to homologous organisation, for example the study of human societies is treated as analogous to the study of plant societies.

Therefore culture, when treated as an observable areal unit, represents ‘the area over which a functionally coherent way of life dominates’ (ibid: 364). These assumptions are imported into the Counter-Insurgency Field Manual or COIN-FM for short, where sections B-6, B-7 outline the use of various map overlays including ‘religion, race and ethnicity’ and ‘population support’. The latter is a means of graphically visualising ‘sectors of the populace that are progovernment, antigovernment, proinsurgent, anti-insurgent, uncommitted, and neutral’. Population support overlays represent local perceptions of coalition forces that COIN-FM suggests are ‘key to successfully targeting, engaging, and evaluating success’.

Problematically, and obviously, mapping perceptions entails the spatial homogenisation of settlements into supportive or non-supportive areas. What this means is that in the same moment an overlay quantifies and maps support—arguably an illusion itself—it excludes temporal changes in perceptions and suggests an individual’s perceptions are predominantly shaped within and by some entity called the community.

Sifting through the research papers that advance this thinking, Arnold (2010: 6) illustrates a common point, that the primary aim of human terrain mapping is to ‘conduct systematic analysis to identify correlations between the assorted ‘layers’ of socio-political data available’. Likewise Sinclair et al (2010: 6) suggest that ‘integrated layers of information on tribes and leadership networks reveals cultural ‘leverage points’ within the community’. Indeed human terrain visualisations are overlaid onto ‘intelligence data […] and analyzed to provide insight as to how the Human Terrain is influencing the intelligence data’ (Eldridge and Neboshynsky 2008: 33). How a layered analysis is conducted remains undefined by Arnold, Sinclair et al, and the COIN-FM Handbook, instead suggesting identification of correlations between different layers without further analytical elaboration. For instance, Eldridge and Neboshynsky (2008: 43) simply state that ‘areas of the map are shaded according to the likelihood of a geographical area to positively correlate to the hypothesis being analyzed’ – groundbreaking..

However one explanation for all this can be gleaned by returning to Carl Sauer’s theory of culture, which can be traced back to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (Leighly 1976: 341; Duncan 1980: 186). Kroeber suggests that reality is divided into several different levels, the top being a cultural and social level. As a result culture is raised to a ‘superhuman level’ superseding the cognitive processes of individuals. In other words, agency is effaced from the individual, with the cultural layer—or cultural terrain in Sauer’s and the Bowman Expedition’s terminology—elevated as determining human action: a crude form of cultural determinism. For instance Kroeber (1952: 49) argues the cultural and social level is not constitutive of a ‘link in a chain, [nor] a step in a path, but a leap to another plane’: this plane being the cultural terrain. Jessica Turnley in discussions with the U.S. National Research Council—one of the important US policy circles where these matters are discussed—points out the obvious here by suggesting that in ‘think[ing] of human culture as “human terrain” […] one arrives at a very different view of culture, one that is more like a fixed landscape’.

All this is imported into layered analysis and COIN-FM’s methodology which employs a taxonomic approach for visualising human terrain data, dubbed ASCOPE, designed to map and record several operationally relevant features: Area, Structure, Capabilities, Organisations, People and Events. There a number of problems with this. First various concepts outlined by ASCOPE—like power and social structure—remain atheoretical. The COINF-FM handbook asserts that ‘the problems themselves will refer to a particular social theory’: although an appropriate social, political or geographical theory remains unspecified. Tellingly the handbook confines three theoretical frameworks to an appendix—‘Structural Functionalism’, ‘Conflict/Social Marxism’ and ‘Symbolic Interactionism’—that can be applied, seemingly willy-nilly, with limited justification to explain observed data trends and spatial correlations. In this sense, research for counter insurgency arguably has no methodology at all, if we are to accept methodology is, at bottom, about constructing an argument for how best to relate theory and evidence.

Second cultural phenomena and human actors are reified as static inscriptions on different layers of the cultural terrain maps. So not only are physical infrastructures—police stations, checkpoints and government offices—given a fixed geo-location, to use Eldridge and Neboshtnsky’s (2008) terminology, but so too are individual and collective subjectivities including beliefs and belief systems, cultural forms, social norms and perceptions. Reification encapsulates a ‘fallacy by which mental constructions or abstractions are seen as having substance’ (Duncan 1980: 181). Indeed participants in the human terrain system draw on the analogy that “I can sort of float above it [culture] and touch it”. Consequently various subjectivities are reified and inscribed into the cultural terrain understood to shape the “operational environment” in the same manner as the physical terrain.

2. Population as a Network Abstraction

In a useful critique of COIN-FM, Hill (2009) suggests that ‘for the sake of redividing territory, commanders are instructed to presume a network basis for relations among groups’. The COIN-FM Handbook itself frequently refers to network analysis and to conceiving the population as a network form. The Handbook makes no explicit mention of appropriate social and political theories for demonstrating how they believe different societies work. Instead, power relationships between individuals in society, as one example—where the handbook equates power with different individuals ‘spheres of influence’—are understood to operate through ‘their social networks’. An insurgent group’s power is measured according to their network’s effectiveness or sphere of influence, and is measured in terms of its network density such that the denser the network connections, the more powerful the insurgent group. Likewise the handbook suggests that ‘social structures’, comprising ‘groups’, ‘institutions’ and ‘organizations’, are inter-linked by networks. In these ways agency (the capacity of an individual to make choices) is abstracted up to the network, which much like the cultural terrain, exists above individuals whom are relegated as passive and mechanistic nodes.

Therefore behind individual actions—such as looting, planting an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) or drug dealing—rests an assumption that these individuals are merely the agents who carry out the tasks determined by some higher transcendental cause. That determining cause, of culture, society or ideology, is pre-determined by the researcher and not gleaned by inductive analysis. Data is collected on social connections and individual social profiles, but the theoretical underpinning detailing how individuals—the nodes—relate to the broader whole—network—remains absent. The individual is atomised, meaning social and cultural relationships are squashed. We have returned full-circle to the rational peasant.

3. System Thinking and Neo-Positivism: Enabling the Modelling of Human Terrain Data

Aside from Human Terrain data being collected and visualised, it is also interpreted and decisions passed regarding its utility in accordance with military operations. The Handbook suggests data is interpreted on the basis of ‘how the information fits in a “human terrain” frame’: illustrative of The Handbook’s general vagueness on how data is to be interpreted and analysed. However what remains clear is that after collecting Human Terrain data it is translated in some way to ‘incorporate the HTA’s [Human Terrain Analyst’s] data [into] software applications to organize, collate, consolidate, and explain the data.’. In the absence of considering social, political or geographical theory—as discussion of theory has been displaced by the metaphors of Human Terrain and Network—interpretation of the collected data falls primarily to various methods of computer modelling. These methods are primarily developed in the article “Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions: Toward a Unified Social Framework “(2011). One of the human terrain system’s many goals, according to Eldridge and Neboshynsky (2008), is ‘identification of portable quantitative measurement techniques […] to describe and enumerate geo-cultural relationships and interactions regardless of the actual location of interest’. By portable the authors mean a systems design for the enumeration of human terrain data that can be easily replicated across other Department of Defence (DoD) institutions.

Similarly Bowman Expedition participants identify with Dobson’s (1983: 136) concept of ‘automated geography’—the integration of remote sensing, geographical information systems, spatial statistics and quantitative spatial modeling into an ‘analytical whole’—as representing an ‘integrated systems approach to geographic problem solving’. Dobson (1983: 136) mirrors the human terrain system goal of a replicable systems design across different institutions by suggesting its ‘general capabilities are enhanced if institutions share their software, hardware, designs and databases’. Moreover these portable technologies, with their closed system logic, are argued to have utility because they can quantify geographical and cultural interactions and relationships, without reference to geographical context: ‘regardless of location of interest’. This assertion is illustrative of information superiority imperatives and associated pre-requisites for gleaning nomothetic laws governing socio-spatial behavior i.e. we want a model of human behavior that can be deployed in any context needed.

National Research Council participants agree that models of socio-cultural knowledge are not ‘stand-alone problem-solving technolog[ies]’ but instead constitute a ‘broader effort to [universally] understand human behaviour […] a way of aiding decisions and judgements made by humans’ (Pool 2011: 74). Given the ethnographic methodology cited by the handbook there exists a clear conflict between the goals of ideographic approaches which focus on describing the particular and contextual, against computer modelling that emphasises pre-defined rules for explaining human behaviour. For instance Silverman et al (2007: 1-2) argue that modelling simulations—in this case using simulated gameworlds from software packages like PMFserv and FactionSim—can be utilised ‘to help model the ‘parts’ and their micro-decision processes’ in order to determine ‘emergent macro-behaviors’.

Furthermore Silverman et al emphasise delineation between cognitive processes internal to individuals (in their heads) and social processes that have an external influence upon an individuals’ decision-making. Social processes specify influences, such as race, religion and tribal loyalties, where the relationship between individual cognition and social or cultural influence is pre-determined by rule-sets and algorithms specified in the computational model and not explicated from the idiographic particularities of geographic context. For example, one National Research Council participant discussing the modelling of cooperative social relationships suggests ‘communal sharing relationship[s] can be thought of an equivalence equation […] in which the social world is divided up into categories of people’ (Pool 2011: 41). Here explanations of sharing relationships are reduced to measuring the ‘intensity of connections’ between different categories of people—mirrored in social network analysis—be they ‘lovers’ (ibid: 40) or ‘members of a platoon’ (ibid: 41). Likewise, social network analysis in the COIN-FM handbook reduces social relationships—represented by dyads—to singular properties.

This logic basically corresponds to a form of essentialism. Anne Phillips (2010) definition of essentialism is useful here: ‘the attribution of particular characteristics to everyone identified with a particular category’, such that ‘differences that may be historically variant and socially created’ are naturalised within that category.

To take one example, as it was just recently Valentine’s Day (vom), love might be quantified into a single metric representing a strong co-operative social relationship and then generalised across a homogenous category labeled lovers: meaning all lovers are all highly likely to cooperate! The context of meaning for notions such as love is emptied and standardised. Such reductions—analogous to concepts like tribal loyalty—are necessary so that social trends and patterns—macro-behaviours—emerging from the actions of individuals are amenable to ‘scientific measurement [particularly] of […] attitudes, beliefs, expectations, motivations, and aspirations’ (Robin 1998: 24). Subjective concepts are treated as parsimonious as possible, retaining only a limited number of properties. Indeed some National Research Council participants agree that there are problems with ‘inserting’ subjectivities and ‘abstract phenomena, such as beliefs, motivations, and the affective dimensions of behaviour’ into computational models.

From here the actions of each node (i.e. person) are governed according to dual cognitive and social processes that Silverman et al (2007: 3) argue as providing each actor with a particular social orientation within a closed social system. Likewise the interaction of cognitive and social processes in an actor’s decision-making cycle has affinities with military theory, particularly John Boyd’s influential Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop. Boyd’s loop was developed as a ‘model [of] the decision-making process a combatant goes through when engaged in the warfighting environment’, a model retaining much explanatory purchase amongst military officials (Bousquet 2007: 180). The orientation phase occurs as an actor ‘absorbs information from his environment [and] his situation within it’ (ibid: 181). An actor’s orientation is shaped by an analytical framework—that assumes actors make rational decisions by preserving the ‘positivist stance [of] regularity determinism (Steinmetz 2005: 34)—comprising deterministic attributes like cultural traditions reflected in the cultural landscape of Human Terrain.

Consequently the OODA loop acts as the implicit, as in unobserved, mechanism linking the ‘autonomous’ observed actions of individual nodes—following the logic of depth-realist positivism (see Steinmetz 2005: 34)—within their constitutive social networks, to the determinism of transcendental formal causes—entities in COIN-FM’s ASCOPE taxonomy and other cultural reifications—that are visualised in the cartography of the Human Terrain that these social networks overlay. As such population takes the abstract form of a network that overlays the separate ontological and causative form of the Human Terrain. These separate and closed ontologies, the deterministic causative status assigned to them, and the regularisation of their units of analysis—reflected by ASCOPE’s reified cultural entities and social network analyses’ standardised nodes—enable the aforementioned replicable systems design for computational—as in the virtual, geographically unbound and thus portable—modelling of the Human Terrain in a variety of areas of military operations, regardless of differing social and cultural context.

Consequently three rules of positivist theories of knowledge—expressed in the unified logic of regularity, determinism and system closure—are advanced by the metaphors of Human Terrain, Network and System in the military use of social sceince.

Playing God? The Pitfalls of Military Social Science

‘How rare is it to encounter advice about the future which begins from a premise of incomplete knowledge’ – Scott (1998: 343).

I’ve tried to argue that the organisation of research practices around the metaphors of human terrain, network and system has important implications for thinking about the use of social science in a military context. There is a tendency to fall back on a neo-positivist theory of knowledge—characterised by the tripartite logic of regularity, determinism and system closure—in which the three metaphors construe reality in such a manner that it serves utility for military operations. Military goals and objectives a priori define a required practical research outcome, such as preventing IED attacks. Consequently that outcome, be it a model, map or social network diagram, must appear as precise, highly probable and stable as possible. In other words, mirroring Scott’s quote above, complexity in, and knowledge of the social world is reduced to as coherent and complete a framework as possible—indeed ignorance of intervening causal factors or loss of contextual meaning from data is a necessity in advancing foresight—and thus reinforcing neo-positivist theories of knowledge and falsely simplistic conceptions of spatiality. The three metaphors act as the vehicles for these reductions. Famously Bruno Latour made the distinction between expertise and research. For him research is unlike expertise as it always involves a collective effort of thumbling through the dark. As the power point slide I showed at the start attests to, we are bound to produce dangerously gross simplifications if we try to turn the lights on human behavior too quickly.

From Freetown diamba to Peckham Pineapples

From Freetown diamba to Peckham Pineapples: What kind of future does the drugs trade hold for youth in Sierra Leone?

Drugs trafficking, especially of Class-A drugs like heroin and cocaine, is becoming an increasingly fashionable concern for West African scholars and policy makers. In Sierra Leone drug trafficking is fast being framed as a security problem as much as unemployment. This is perhaps partly because both unemployment and drugs can easily be related to youth, and by extension, lend to importing assumptions that youth gangs, and their respective grievances with state and customary authorities which fuelled the brutal violence of Sierra Leone’s civil war, will be reproduced at some point in the future. Some take the dangers of drug trafficking to an even greater extreme: “it is clear that there is a possibility of Freetown turning into another Sao Paulo or Bagota, with youth-cum-drug gangs becoming part of the urban landscape” – so say Kunkeler and Peters in a 2011 journal article.

In reality class-A drug consumption is very limited in Freetown. Youth generally cannot afford them, effectively being priced out of the market, and there is a long history of socialisation into smoking the locally grown diamba. In contrast wealthier sections of the population, especially ex-pats, consume cocaine in a small selection of locations around Western Freetown that can be counted on one hand. Clearly Class A is not just a criminal classification here. As one senior police officer put it: “we don’t police cocaine in this country, we don’t produce cocaine in this country, I don’t [even] have the evidence [for that]”. Of youth that have been admitted to psychiatric services in East Freetown, about 80% according to Dr Nahim—Sierra Leone’s only trained psychiatrist—have alcohol, tobacco or marijuana related problems. Yet the discourse of child soldiers, brutalised and desensitised by the Revolutionary United Front through drugs like “brown-brown”, continues to stick in the imaginations of many ministers and policy-makers.

According to the UN Office for Drugs and Crime, however, drug trafficking has risen dramatically in West Africa, with 27% of cocaine arriving in Western Europe being transited through West Africa between 2005 and 2012, and 23 ‘large seizures’ of cocaine being logged during the same period. A worrying trend is the perceived relocation of wholesale distribution of cocaine, the most profitable of all globally trafficked goods, from Latin America to West Africa, particularly as more traditional routes become riskier to traffic through. In countries like Guinea-Bissau, which records the highest number of seizures, trafficking is indeed a grave concern. For example, the wholesale value of just 2.5 tonnes of cocaine is equal to about the entire national budget of Guinea-Bissau. Likewise, any large influx of foreign currency is likely to heavily distort local economies. The potential for bending state official interests away from upholding the law, and toward complicity in the drug trade, is in some cases clearly acute.

Freetown has bared the brunt of one such ‘significant’ seizure in 2008, something law-enforcement agencies have described to me as an “eye opener” moment. The judgement document prepared by presiding judge Mr Justice Browne-Marke in 2009 shows why some of these anxieties are not entirely misplaced. The story involves an unscheduled Cessna Plane, marked with fake Red Cross logos, landing at an unlit Lungi Airport runway. Flicking through the 100-or-so pages of this document we learn of Latin Americans setting-up shell companies, fake NGOs posing as conservation and disability charities, the renting of safe houses; the complicity of state ministers (and their brothers), and that the Special Branch of the Police and CISU intelligence services were accused of withholding evidence suspected to have implicated their officers and agents. As Browne-Marke summarises, the state “had become [a] penetrated institution, accepting shop-worn wares as good intelligence”. In any case, drugs and organised crime are now handled by the “independent” Transnational Organised Crime Unit (TOCU).

Whilst academics focus disproportionately on class-A drugs, presumably for it makes a sexier story to tell; the real issues facing Sierra Leoneans, as signalled by health professionals like Dr Nahim, lie firmly in cannabis production and consumption. Sierra Leone, but particularly Freetown and its outlying towns and villages, has a long history of producing, trading and consuming drugs of various kinds: but cannabis is by far on the largest scale. Conventional wisdom suggests that cannabis originates in South Asia, where Indian ganja (i.e. hemp) was popularised by ex-serviceman following World War Two. However Sierra Leone’s diamba, to this day smoked pretty much everywhere, pre-dates hemp by almost twenty years. According to Ghanaian scholar Akyeampong, diamba was smoked by fisherman as a non-medical aid to ease the excises of a day’s hard labour. By the 1930s a well-established network of producers and traders had formed, with cultivation of diamba in the outlying towns of Hasting, Kissy and Wellington, packaged as a sought after commodity, and sold onto various traders in Freetown. During this time Freetown was a busy trading port, and it was not unusual for significant amounts of diamba to be trafficked by outbound mining employees of the British colonial DELCO company (an interesting story in itself). In fact, at a time of economic depression, Akyeampong suggests cannabis, increasing travel, and a growing Sierra Leone diaspora came together to facilitate new and creative ways of supporting local livelihoods.

Recently cannabis farms have become the target of Sierra Leone’s specialist drugs division, TOCU. Under the guise of unimaginative operational code names like “Desert Breeze”, and funded by the Irish Government, just over 350 kilograms of cannabis crop have been burnt, a further 16 kgs seized from villages across Northern Province and at MacDonald Village along the Freetown Peninsula in a single January operation. In total eighteen suspects were arrested. Looking at press releases the in-vogue motive for such exercises is now: growing cannabis reduces food security! Such is the (hammering of the) link between ‘security’ and ‘development’ in current donor and NGO thinking.

Despite pressure from law-enforcement agencies there is growing creativity in other sectors of the West African drugs trade. Experts point to the Nigerian model of “adhocracy” as the optimal means of trafficking drugs. Unlike the hierarchical and competing structures of mafia or triad-type organisations that are played off against each other in law-enforcement strategies—think of The Sopranos—adhocracy involves the temporary pulling together of different individuals, with particular specialisms, who then work on one or multiple “projects” and then disband. There is very limited rivalry. Adhocracy is a marvel of the drug trafficking management sciences. Of course there are other facilitating factors that make drug trafficking, particular through Ghana and Nigeria, more common: a sophisticated financial infrastructure for money laundering, a large diaspora resident in (and with comfortable knowledge of) Western Europe, a large property market, and political stability – to name just four.

Many of these conditions more-or-less directly relate to the ease of laundering money. Money laundering has three key stages: placement, layering and integration. Placement involves the cutting-up of money into smaller amounts, then deposited either directly into a bank account or by purchasing a series of monetary instruments e.g. cheques, money, orders. In a cash-based economy, like Sierra Leone, this stage of laundering is incredibly difficult to trace, and relatively easy to execute. However for larger sums you need layering—the channelling of funds through the purchase and sale of investment instruments, usually across borders—and then integration—where funds are reintegrated into the legitimate economy by investing in different assets e.g. real estate, casinos, tourism—that requires more sophisticated financial instruments which are lacking in Sierra Leone. Of more concern, however, is that the local agents of many traffickers (or “been-tos” as they are locally called) are not paid in cash, but in kind, leading to drugs being left in local communities, and therefore opportunities, it is said, for the emergence of competing local youth gangs.

Talking to youth, the way they rationalise activity considered ‘criminal’ by the state is interesting. Generally speaking, criminal activity is perceived as a form of wealth redistribution. Their conversations focus on economic inequality, usually marked with reference to the aesthetic differences between the poor and rundown east, against the rich compound villas and hotels of the developing west of Freetown. The inequality between east and west, and influx of dollar currency (especially in the rental market), is a grievance played out almost daily in the columns of Sierra Leone’s newspapers. Mark Shaw, in a 2002 article, uniquely interviewed Nigerian drug ‘kingpins’. They too saw themselves not as criminals, but as agents rectifying the balance of global economic inequalities. For Shaw this constitutes a popular culture shared throughout the West African sub-region. But this perception of inequality extends further. When asking Sierra Leonean officials what they think the single biggest problem with rising drug trafficking is, the unanimous response is: growing demand in the West. For them: no more snorting in London, no more problems in Freetown.

Class-A drug trafficking in Sierra Leone has some historical precedence. During the mid-1980s a lot of cocaine was smuggled through well-established Lebanese networks, purportedly used in funding the Lebanese civil war. Much of this activity was curtailed by Israeli Intelligence Services. In particular, Marat Balagula is held up as a pioneer of using Russian mobsters to break up smuggling networks. Some of the preferred Lebanese trafficking networks are documented as early as 1952, originating in Beirut, arriving in Accra/Kano, for onwards transmission to North America. As demand decreased in North American markets, and profits margins rose in Western Europe, onward transmission switched primarily to London in the early swinging 1960s. In a great article on the history of drug smuggling in Africa, Stephen Ellis perceptively asks whether:

‘Given the use of West Africa by Lebanese smugglers in more recent times, it is an intriguing question whether there has been a highly discrete narcotics pipeline linking Lebanon and West Africa to the consumer markets of North America and Western Europe in continuous operation for more than fifty years […] narcotics smuggling the world over seems to have become intertwined with the work of secret intelligence agencies from an early period’

At various points Freetown has been used as a Freeport facility. Ports, both land and sea, are used as spaces in which heroin from Thailand is exchanged for diamonds bound for the then Soviet Union. More recently Dutch criminal networks have had an interest in Sierra Leone and Liberia for the trans-shipment of hashish from South Asia.
Trafficking techniques in recent years have innovated at a much faster rate than underpaid and under-resourced law-enforcement agencies in Sierra Leone can keep pace with. First, trafficking via commercial air flights comprise a variety smuggling techniques: vaginal inserts, swallowing, strapping to the body, using multiple decoy mules to fool customs profiling. Second, trafficking via sea, be it cargo ships (dubbed “motherships”) dropping packages in territorial waters to be collected by fishermen in dug-out canoes, in African foodstuffs on cargo crates (pineapples and mangos are a favourite, the smell is more potent than marijuana), in carved-out lion heads (for the posing tourist), dropped from helicopters over the sea, or by mislabelling goods not checked against cargo manifests. The trafficking techniques are innovative, the law-enforcement response stagnant.

While concerns that the shift of wholesale distribution to West Africa will reignite youth gang violence remain to be seen, there is certainly no empirical evidence that Freetown will become a new Sao Paolo or Bagota. Rather, there are widespread calls, most recently from the Kofi Anan Commission, for basic data on consumption rates, and greater scholarly engagement with organised crime to form more precise hypotheses and get a better grasp of what is actually happening.

On returning to Sierra Leone in 2002, following its brutal civil war between 1991 and 2002, Akyeampong asked a cross-section of people just one question: “had the causes of the civil war been resolved”. The general narrative which emerged was that the civil war ended because Sierra Leoneans were tired of fighting. For them, control of the economy lay with external economic forces well beyond the capacity of any government administration to bring about radical economic transformation. Violence was the epiphenomena of conflict shaped around much more deeply entrenched socio-economic and political inequalities.

Perhaps, then, it is not so much the reformation of competing youth gangs and its accompanying violence—basically of locating the problem in ‘youth’ itself—that should be the concern here. Rather, I think that attention must be paid to how, at times of prolonged economic stagnation “alternative livelihoods” like drug trafficking are rationalised as attractive prospects for rectifying the imbalances of a political economy skewed against a rising generation of ambitious (and clearly innovative and creative) young people.

What the f*ck?! A Methodological Approach for Explaining ‘Enjoyment’ in Video Gaming

The following summarizes a piece of research conducted last year for a course completely unrelated to my PhD research; but which, despite my complaining, turned out to be fairly interesting. The broad aim of the project is to understand how a multi-sensory methodology (i.e. collecting and analysing data that is not just textual: what people say and write) is useful for understanding what the elicitation of fleeting emotional affects, like enjoyment, might tell us about different sorts of social behaviours. The basic questions addressed are: i) what produces a range of different emotions when playing video games (e.g. frustration, anger, pleasure) and, ii) is the way in which these fleeting moments are produced significant for explaining what makes people play video games, and continue to play them.

Principally I draw on the application of psycho-social theories from studies in child development, particularly Winnicott’s (1971) theory of transitional space, in order to understand gaming as a form of ‘play’.During play it is not so much the content that matters, but rather the gamer’s functional preoccupations: their acute concentration and state of withdrawal from objective reality. Play is irreducible to internal psychic reality; it is not subjectivity confined inside the head of the player. Rather, the identification of play requires a greater level of nuance, for whilst it is manifest ‘outside the individual’ it does not represent ‘an external reality’. Players pull fragments from reality to advance a particular projection of ‘inner or personal reality’, and in doing so construct a ‘dream[-like] potential’ during the act of play: an immersive state.

As play is at root ‘essentially satisfying’ (ibid: 52), there scope for arguing that play may facilitate the elicitation of Lacan’s concept of ‘jouissance’.

It is first important to understand some of Lacan’s basic psychoanalytic concepts, and their various interpretations, if we are to make the initial argument that enjoyment (i.e. jouissance) is the hook/drive that gets people playing video games and keeps them playing. I also raise two methodological considerations in relations to this. For sanity I’ll C + P in from the paper:

“The theoretical groundwork in this study highlights two important methodological considerations when using a multi-sensory approach for eliciting enjoyment when drawing on Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts of ‘extimacy’ and ‘jouissance’ (see Lacan 1998: 1-13; 2007: 29-83). Lacan’s theory works in accordance with three relational registers: Symobolic, Imaginary and Real. The Symbolic is linguistic, a cultural realm encompassing ‘words, gestures and signs’ (Proudfoot 2010: 510). It is the register of the signifier, rather than the signified. The Imaginary register is where the self is structured by a set of imaginary relations to an Other (Lacan 2006b, in Proudfoot 2010); relations permeated with aggression and narcissism (Proudfoot 2010: 510). The Real is a register independent of the Symbolic and Imaginary, remaining extra-discursive; a ‘brute materiality’ that disturbs the Symbolic and Imaginary registers, evading any symbolic signification or representation. Jouissance emanates from the Real evading representation and discursive signification (see Žižek 1998); it is the analytical focus of this study.

Taking these registers together, structure is understood as extra discursive; neither symbolic nor linguistic. Instead structures, in Kingsbury’s (2007: 246) interpretation, are ‘not real, because they are not entirely immanent to or coincident with the positivity of social spaces and relations’ –not observable. Therefore experiencing enjoyment when playing a game cannot be understood textually vis-à-vis discourse analysis. Instead Lacan employs the concept of ‘typology’ as an equivalent of structure; irreducible to metaphor or allegory (see Evans 1996: 208). Structural tendencies in the social world—cultural structures like class, gender or race—are not elicited at the level of textual representation. From here, the concept of extimacy suggests subjectivity (including intimate emotions such as crying, laughter and compassion) is diffuse and transferrable to other objects and people, opposed to structural tendencies anchored, autonomously, in a person’s mind (see Žižek 1989: 34). As Žižek suggests, psychoanalysis is not simply ‘a psychology’ (ibid). As there is no clean separation between subject and object; or ‘player’ and ‘game world’, “self” is inter-subjectively constructed in playing a game.

In short, any distinction between the player’s internal subjectivity (their ‘being’ prior to engaging in play) and an external game world containing a selection of immanently identifiable discursive representations, is not a priori held in such a framing. The game world is thus a medium through which particular affects and particular subjectivities are transferred and registered.

Extimacy suggests video games do not substitute in for players’ beliefs or political proclivities. As Kingsbury’s (2007: 247) argues, players may feel emotional affects through a video game: ‘because subjectivity does not simply take place when an agent is actively doing something, but rather when another thing (person or object) is doing it for the agent’. The act of play in video gaming is the conduit through which ‘people transfer and register their innermost feelings’ (ibid: 248). This raises the first methodological implication, as when considering how to elicit affects our understanding of intimacy is inverted. Intimacy here is not concerned with establishing claims to a truthfully expressed emotion. Neither is intimacy commensurable with a dispassionate ethnographic reading of subject’s behaviour. Instead intimacy is a ‘point of opacity […] like a foreign body’ (Miller 1994: 76). Kingsbury (2007: 249) suggests ‘what grounds the alterity of the Other, that is, what makes the other Other is the jouissance […] of the Other—the ways in which people organize their enjoyment’. Here the paper contends that the utility of a multi-sensory approach is located in the notion of ‘play’ that organises how enjoyment is elicited. For Shaw (2010: 790-1) the act of playing a video game offers an ‘interpretive framework’ for understanding how the self and game inter-subjectively ‘comingle’.

A second methodological implication, then, is to emplace data collection in the context of the subject’s interaction with a video game and thereby understand methods of data collections, like interviews, as multisensory events rather than linguistic ones (Pinker 2009: 81).”

I then differentiate enjoyment from pleasure in the hedonistic sense by examining recent re-interpretations of Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts of ‘jouissance’. Enjoyment is integral for understanding why people get “hooked” into playing video games, but not according to a conventional understanding of what makes people feel pleasure. Enjoyment is analogous to a football fan shouting arms out-stretched, a spontaneous brute-materiality most obvious when pleasure is experienced in pain.

As such, understanding social and fully-immersive video gaming as distinct types of play helped to distinguish the manifold ‘ways in which people organize their enjoyment’ (Kingsbury 2008: 249). Enjoyment is not hedonism, it is not about maximising a player’s experience of pleasure. Enjoyment, in Fink’s (1997: 7-8) reading, is ‘“getting a [more ephemeral] kick out of” playing video games—it is about extra-discursive and ephemeral thrills—in which enjoyment is ambiguous and paradoxical, referring more tentatively to the ‘allures of pleasure-in-pain and pain-in-pleasure’ (Kingsbury 2007: 250) that evade linguistic and textual representation (Proudfoot 2010: 508). Enjoyment is sustaining a contradictory desire; it is the opposite of pursuing a pleasurable experience (Žižek 1996: 17) – one can find enjoyment in the outwardly expressed anguish of losing.

Second the paper outlined a number of methodological issues for collecting data on fleeting emotional affects. For instance, eliciting textual data (e.g. an interview/focus group) and framing questions in terms of “why” (i.e. seeking root causes) makes participants resistant to discussing enjoyment and loses important multi-sensory data necessary for differentiating pleasure from enjoyment.

The methodology was seperated into two stages. The first examined the production and form of enjoyment in a social context. Participant-observation of a LAN gaming torunament, alongside emplaced interviews and photography was used to probe player experiences in their participation during the tournament, cross-checked against my observations of their behaviour.

The second stage examined enjoyment in the independent-immersive context. Participants played through a level of the popular video game “Call of Duty”. Positional cameras recorded their behaviour, whilst in-game footage was recorded. The in-game footage is later played back to the participant and they are asked to self-select moments which “moved” them or provoked a “gut” reaction. I probed further on how they thought these reactions were produced. Here I tested the working hypothesis, drawn from Zizek, that asking “why” too directly accesses the Real source of enjoyment (which, for Lacan, was found in metanarratives like nationalism) and so requires an approach of “looking and speaking awry”. This emphasises asking how, slowly explicating process, not asking why and searching for root causes.

A two-level thematic coding frame is used to analyses the data. The two levels: visual cues and verbal cues, are necessary as the working hypothesis for the elicitation of enjoyment is that participant reactions must be bodily (e.g. throwing a control, punching a fist) in the first instance.

Analysis first revealed the context of play, social vs. independent-submersive, matters for the extent of inter-subjective comingling (i.e. blurring between fantasy and reality). Key indicators are found in participant commentaries of playback footage in the submersive context, where first-person (the person playing) and third-person (their character in the game) are frequently interchanged. In contrast, participants in the social context identified “teamwork” in terms of communicating with each other in the first person, and breakdown in communication, as the source of angry or frustrated outbursts. In the social context player’s easily displayed anger and frustration, and with less diffidence could recall such moments and expand on what they thought triggered them. This suggests pleasure in the hedonistic sense–moving freely from signifier to signifier–not enjoyment.

Independent-submersive context participants could identify moments at which they were “moved”, and, just like in the social context, these were mostly moments of frustration or anger at being unable to complete a (routine) task. Most tasks involved simple bodily movements in-game that could be replicated outside the game. Reviewing observational footage shows these self-selected moments coincided with increased bodily activity e.g. breathing-in deeply, steadying hands, tigheting hands, moving closer to the screen. In effect these bodily actions outside the game were preparing the player for tasks inside the game. Cross-checking footage highlights that brute outbursts (laughing, shouting, anger, throwing controllers) occurs when the cycle of simple bodily preperations outside the game is interrupted, or placed under strain, by more complex and spontaneous tasks during gameplay.

It is these moments at which player outbursts, and their lack of an explanation or resistance to provoide an answer for what provoked them, mirror Lacan’s understanding of enjoyment (i.e. pleasure-in-pain).

The efficacy of enjoyment depends on:

i) the context of play: immersive-independent vs. social;

ii) the extent to which action sequences are scripted;

iii) Counter to conventional wisdom, atmospheric music, player-NPC interaction and visuals are less significant in producing enjoyment. Instead, whilst heightened enjoyment still emerges from the blurring between fantasy and reality, it emerges most when an emphasis is placed on simple, repetitive, bodily tasks; and even more so when these are visceral or violent in nature.

Conventional approaches ot video game design focus largely on: graphics, atmospheric music, dialogue, all of which were insignificant in producing enjoyment, the hook which keeps gamers playing. More important is the replication of simple real work tasks in the game, such that a player “feels”–by breathing-in deeply to mimic aiming, move their head to see around a corner, steadying hands, gulping etc.–like they are preparing the body for them outside. It is the interruption of this cycle of preperation outside game, and completing tasks inside the game, through more spontaneous, complex and multi-fareous task setting in the game that creates the preconditions for enjoyment.

Beyond video games a multi-sensory methodology likely has a number of other applications for media products and advertising that go beyond interviews and focus groups; which, in the main, rely on textual interpretation. More importantly, perhaps, the separation of enjoyment from pleasure suggests a need to rethink the conventional wisdom of video game design, and maybe even market research more broadly.