Jeunesse de l’Axe: Securing Youth, Digital Technologies, and Urban Space in Conakry, and Beyond
Clovis Bergère
The years 2006 and 2007 are widely remembered in Guinea as particularly dire, most Guineans rapidly sliding into deep poverty, unable to afford even the most basic of necessities. Provoked by a brutally incompetent and contemptuous government, Guineans orchestrated what is to date the country’s longest general strike, a series of three consecutive strikes that together brought the country to a standstill, shutting down shops, schools, businesses, and government services for an unprecedented total of over fifty days. Forced to react, the then president General Lansana Conté, sick and with his government on its last legs, made a rare media appearance. Decrying the quasi-insurrectional situation in Conakry, he described several of the capital’s poorest and most underserved neighborhoods – Cosa, Bambeto, and Hamdallaye – situated along the Le Prince highway, as the new “Axis of Evil,” thereby directly referencing then US president George W. Bush’s famous phrase for perceived enemies, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Conté’s rebranding of the Cosa, Bambeto, and Hamdallaye neighborhoods echoed popular “imaginative geographies” that increasingly understood the struggles of poor urban residents in Conakry in relation to global geopolitics generally, and the so-called War on Terror’s concerns with security specifically. In his diary of the protests, for instance, young activist Alexandre Delamou, described the situation along the Le Prince highway as such:
“Several neighborhoods resembled battlefields looking increasingly like neighborhoods of the “Persian Gulf:” Dar Es Salam (Afghanistan); Hamdallaye (Bagdad); Bambeto (Gaza Strip); or Cosa (Thora-Bora). The anxious skies of the capital lit up with the red traces of deadly bullets.”
While Guineans were quick to forget the rest of the flailing General-president Lansana Conté’s media intervention that day, the phrase “Axis of Evil” somehow stuck. It is still widely used in Guinea, acting as a focal point for popular contestations over the meaning of everyday security in contemporary Guinea. Some youths, for instance, have redubbed the area the “Axis of Democracy” in response to Conté’s “Axis of Evil” denomination and the phrase “Jeunesse de l’Axe” [“Axis youth” in English] has entered everyday speech.
In this short reflection, I highlight how the 2006 and 2007 general strikes mark a turning point in recent Guinean history, when three emergent issues – urban poverty, youth, and digital technologies – became increasingly understood through the lens of security. As Noha Aboueldahab’s contribution to this roundtable reminds us, this is part of a larger global history of security in the Global South that invites us to reimagine how we research and understand security outside of a Western frame. As with the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) discussed by Aboueldahab, engaging with everyday contestations over security illuminates the plurality of meanings attached to security in Global South contexts.
The recent history of the Conakry neighborhoods of Cosa, Bambeto, and Hamdallaye highlights a general tendency in Guinea to approach questions of inequality, poverty, and precarity as problems of security. For the first time, a whole grouping of poor and underserviced Conakry neighborhoods became reframed in media, official discourse, and popular imaginary as the hotbed of contestation, something that has remained ever since. A key reason behind this was the “unparalleled availability of non-policed spaces along the axis,” which initially made it possible for youth gangs to organize. Since then, however, the Guinean government has responded by increasingly securitizing the area, with direct support from the French army, making it one of the most policed areas of Conakry today. Neighborhoods such as those situated along the Axis become useful focal points or prisms through which to think about the multiplicity of ways in which changing global and local discourses of security come to be realized. This foregrounds how practices and discourses of security and securitization intersect in crucial ways with changing media infrastructures, technologies, and practices – with digital technologies in particular – as well as with changing notions of youth, itself a relational social category.
Significantly, the strikes of 2006 and 2007 hold a particular place in the recent history of youth in Guinea. During the strikes, which resulted in over 130 deaths amongst the protesters, youth not only performed as youth, in front of cameras and drawing on a globally circulating hip-hop repertoire but were also acknowledged as youth. As a result, contestation has since largely been framed as a question of youth versus the state, and moral panics over the containment of young people’s bodies need to be accounted for when trying to make sense of the discourse on security. Put briefly, beginning in the early 2000s, and exponentially so following the general strikes of 2006 and 20007, youth, just as urban poverty, began to be primarily understood as a security concern. Furthermore, the general strikes also coincide with the first ever recorded government-ordered internet shutdown in the world, a direct response to young Guineans increasingly using mobile digital technologies to organize. In a strange turn of events, this put Guinea, a country with some of the worst internet penetration rates at the time, firmly on the global digital map, highlighting the emergence of digital technologies as a security concern for African states. The general strikes in Guinea, therefore, highlight how in the context of changing global geopolitics, a broad range of issues including urban poverty, youth, and digital technologies found themselves reframed as matters to be securitized. This raises crucial questions about connections between political life, the demands of youth for a better life, and global security governance that are in part captured by the quote below by Judith Butler:
“The opposite of precarity is not security, but, rather, the struggle for an egalitarian social and political order in which a livable interdependency becomes possible—it would be at once the condition of our self-governing as a democracy, and its sustained form would be one of the obligatory aims of that very governance.”
The ability to explore these kinds of questions, in conversation with other scholars approaching security from a multitude of perspectives, is what attracts me to a hub related to Critical Security Studies emerging in the region. Being in Doha, in the Middle East, at the confluence of many different regions, including Asia, Africa, and Europe, invites both the deep engagement with the region that members of this group have shown, but also to put that in conversation with what is happening in other parts of the Global South, where globally circulating concerns for security find themselves refracted. Francis Nyamnjoh invites us to consider conviviality and incompleteness as productive notions for scholarship, noting:
“Convivial scholarship does not impose what it means to be human, just as it should not prescribe a single version of the good life in a world peopled by infinite possibilities. Rather, it encourages localized conversations of a truly global nature on competing and complementary processes of social cultivation through practice, performance, and experience, without pre-empting or foreclosing particular units of analysis in a world in which messiness of encounters and relationships frowns on binaries, dichotomies, and dualism.”
This somehow resonates profoundly with the work of this group. As has become very clear to me in participating in the vibrant discussions of this regional hub on Critical Security Studies: it is not security that needs to be pluralized but rather the discourse or how we, collectively, understand security that needs to be pluralized. Security itself is a plural, multifaceted, nimble, and productive lens through which to consider a whole slew of historically contingent processes, events, and practices that affect daily life, particularly in the Global South.
references
Butler, Judith. 2016. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Read More.
Delamou, Alexandre. 2007. Les 32 Jours de Grève Générale en Guinée : Le Film des Evénements. Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Read More.
Diallo, Alpha Oumar Telli. 2015. La Guinée-Conakry de Janvier 2007 à décembre 2010 : Chronique et réflexions sur une transition militaire ratée. Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Read More.
McGovern, Mike. 2017. A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Read More.
Nyamnjoh, Francis. 2017. “Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 52, no. 3: 253–270. Read More.
Philipps, Joschka. 2013. Ambivalent Rage: Youth Gangs and Urban Protest in Conakry, Guinea. Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Read More.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism (First Vintage books edition). London, U.K.: Vintage Books. Read More.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clovis Bergère is the Assistant Director for Research at The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (IAS_NUQ) at Northwestern University in Qatar. Bergère's research examines the politics of youth as they are realized in relation to digital media in Guinea, West Africa.
citation
To cite: Bergère, C. "Jeunesse de l’Axe: Securing Youth, Digital Technologies, and Urban Space in Conakry, and Beyond." In Developing Critical Security Studies from Doha, edited by Hermez, S., Doha: #IAS_NUQ Press/Beirut: Arab Council for the Social Sciences, 2024.