Rethinking Authoritarian Power: The Logistics Space and Authoritarian Practices in and between Secondary Port Cities of the Global South

How to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state bound- aries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia. We demonstrate that processes of privatization and a continuum of pre-emptive, technocratizing, and repressive authoritarian practices with the overall purpose of enabling capital accumulation occur in a remarkably entangled manner in both locales, even if located at seemingly unconnected geographical sites. By thinking of Aqaba and Buenaventura as occupying the same “transregional authoritarian logistics space” (TALS), we understand Buenaventura through Aqaba, and vice versa. This crisscrossing of established notions of context has important implications for our understanding of authoritarianism and future transregional research designs. As a unit of analysis, the TALS allows us to highlight the role of global logistics players and “developmental aid” agencies—actors rarely discussed in literature on authoritarianism—in rearticulating boundaries within and beyond the nation-state based on class and race. Our contribution calls for an understanding of authoritarian power as transregionally entangled, rather than separate and limited to the nation-state and builds on literatures on authoritarian practices, authoritarian neoliberalism, critical logistics, and transregional connections. ¿Cómo

Authoritarianism and logistics seem to have nothing in common. Authoritarianism is predominantly understood as the mode of governance of specific regimes; logistics produces economic connections. However, the port cities of Aqaba in Jordan and Buenaventura in Colombia, approximately 12,000 km apart, are examples of intriguing connections between logistics space and authoritarian power. The two cities have different local political institutions, and while Jordan is considered authoritarian, Colombia is seen as democratic. What does connect them, however, are sets of authoritarian practices and their function as secondary port cities with multiple connections to similar or the same actors beyond national territories. Yet conventional understandings of authoritarian power fail to see any linkages.
How can we rethink authoritarian power in ways that render visible and better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? In this paper, we reconceptualize the context in which to analyze authoritarian power. By doing so, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between two secondary port cities of the Global South that are usually only made sense of in their nation-state contexts. We mobilize the "transregional authoritarian logistics space" (TALS) as a new unit of analysis to account for authoritarian connections between the Jordanian Red Sea port city of Aqaba and the Colombian Pacific coast port city of Buenaventura. Our suggestion of the TALS as a unit of analysis is a deliberate attempt at challenging the predominance in mainstream political science literature (O'Donnell 1999;Linz 2000;Diamond, Plattner, and Walker 2016) of units of analysis (regimes, nation-states, etc.) that ignore the transregional entanglement of authoritarian practices. Instead, we build on literatures on authoritarian neoliberalism (Bruff and Tansel 2019) and critical perspectives on logistics (Cowen 2014;Chua 2018;Khalili 2018), the latter with a decidedly transregional lens.
We define the TALS as a relational logistics space marked by authoritarian practices that are not only highly similar, but also closely entangled, despite the physical distance between the nodes themselves. The local state, actors, and policies do play a crucial role, but multi-scalar and transregional connections are equally relevant. The TALS is an attempt at making transregional understandings of authoritarian power conceptually tangible. To avoid the trap of methodological nationalism, we deliberately refrain from defining neat spatial borders of the TALS. Since authoritarian power does not neatly follow the territoriality of the nation-state, the units of analysis via which we study it should neither. Accordingly, the TALS puts authoritarian practices and their role in enabling capital accumulation center stage and thereby allows us to capture a diversity of authoritarian actors largely ignored by established approaches to authoritarian power.
We argue that, as logistics space "collides with and corrodes national territory" (Cowen 2014, 10), and to grasp authoritarian power that increasingly transcends nation-state boundaries, it is crucial to focus on authoritarian practices and transregional connections. At the nodal points of the supply chain, the core of logistics space, actors from within and beyond the state employ authoritarian practices. Transformations in the TALS form part of a single, but highly uneven process of capitalist restructuring, affecting the entire shipping trade and effecting major regional shifts. The global privatization of logistics infrastructure enabled a truly global port management and boosted the role of transnational corporations in managing and preventing public discontent. Ports were separated from the cities in which they are located via physical relocation and the discursive construction of local populations as a threat, preparing the ground for an emerging TALS.
We define authoritarian practices as preventing (possibilities for) dissent, rendering deeply political questions into matters of seemingly only technical concern, and repressing oppositional activism, with the overall purpose of enabling capital accumulation. Following the practices approach of authoritarian neoliberalism (Bruff and Tansel 2019), we understand authoritarian practices as a territorially unbounded "mode of governing people," (Glasius 2018b) which not only sabotages preexisting (2018a, 517), but also prevents demanded forms of accountability via strategies of preemption, technocratization, and coercion. We show that, in Aqaba and Buenaventura, authoritarian practices recast existing and create new boundaries within and beyond the nation-state, based on dimensions of class and racialization. In our cases, particularly, assumptions of difference, translated into processes of racialization and spatial segmentation, acquire centrality in justifying authoritarian practices. The TALS as a new unit of analysis helps us capture the entangled nature of the spatial rearticulations triggered by the latter.
At first sight, our understanding of authoritarian practices as preventing dissent, technocratizing politics, and repressing oppositional activism is not that different from Linz's focus (2000, 159-261) on limited pluralism, limited participation (de-politicization), and ill-defined limits of power. What we criticize in such definitions is the frequent, exclusive application of these features to regimes and nation-states, and the absence of capital accumulation and racialized forms of labor exploitation as a purpose for authoritarian power. Focusing on authoritarian practices in a transregionally entangled space, instead of regimes, we recognize the dynamic nature of governance (see Glasius 2018b). In short, we highlight the ways in which logistics operate in advancing travelling authoritarian practices.
An understanding of authoritarian actors and practices as situated in the same TALS has important implications for our understanding of authoritarianism, as it allows us to see connections where established approaches focus on differences. This political reading of logistics can inform critical IR on "shrinking spaces" and punitive policing (Hönke and Müller 2016) and urban in/security, recognizing transregional and multi-scalar assemblages of disciplining practices (Bogaert 2018;Jenss 2019), forged through "public-private authoritarian partnerships" (Glasius 2018a, 517), and often resulting in outright "military urbanism" (Graham 2011). We build on work on the reinforcement of authoritarian rule by US and European "democracy promoters" in Jordan (Schuetze 2019), Egypt and Morocco (Snider 2018), and authoritarian developments at the US-Mexico border (Arteaga 2017).
On a meta-level, we argue that authoritarian practices need to be understood and researched both at the microlevel of cities within which they most obviously manifest themselves (Harb 2017;Solomon and Steele 2017), and as extra-territorial practices taking place at transregional scales. In our interpretive analysis, we propose that the study of contemporary authoritarian power requires transregional approaches within research design itself. We will only adequately understand the entangled nature of authoritarian rule, not dictated by geographical propinquity, if we approach our object of study via a transregional lens. This constructs new contexts (Dirlik 1999, 152;Grosfoguel 1994) and reframes what counts as such (Appadurai 2013, 138;Lowe 2015). It enables us to perceive the two cities not as fixed, isolated units, but to understand Buenaventura through Aqaba, and vice versa.
Our argument warrants a methodological approach that connects, rather than compares (preexisting) units. We combine the empirical methods of comparative politics and globalization studies, by focusing both on similar processes and connections between them. This allows us to rethink context, instead of merely reproducing it. Rather than a comparative study of authoritarian practices in Aqaba and Buenaventura, this paper presents an interpretive analysis of the transregional nature of authoritarian power. We suggest that single-case study approaches, including our own casestudy work-despite their important insight into local manifestations of authoritarian practices-tend to maintain the nation-state as a key object of study (Jeppie 2013, 142) and downplay the transregional nature of contemporary authoritarianism. Given the importance of context-sensitivity, collaborative research offers possibilities for such transregional research (Deeb and Winegar 2013). We have, respectively, conducted extensive research in Jordan (2012)(2013)2015) and Colombia (2009Colombia ( , 2011Colombia ( , 2020; including stays in Aqaba and Buenaventura. To capture different narratives, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with state officials, activists, business people, and "development aid" workers. To analyze official policy guidelines, we accessed planning documents produced in global-local, publicprivate partnerships. To analyze the whole continuum of practices beyond official accounts, we relied on US Embassy cables published by wikileaks, and public and confidential reports (in Arabic, English, and Spanish).
Our choice of the two cities as extended case studies is deliberate. While Buenaventura and Aqaba are each global port spaces in themselves, the TALS becomes visible only through relating the connections. Despite the distance between them, the context of Aqaba and Buenaventura as emerging secondary logistics platforms is sufficiently similar to allow for a connective approach. Aqaba is the only Jordanian port city; Buenaventura is Colombia's main port on the Pacific. Both are key US allies in the so-called "war on terror" (Jordan) and "war on drugs" (Colombia). Both countries have free trade agreements with the United States and the EU. They aspire to matching imaginaries: While the transition of Aqaba has become the most prominent example for neoliberal reform in Jordan, Buenaventura is heralded as a development engine for the Colombian economy. Yet the differences between the two cities in terms of geographical location and regime typologies-the Economist (2018) defines Colombia as a flawed democracy and Jordan as an authoritarian regime-appear so significant that they have not been discussed in direct connection. The cases exemplify the tendency to think authoritarian power in separate regime contexts and/or in comparison (see Diamond, Plattner, and Walker 2016). However, the existence of similar, at times overlapping authoritarian actors and practices supports our argument about an emerging TALS and highlights the transregionally entangled nature of contemporary authoritarianism not yet fully explored in the existing literature.
By looking at secondary port cities in the Global South, which logistics studies have partly neglected (Schouten, Stepputat, and Bachmann 2019), our research helps decenter the study of neoliberalism from its predominant focus on the Global North (see Bruff and Tansel 2019, 3) and primary nodal points such as Dubai or Singapore.
Buenaventura port handles around half of Colombia's external trade. The port's capacity is now at 1.7 Mio con-tainer units (TEUs) per annum, having grown from 533.000 in 2013 (CEPAL 2016). The intergovernmental Pacific Alliance for trade declared Buenaventura its capital in 2013, as a strategic node for shipments north; it is the southernmost site of the Mesoamerican Project, a gigantic infrastructure investment plan designed to attract global investors. Yet, Buenaventura is one of the poorest Colombian municipalities, and "a key battleground" (Reuters 2007) of the 2000s, making it a strategic site for US-Colombian military cooperation.
Aqaba borders Israel and Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah II established the Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) in May 2001 as an "investor nirvana" (Marks 2007, 86) that would "turn sand into gold" (ASEZA advertisement in Marks 2007, 4-5) and boost Jordan's exports, economic growth, and employment. With a total of $10bn in realized investment by 2017-primarily in tourism, real estate and port development (Oxford Business Group 2018)-Aqaba is promoted as a blueprint for the rest of the country (Schuetze 2019, 151-69). Positioning itself as a logistics hub for the future reconstruction of Iraq and Syria, local authorities are targeting an increase of the annual capacity of the city's port from 875,000 TEUs in 2017 to 2 million TEUs, once the port expansion is completed (Oxford Business Group 2018).
After defining the TALS in the next section, we reevaluate what counts as context. We then discuss globalized practices of port privatization and the associated transfer of decision practices that prepare the ground for the emergence of the TALS. Subsequently, we identify three sets of practices-preemptive, technocratizing, and repressive,-which have become central to an authoritarian re-organization of life in the transregional logistics space. Finally, we illustrate the spatial rearticulations and newly emerged boundaries these practices trigger, and conclude by outlining contemporary authoritarian actors and practices that our argument helps grasp.

The Transregional Authoritarian Logistics Space
We suggest the TALS as a new unit of analysis that allows us to capture better the transregional connections of authoritarian practices.
Contrary to essentialist definitions of space, we define the TALS as a relational logistics space, which stretches social relations across geographical spaces and seemingly disembeds global economy from local political contestation, thus producing new limits on political change, and letting privileged individuals and goods move more freely than others. As authoritarian power transcends nation-state or regime borders and emanates from a variety of different actors, we deliberately refrain from defining authoritarianism's inand outsides or sets of actors. The security checkpoints at the entrance to the port facilities in Aqaba and Buenaventura, which transregional flows of goods and racialized labor forces have to pass, do constitute spatial borders. However, marginalized neighborhoods located beyond these and globally active logistics firms and "developmental aid" agencies are not external to the functioning of the TALS. Our suggestion of the TALS as a new unit of analysis reflects our interest in the (transregional) character of authoritarian power and in the practices that make the transregional logistics space authoritarian. The TALS is an attempt at making transregional understandings of authoritarian power, understood as the political effects of Cowen's "spaces of circulation" (2014, 3-4), tangible.
Our definition of the TALS, and thus our analysis of authoritarian power, first relies on critical notions of logistics that look beyond boundaries usually imagined as a given (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019;Schouten, Stepputat, and Bachmann 2019). Across sites as distant as Colombia and Jordan, competitive states increasingly organize economic activity, infrastructures, and people in ways that enable the global circulation of goods and capital, but have simultaneously reinforced social hierarchies and made containment a feature of such flows (Chua 2018, 2-3). The welldocumented role of logistics as a foundation for the calculative planning of military preparation (Cowen 2014;Khalili 2018; Ziadah 2019) makes us ask for clearer analytical connections between logistics and critical security studies, and in consequence, the study of authoritarian and punitive practices across spaces.
Second, our suggestion of the TALS as a unit of analysis draws on Bruff and Tansel's (2019) practices approach to authoritarian neoliberalism. Building on this critique of regime theory's neglect of the coercive core of liberal democracy, we observe that logistics shifts are embedded within capitalist accumulation strategies "at the expense of democratic politics" (Tansel 2016, 5). While a logistics reading focuses on mobility and containment through the lens of global circulation (Chua 2018, 13), we analyze the connections between logistics and authoritarianism through a "politics reading." The defining feature of the TALS is its spatial unboundedness, which fundamentally challenges definitions and maps of global authoritarianism based on an "inside/outside binary of national territoriality" (Cowen 2014, 11). While authoritarian power always becomes spatialized, the presence or absence of authoritarian actors cannot always be mapped into spatial units (Koch 2017). Our conceptualization highlights that authoritarian practices in the logistics space are transregional and entangled in nature, and shaped by the "geographical stretching-out of social relations," which is the result of global socio-economic changes (Massey 1991, 24). They produce cities such as Aqaba and Buenaventura as relational spaces that continuously (re-)produce one another. The TALS, then, allows us to see actors, connections, and interrelations that established units of analysis for the study of authoritarian power fail to recognize.
The tensions that emerge in the TALS between the primacy of flows of goods and the simultaneous containment of bodies manifest in a continuum of authoritarian practices, ranging from preemptive and calculative to openly repressive, which (re-)organize space and social life. These practices prevent, limit, and repress demands for deeper democratic mechanisms, and by doing that, facilitate capital accumulation even in highly conflictive contexts and despite the existing potential for its contestation. The practices differ in scale. Preemptive practices target the behavior of social groups and individuals, technocratizing practices are embedded in global streamlining processes, carrying ideas of development and improvement, and repressive practices aim to disorganize local forms of contestation. They often overlap, instead of occurring in chronological order, and a variety of different actors exercise them.
Authoritarian practices affect different individuals and/or socio-economic groups differently. They both build on and perpetuate "assumptions of 'difference'" (Sabaratnam 2013, 260), which manifest in processes of racialization and/or labor exploitation (Khalili 2018, 912). These further facilitate capital accumulation and characterize the hierarchies of global value chains. With its focus on transregional entanglements, the TALS helps disclose the transregional dimension of race and its material consequences as a phenomenon that "exists in excess of national boundaries" (Thompson 2015, 45). Processes of racialization cut across all three sets of authoritarian practices and throughout the TALS; Practices of repression, for instance, particularly discipline non-white bodies associated with deviation and upheaval (Tansel 2016, 12). While processes of racialization also occur elsewhere, in the TALS they are particularly pronounced and enable extreme forms of capital accumulation. In this respect, the TALS does bring about consequences itself; logistics space creates potential for authoritarian practices and limits their contestation, often through structural demands.
Putting authoritarian practices center stage in the study of authoritarian power allows us to capture the diversity of authoritarian actors in the TALS. Which actors employ authoritarian practices or request these is an empirical question. We highlight that these can be port operators, armed private actors, logistics players, as well as state institutions from both legislative and executive realms. Instead of assuming who they are, we ask which actors have political agency, how they make their interests heard in and implemented by political institutions, and which practices they opt for. Unlike democratization scholars like Diamond, Plattner, and Walker (2016), who view authoritarian regimes as the sole sources of authoritarian power, we shed light on authoritarian practices of actors widely deemed forces of liberal democracy, including global logistics players and "developmental aid" agencies. Authoritarianism Goes Global not simply because of the "challenge presented by regimes in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and Riyadh" (Diamond, Plattner, and Walker 2016, 17), but to a considerable extent because of practices of USAID, Bechtel, Møller-Maersk, and the like.
The key function of the TALS is that it allows us to destabilize established ways of thinking about authoritarianism by providing us with "different 'starting' points" (Nayak and Selbin 2010, 4). As a unit of analysis, the TALS enables an understanding of authoritarian power that does not preclude the possibility of authoritarian practices beyond regimes and states 1 but instead allows us to map actors and practices that drive an authoritarian shift in the logistics space. In short, the TALS enables us to see transregional connections as opposed to national differences and authoritarian practices as opposed to regime types. It highlights the role of transregional authoritarian practices and transregionally connected processes of racialization and/or labor exploitation in facilitating global flows of goods and capital.

Rethinking Context
The presence of the same or structurally similar actors in Aqaba and Buenaventura calls for connective scholarship and demonstrates the importance of rethinking context. As disciplinary confinements and the difficulties of conducting field research in different world regions limit the cases comparative political scientists discuss, the study of authoritarianism remains-by and large-state-centric (see Tansey 2016). In their focus on regime types, studies of authoritarianism (O'Donnell 1999; Linz 2000; Levitsky and Way 2004) reproduce a methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2003), based on the problematic association of authoritarianism with the institutional "level of the nation-state" (Glasius 2018b, 519; Jeppie 2013). As scholars compare preexisting unities (Kumar 2013, 151) within established notions of what exactly constitutes a region, truly transregional studies remain the exception (Derichs 2017;Lowe 2015;Boatcӑ 2020). The tendency to reproduce preexisting notions of context, region, and space, underrating relationships that challenge and/or cut across these, remains problematic in comparative scholarship.
In consequence, scholarship on Aqaba mostly treats the city as an example for neoliberalism and authoritarian rule in Jordan, or as an attempt at emulating infrastructural nodal points and tourism destinations in the region, such as Dubai and Sharm el Sheikh. Somewhat similarly, Buenaventura is seen as a case of neoliberal politics and violence within either the Colombian nation-state or Latin America. We build on research, which, while explicitly exploring authoritarian practices at specific sites, views them as elements of "globalized authoritarianism" (Bogaert 2018) and highlights assemblages of power that traverse narrow conceptualizations of "the local" versus "the global" (Parker 2009). Decolonial studies have long demanded analyses not of "each country's separate relation to the world economy" but through the centrality of transnational linkages (Grosfoguel 1994, 79). We recognize that many contemporary beyondthe-state practices can be traced back to entangled histories (Lowe 2015), i.e., colonial and highly asymmetrical trade relations.
We highlight the prominent role of transregional actors in territorially unbounded authoritarian practices. Critical scholarship has called for a stronger focus on regional entanglements (Hanieh 2018), for rethinking context as a whole (Appadurai 2013, 138), or for thinking specific sites "through elsewhere" (Robinson 2016). We argue that we can only adequately grasp important political dynamics in Aqaba and Buenaventura if we think of the two cities as occupying the same context. Such a reconsideration of the context of political processes allows us to highlight the ways in which these are intimately entangled, rather than stopping short at Jordan's and Colombia's national borders and the boundaries of conventional notions of the Middle East and Latin America.
Buenaventura's logistics landscape comprises four separate ports. Since 1994, the public-private Regional Port Society Buenaventura (SPRBUN) manages the oldest. Colombian family businesses, Colombian logistics players, and global port operators such as Danish Maersk or Philippine and Singaporean conglomerates ICTSI and PSA manage the larger port terminals TCBUEN (since 2011), and Aguadulce Port (since 2017) (CMH 2015, 67;Findeter 2015, 27). The Colombian military and navy, illegal armed actors, and those that appear in both realms shape Buenaventura's urban life, beyond global logistics players. Port access is central to the value chain of cocaine (Mundubat and Justicia y Paz 2015, 10).
The port of Aqaba consists of twelve terminals owned by the Aqaba Development Corporation (ADC). ADC was established in 2004 as a private shareholding company equally owned by the Jordanian government and the ASEZ Authority (ASEZA). The ASEZ was launched in 2001, based on a 1999 master plan by the US company The Services Group (TSG). Both the EU and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played a central role in the establishment of ASEZA, which Peters and Moore (2009, 278) describe as "USAID's baby," while AE-COM, TSG's legal successor, implemented technical support programs.
Interconnections between the two port cities are numerous, shaped by enormous concentration processes of global port logistics (Notteboom and Rodrigue 2012, 249). The Danish A.P. Møller-Maersk Group, via its subsidiary APM Terminals, has been managing and operating the Aqaba Container Terminal (ACT) since 2006. In 2016, it acquired the management of Buenaventura's TCBUEN port. Leading shipping companies such as the Chinese Yang Ming Marine Transport Corporation or the South Korean EUKOR Car Carriers Inc. serve the ports in both Aqaba and Buenaventura. UAE-based DP World, operator of Dubai's Jebel Ali Port, which served as a model for the TSG-developed master plan for the ASEZ, has been involved in SPRBUN since 2013 (Datafix 2013). Further, Colombian elite soldiers are part of the Multinational Force & Observers (MFO) peacekeeping force deployed on the Sinai Peninsula and tasked with, among other points, protecting the strait of Tiran and access to the Gulf of Aqaba. The (in-)securities these soldiers produce in the direct vicinity of Aqaba can be seen as not only related to, but to some extent produced by previous (in-)securities produced in Colombia.
Rather than a physically connected space, through the TALS, Buenaventura and Aqaba are drawn into relational logistics spaces, simultaneously connected and in competition with each other. Trade between the two countries has steadily increased since 2000, with Colombian coffee mostly shipped from Buenaventura and Jordanian garments from Aqaba. While located in different world regions, economic crises in one region increase the pressure to reform labor markets and increase competitiveness at other logistics sites. If the port of Aqaba is enlarged or modernized to allow for larger container ships by Yang Ming Marine Transport Corporation, pressures on other ports, including in Buenaventura, to follow suit increase (see Khalili 2020, 13). Port efficiency is the major indicator for reducing transport costs, putting pressure on ports to shift from labor to automation (IDB 2015, 1). The agents and processes that today shape the ports of Aqaba and Buenaventura stretch along the whole supply chain and globe and weigh their engagements in different ports against one another. If APM Terminals encounters losses in Buenaventura, it may react with redundancies in Aqaba. Processes of port modernization and dynamics of labor exploitation in the two cities are not just linked, they produce one another.
Both the Colombian National Agency for Infrastructure (ANI) and the Aqaba Development Company (ADC) handle and grant concessions for port construction based on masterplans developed by global consultancies: In Buenaventura, the Spanish consultancy company Esteyco, and in Aqaba, the American companies TSG and Bechtel. These entanglements enable us to highlight how Buenaventura mirrors and follows Aqaba's development toward a logistics city. In 2012, USAID co-authored Buenaventura's Local Employment Plan (MinTrabajo and USAID 2012), similar to USAID's career and entrepreneurship trainings in Aqaba. Just as in Aqaba, USAID assists in the creation of public-private partnerships in Buenaventura, claiming to further "reconciliation" in conflict-affected areas. USAID's somewhat lesser presence in Buenaventura is possibly due to the more prominent involvement of the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the US Army, and US private security firms, especially during military phases of Plan Colombia between 2002 and 2008.
Understanding authoritarianism as a phenomenon not solely "embodied" by nation-state governments, but instead "constituted by a distinct set of practices" (Glasius 2018a, 183), we demonstrate that transregional (non-)state actors are key to shaping political outcomes. What connects these transregional actors is a presupposed "occidental" superiority (Coronil 1996, 57). They frequently aim at "improving" cities through transnational security policies and "development" schemes, understanding urbanites of the Global South as a racialized "other" that needs disciplining, ordering, and pacification.
The trans-spatial discourses of racialization that undergird authoritarian practices in Aqaba and Buenaventura mobilize the same loosely defined narrative of (in-)security policies, directed against diffuse threats. These imaginaries combine with technological innovations and make cities such as Aqaba and Buenaventura the object of globalized surveillance systems (Graham 2011). The logic which informs transnational policies on the "Arab city" in need of pacification mirrors the idea of the dangerous Colombian Pacific, where policing supposedly helps a marginalized and racialized "urban other" to forsake the promises of the illegal economy.
In both Aqaba and Buenaventura, global players responsible for drafting reports and masterplans alluded to "poor neighborhoods" as obstacles that occupied "prime real estate" and consequently required relocation, to allow for urban "development" to materialize. "Buenaventura," writes the National Planning Department, "is in a privileged zone to access big markets such as Asia.
[…] But while it has the potential, the current settlement does not offer private actors conditions to invest" (La Silla Vacía 2016). Similarly, involved actors portrayed the neighborhood of Al-Shalālah, located in the old city center of Aqaba, overlooking the old port, as occupying a "privileged" space that inhabitants do not "deserve." A US Embassy Amman cable (2003) states that "Shalala, the poorest neighborhood in Aqaba, occupies prime real estate […]. Accordingly, ASEZA plans to move its inhabitants […]. The move would ostensibly open up the hilltop for development." While depictions of Aqaba and Buenaventura as globally interconnected success models depend on an understanding of the city as its port (see also Kanna 2011), attempts at physically and discursively separating the port from the city depict the latter as inadequate. In both Aqaba and Buenaventura, the urban poor are constructed as an "other" to the supposedly successful port economies. An Aqaba Community Profile, co-authored by USAID, suggests that "[p]rostitution, drug dealing and weapon smuggling are known to be highly abundant in that area [ … ] child abuse, incest, and rape, a lot of ignorance and lack of awareness on civilization in general" (AZEM, USAID, and Nathan Associates 2004a, 14, 24). Depictions of Buenaventura are equally tendentious. Newspapers routinely contrast the city's global importance with its depiction as a dangerous place, characterized by appalling socio-economic living conditions, homicides, and lootings (El País 2017). These imply that Afro-Colombians do not seize the opportunities the port and economies of scale offer.
Having stressed the necessity of including transregional connections in analyzing authoritarian practices, we now turn to a discussion of the processes of privatization that open up the same potential for authoritarian power in both Aqaba and Buenaventura.

Globalized Practices of Privatization
The privatization of essential logistics infrastructure is a partial precondition for transregional logistics entanglements. Port privatizations assigned port labor a precarious position, as they went hand in hand with major layoffs in almost any of the ports concerned, changed property relations, and in some cases came with major administrative shifts.
The retreat of state-owned logistics management to the benefit of private firms coincided with a shift toward logis-tics as a profit-generating product itself. With privatization, public government handed major steps of the logistics process and supply chain to private hands, giving up control over an element, which governments now particularly rely on in terms of providing competitive locations: logistics platforms for global trade. Logistics players unsurprisingly influence public government and both resort to authoritarian practices to provide logistics solutions free of disruption. In Buenaventura, state-owned port management firm Colpuertos historically shaped Afro-Colombians' upward social mobility during phases of economic growth. It employed large numbers of the island's male inhabitants, allowing strong labor unions to develop. Colpuertos was privatized during Colombia's "economic opening," through the port management law of 1991, requested by CONPES, a technocratic entity subject to little parliamentary control (Gaviria 1998). From Colpuerto's privatization, the Regional Port Society SPRBUN emerged in 1993 with a concession of 40 years, as an 83 percent privately-owned corporation. Remarkably, the port union entered SPRBUN as a shareholder, but still, major dismissals shrunk the number of dockworkers from 10,000 to 4, 200 between 1990200 between and 1996200 between (CMH 2015. Since then, Buenaventura's transregional links have become evident. In 2013, Dubai-based logistics giant DP World entered SPRBUN with 19 percent. Just as in Buenaventura, Aqaba port had been the city's largest employer before privatization, which led to longanticipated major layoffs (US Embassy Amman cable 2008). Privatization in Aqaba relied on the 2004 establishment of the ADC as a private shareholding company evenly owned by the Jordanian government and ASEZA (the latter holds an additional type B stock, which gives it strategic voting control; AZEM, USAID and Nathan Associates 2004b, 4, footnote 1). The creation of one entity responsible for regulation (ASEZA), and another for development and investment (ADC) had already been part of the initial plans for the ASEZ. ASEZA transferred practically all ownership of formerly public land, classified for industry, retail and tourism, property and companies to ADC, including the city's airport, and the port, which had been indirectly operated by the Jordanian Ministry of Transport. After the creation of ACT in 2006, a 25-year Joint Development Agreement was signed, based on which Danish APM Terminals now manages it. Following suggestions that the US corporation Bechtel had made in a confidential 2003 Draft Business Plan for the Aqaba Development Company (later named Aqaba Development Corporation), a private firm (BearingPoint) was contracted to manage ADC's start-up operations. According to the Bechtel report, the management of ADC as a publiclyowned private shareholding company not only entailed an overall "40 percent increase over the current ASEZA salary ranges," but the opportunity for "public funding, if necessary" (Bechtel 2003, section 9, 26 and 2, 5-6). This illustrates the extent to which processes of privatization benefitted an elite few, subsidized and/or assured by public funds.
The structural modifications from labor to capitalintensive port economies significantly diminished opportunities for upward social mobility of city dwellers. Port managements' priorities shifted to guaranteeing the security of capital investments, which contributed to the restructuring of tax and labor regulations (Cowen 2014, 81). New labor regimes produced a precarious dock workforce, based on subcontracting and temporary contracts. In both Aqaba and Buenaventura, privatizations separated the city from the port, disabling citizens' access to the port's profitability (CMH 2015, 54; Debruyne 2014, 187-98). As a consequence, according to the National Planning Department (DNP 2018, 2), a stunning 90.3 percent of Buenaventura's inhabitants makes a living at least partially from the informal sector. When the union disappeared, subcontracting not only surged in the port, where 12,000 are subcontracted workers (Fox-Hodess 2019, 11), but social services disappeared throughout the city. In 2011, only 27 percent of dockworkers had direct contracts with their employers, and many had no contracts at all (Findeter 2015, 90). In Aqaba, processes of port modernization both pushed previously existing informal economies out of the city center and forced inhabitants into new informal arrangements. Education, health care, and security became mere "socioeconomic enablers" (Bechtel 2003, executive summary, 8) dependent on market forces. In Buenaventura, the only public hospital stopped operating in 2014.
The fragmentation of tax and labor law regimes in the context of port privatization is particularly striking in Aqaba. While a 2008 report (ACED, USAID, and AECOM 2008, 15) envisaged an increase of ASEZA's revenue share with the Jordanian government up to 100 percent by 2014, in reality, by 2004, it had fallen from the initially agreed upon 75 to 50 percent (ACED II, USAID, and AECOM 2014, 18). Similarly, Buenaventura's new status as a Special Industrial, Port, Biodiversity, Ecotourist District enables it to access state funds. Depictions of both ports as major sources of revenue for each country's central government consequently appear questionable at least. Aqaba allows the employment of up to 70 percent of foreign workers and exempts investors from social services, land and building taxes, and taxes on distributed dividends and profits.
With the global shift toward logistics, governments' planning practices changed, primarily aiming at attracting global corporations' investments. For Aqaba, a US Embassy Amman cable (2004) remarked that ASEZA officials "subscribe to the 'trickle-down theory' of economics, in that the initial benefits of the development plans are intended to benefit the wealthy, but eventually, tangible benefits will filter down to the lower rungs of society." Visions of prosperity are similar for Buenaventura (Esteyco and Findeter 2015). Infrastructure investments, it was hoped, would overcome the boom-and-bust cycles of extractive economies and convert Buenaventura into a logistics hub for Pacific markets (CMH 2015, 50).
Following, we explore how, after privatization prepared the grounds for a truly global port management, a continuum from more pre-emptive to openly repressive authoritarian practices came to define the transregional logistics space.

The Transregional Organization of Authoritarian Practices
Authoritarian practices prevent and criminalize (opportunities for) dissent, render deeply political questions into matters of technical concern, and repress oppositional activism, in order to enable capital accumulation (Bruff and Tansel 2019). Such practices discipline everything that could potentially limit the flow of goods and differ only marginally at different sites of the TALS. Based on deeply problematic assumptions of difference, they do not affect each member of society in the same way; processes of racialization and/or labor exploitation are both foundation and result of authoritarian practices in the TALS. In this perspective, urban social relations are relevant to economic development to the extent to which inhabitants function as customers, consumers, or enablers of flows of goods. Preemptive practices reduce the possibilities for dissent of racialized "others" and induce behavioral change via orientalist and/or racist assumptions. Technocratizing practices give authoritarian power a seeming purpose by depoliticizing it in the name of "development." Repressive practices, in turn, openly oppress organized "urban others." The three sets of practices operate at different scales. While it is context-specific which comes to the fore, the limitations they pose for democratic contestation have facilitated capital accumulation in both Aqaba and Buenaventura. They do so by severely limiting democratic arenas and politicization processes (pre-emptive), by imposing management processes that inhibit radically different organizations of communities (technocratizing) and by making protest impossible (repressive).

Pre-emptive Practices: Preventing (Opportunities for) Dissent
A major shift in nodal points of the TALS, we argue, is the transformation of decision practices toward insulating economic action from democratic contestation. While regimecentric approaches may insist that municipal elections were only abolished in Aqaba, such objections fundamentally miss that the presence or absence of democratic procedures has become largely irrelevant for the everyday lives of those inhabiting the TALS. The primacy of protecting globalized networks and of cost calculations (Chua 2018) as governing principles for the TALS can-depending on context-be achieved via either eliminating existing forms of democracy or radically depleting them (i.e., procedural democracy). Following Brown's (2019, 7) argument about rising antidemocratic politics in "the West," neoliberal rationality and processes of privatization "prepared the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious antidemocratic forces" also in the TALS. Both the formal transfer of local decision processes into private hands, including abolishing democratic mechanisms, and formally maintaining procedural democracy, which is heavily influenced by private actors and lacks emancipatory potential, constitute and/or enable authoritarian and, in essence, deeply antidemocratic practices. Independent of formally democratic mechanisms, the very same actors, logics, and dominant ideas shape the results of actually existing decision processes in both locales, while opportunities for dissent are suppressed and forms of socio-economic authoritarianism exacerbated.
After privatization, public-private partnerships, coordinated within Regional Port Societies, took control of Buenaventura's ports. Beyond that, parts of the city have de facto been extracted from democratic decision-making, as public-private partnerships rearranged the long-term management of neighborhood developments. For instance, financial management agency Findeter granted authority over the newly built boardwalk to Spanish consultant Esteyco, not the local administration (Chica 2016). Further administrative changes to Buenaventura's status to a "Special District," including the framing of respective projects as "strategic," make legal contestation almost impossible.
In Aqaba, anti-democratic tendencies may be even blunter. The ASEZA replaced the Aqaba Regional Authority (ARA) and the elected municipality in 2001 and put the approximately 90,000 people who at the time lived in the ASEZ under direct control of a cabinet-appointed board of six commissioners. The model included eliminating any public participation in decision-making processes. While official discourse portrays economic liberalization as interdependent with political liberalization, the ASEZ demonstrates the ease with which neoliberal reforms led to a reinforcement of authoritarian power. The former ASEZA Chief Commissioner and former Prime Minister Dahabi offers a striking illustration of such dynamics: We replaced the local municipality; the board of commissioners is now the municipality. There are no elections, no municipality in ASEZA. A just dictatorship is better than a democracy. Treat people equally. The local community was deprived of their rights to elect their representatives. Instead, I appointed a consultative council from 18 leaders from the community to talk to them, men and women, hear their concernstell them what we are doing and receive their feedback. (quoted in Marks 2007, 93) A US Embassy Amman cable (2008) illustrates the extent to which the advancement of free-market reforms and opportunities for capital accumulation depended on preventing (opportunities for) dissent, in particular of racialized "urban others." It summarizes that "Dr. Bilal Al-Bashir [then ASEZA Deputy Chief Commissioner] conceded to poloffs [political officers] that the Special Economic Zone 'was not democratic,' but characterized this as an advantage. 'People (in Aqaba) are not interested in empowerment-they just want things done'." Efficiency as the defining element of global logistics imaginaries shows how directly such pre-emptive practices enable capital accumulation. The set of practices helps us understand Buenaventura through Aqaba, despite municipal elections still held in Buenaventura. Both the national press and NGOs frequently link them to corruption and patronage (El País 2018). Buenaventura's Bishop illustrates the extent to which the regulating institutions depend on profit-oriented and non-democratic practices (Bishop Epalza 2015): the one who gets into the administration wants to get his share, because he has invested a lot into the campaign to become mayor. […] To administrate is to pay favors: They distribute the booty among themselves.
After Buenaventura's mayor was detained in 2018, the post remained vacant for months. He appeared to have received illegal payments, and be responsible for failed renovations to the city's only public hospital, which had closed down in 2014 due to construction irregularities (El País 2018).
Pre-emptive practices are guided by an underlying understanding of economic development as detached from (urban) politics, and of politics as an interference into cycles of capital accumulation otherwise undisturbed. In Aqaba, Bechtel proposed "lifetime partnerships with investors" and "shielding" operations (Bechtel 2003, section 7, 9 and 8, 1) to ensure what it called a "people-versus-business division [of] assets and revenue streams, development roles and responsibilities of key enablers" (Bechtel 2003, executive summary, 7). In particular, it emphasized the importance of "insulat[ing] ADC from the management of "people" issues related to Port operations so that ADC can focus on value added activities." (Bechtel 2003, section 5, 5). In Buenaventura, political shifts have proven practically irrelevant to harbor expansion. The existence of numerous community councils, indigenous cabildos, and committees suggests a lively democratic community, yet no harbor development project had to gain prior and informed consent from affected "ethnic minorities," as established in ILO Convention 196 (Mundubat and Justicia y Paz 2015).
As container turnover and investments attracted have become the key indicator for measuring "development," it is now the cities and their populations who follow ongoing processes of port modernization. Instead of pro-viding safe employment to city dwellers, ports provide a transregional capitalist class of logistics entrepreneurs with cheap labor and almost unrestricted opportunities for capital accumulation. In these relational spaces, citizens' ability to function as consumers in and providers of labor for the global market constitutes one of the key ordering principles.
The authoritarian practices that hold local "others" at bay are not purely coercive but subtly aim at preventing (opportunities for) dissent by inducing behavioral change and internalizing deeply orientalist and/or racist assumptions. Transregional authoritarian actors construct local populations as incapable of benefiting from the logistics space they inhabit and as requiring external intervention. Deeply problematic "assumptions of 'difference'" (Sabaratnam 2013, 260) undergird such processes of racialization.
Instead of questioning the structural violence that went hand in hand with the authoritarian practices discussed, transregional authoritarian actors in the logistics space further reinforce such assumptions of difference, as the latter are central to perpetuating the apparent need for constant intervention, providing additional legitimacy and maximizing the opportunities for capital accumulation. As Aqaba's integration into the TALS occurred in a fundamentally uneven and unequal manner, USAID organized "career awareness" trainings to make the local "urban others" realize their new place in the city. USAID organized similar "entrepreneurial sensitization" programs in Buenaventura (MinTrabajo and USAID 2012, 46); both programs construct the local population as passive and deficient. The fundamental disregard for the structural violence that enabled the emergence of the TALS allows relegating negative effects of the latter to the sphere of political culture, which, in effect, reproduces race determinism "in less obvious but more insidious ways" (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2015, 9). In the words of a US Embassy Amman cable (2008): In the absence of effective channels for the airing and addressing of local grievances, this most economically advanced of Jordanian cities leaves its poorest residents with only traditional relationship-based tools. USAID-funded projects are helping to bridge this gap, but overcoming the political culture is proving to be a slow and difficult task.

Technocratizing Practices: Global Port Security
Technocratizing practices, in our rethinking of authoritarian power, carry connotations of "development" (Mitchell 2002). Through such practices, which introduce "improved" management processes in logistics and trade, local populations appear as "others" to be developed. They give authoritarian practices a seeming purpose ("development") and reinforce inequalities by depoliticizing them and obstructing their contestation. One example are port security programs devised by globally active institutions and, most prominently, the US government, which cannot be contested at the local scale.
Global port security programs are part and parcel of the emergence of the TALS and bring Aqaba and Buenaventura into the same entangled context. They have similar effects on democratic participation in different locales and contribute to a homogenization of the built environment. Global port security programs are effects of highly uneven practices of supply chain protection (Cowen 2014, 8-9) and include a range of initiatives, guidelines, and directives.
Institutions in both locales are signatories to these programs.
Global port security initiatives define access to and equipment of ports, enabling secondary ports' competitiveness in capital circuits. As Buenaventura and Aqaba are certified as ISPS code-complying, secure ports (LCA 2018; ACT 2019), the logistics space integrates both via the same globally expanding port security infrastructure. In 2002, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) introduced complementary statements on the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). The result, coined as "taking SOLAS to the shore," was the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS), intended to protect ports from "terror attacks" (Jacobshagen 2016, 86). The ISPS, recognized in July 2004, quickly became a mandatory security regime for any port-ship-interface with freight trade above 500 gross tonnage. It regulates detailed security measures necessary to gain an ISPS certificate and imposes port security plans, which "assess and detect potential security threats to ships or port facilities" (IMO 2019). Remarkably, the ISPS coordinates governments, government agencies, local administrations, and the shipping and port industries. One-hundred and fifty-five states officially comply with the ISPS, among them Colombia and Jordan.
Dockers and seafarers are subject to elaborate controls. The IMO (2019) Code of Practice on security of the wider port area complements the ISPS Code, applying security guidelines to "all areas and functions of the port, and those working in, having business with and requiring access to the port or transiting through the port." The software operating such controls has frequently been criticized to reproduce unconscious bias (IFSEC 2020). Racialization thus shapes who is affected how by technocratizing practices.
Corporations can certify their supply sites through ISO 28000 and rating and insurance agencies. Presented as "best practice" by the US Coast Guard (2006)-a subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security with offices in Colombia-Buenaventura port uses sixty-two biometric readers at personnel access gates to monitor the 25,000 people associated with the port. Security patrolling, sensor cables, and CCTV monitoring are routine; SPRBUN port boasts to possess 370 fixed security cameras to film "any security events" (LCA 2018). TCBUEN in Buenaventura operates an optical character recognition system. The Container Security Initiative (CSI), in existence since 2002, differs from the ISPS, as US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) itself initiated it. APM Terminals, for instance, a manager of ports in both locales, is a signatory to the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) and the CSI. C-TPAT, "one layer" of US CBP (2019), promises to secure the whole supply chain, closely linking public and private actors. CBP audits logistics firms on their "security risk assessments," with negative assessments regularly leading to cargo movement suspensions. The CSI brings US officials into ports such as Buenaventura and Aqaba, where they inspect cargo together with customs. APM Terminals has actively participated in the CSI in cooperation with the Megaports project with CBP (APM 2019). A wikileaks cable (2005) document plans to implement the CSI in Buenaventura "in close coordination" with US port security programs.
Technocratizing practices have authoritarian effects. They invade workers' privacy, spatially separate communities from logistics operations, preclude radically different visions for societal organization, and complicate the conduct of strikes much more than they inhibit the flow of illegal goods.

Repressive Practices: Infinite Wars and Structural Violence
Contemporary logistics has historically been an integral part of military enterprise. Military use generalized the container as a practical form of goods transportation across multimodal transport. The relation of logistics to coercion is not automatic, but the calculability and predictability of the flows of goods enabled more constant war-making (Chua 2018, 88). Given the highly political character of urban transformation through logistics, pre-emptive practices often give way to or overlap with repressive practices.
The most obvious element of authoritarian practices is the physical repression of organized groups that protest the effects the TALS has on their lives (Bruff and Tansel 2019). The centrality of port infrastructure for social relations in both locales never led to an appreciation of port workers as necessary staff to enable logistics spaces to function. Rather, the ports themselves became spaces of discipline, illustrating the role of both locales as logistics chokepoints and the associated construction of particular threats. Consultant firm PricewaterhouseCoopers likens labor mobilization in supply chain chokepoints to effects of terror, estimating its high costs as similar (Cowen 2014).
The logistics space exposes the role of military and police in "the geoeconomic transformation of the countries" in which they operate (Khalili 2018, 917). For instance, a 2009 strike by 3,000-4,000 port workers in Aqaba, who faced the imminent threat of losing their jobs and affordable housing (part of their job contracts) was violently suppressed by Jordanian Gendarmerie forces (Bustani 2009;Adely 2012). Colombian National Police riot units have played a similar role in strikes and port blockages in Buenaventura. The port's access infrastructure depends on one road, which civic organizations, mainly Afro-Colombians fed up with violence and lack of perspective, used to their advantage in 2017. Their roadblocks disrupted harbor activity for several weeks. Colombian media (El País 2017) described workers and inhabitants as a threat and reported on lootings and chaos as strike-related. The repression of strikes in the TALS entangles far-distant port cities, as the disruption of flows in one site may directly affect the other, and unions frequently express solidarity with striking colleagues far away.
Forced displacements have become permanent features in Buenaventura. Due to massacres, selective murder, and threats by paramilitaries, people fled from rural areas to the city, and then within the city, from one expansion site to the next (Mundubat and Justicia y Paz 2015). This violence has inhibited protest against harbor expansionreorganized paramilitaries prohibit inhabitants from crossing into other neighborhoods-and has facilitated capital accumulation through logistics investments at the sites of displacement.
As spaces of militarization and logistics merge, the role of militaries as transregional path-breakers of capitalist infrastructural power (Wood 2002;Khalili 2018) lets us understand Buenaventura through Aqaba and vice versa. Repressive practices in Buenaventura were long intertwined with military strategy, coordinated with the United States via the "war on drugs" Plan Colombia. The latter included trainings, financial military aid, contracts for buying US equipment, and US involvement in on-the-ground operations. After this openly military phase, Buenaventura became a key site of Integral Action Centers. Combining socalled consolidation and civil action under military control, and claiming to establish thorough state "presence," they have been criticized for evolving into counterinsurgency centers, physically repressing urban discontent.
Although associated with less direct violence, Aqaba is constructed to enable efficient global commodity flows, while simultaneously recognizing strategic security interests. Just as Buenaventura is a logistics hub for the global flow of goods, and a military nodal point for the US-led "war on drugs," logistics infrastructure in Aqaba converges with the US-led "war on terror." As one US Embassy Amman cable (2006) states, the port of Aqaba is now "capable of handling two US cruiser-class warships or one U.S. JFK class aircraft carrier." Just as Aqaba port integrates Jordan more efficiently into global capitalism, it is an important constituent of US military logics in the region and enabling component for a whole cluster of US-funded military training centers (Schuetze 2019). US soldiers participating in the 2018 "Eager Lion" exercise arrived through the port of Aqaba, and the CIA detention facility in Al-Jafr is 170 km from the city.
The dependence of contemporary logistics on war becomes apparent when considering the history of now global port operators. In 1999, Danish logistics giant Møller-Maersk purchased Sea-Land, the container shipping company the US government had contracted to transport military supplies to Vietnam in the 1960s. Returning with goods from Japan, it combined military logics with container efficiency and profitability (Chua 2018, 87). In 2015, Maersk promoted Sea-Land again as its subsidiary serving the Americas.
While "infinite war" (Wood 2002) and "logistics space" (Cowen 2014) are intimately connected, the latter presents itself as fundamentally external to problems of repression and violence. As Colombian institutions (Findeter 2015, 46) present the "new" Buenaventura as "peace territory," the "new" Aqaba inspires King Abdullah II's "Aqaba meetings." Both labels invoke international cooperation against "crime" and "terrorism," while ignoring the structural violence that enabled the emergence of Aqaba and Buenaventura as brands for "modernity" and "development." Ironically, the United States hosted the most recent "Aqaba meetings," following the Netherlands in 2018. Indeed, the logistics space and the counterinsurgency elements of these open-ended wars materialize in specific locations, while simultaneously stretching beyond, to manifest themselves in the transregional realm.
Pre-emptive authoritarian practices prevent (opportunities for) dissent and internalize forms of control. Technocratizing practices depoliticize the authoritarian power required to ensure the unimpeded flow of goods, and repressive practices enforce and secure the acceptance of the latter as a key ordering principle. All three facilitate growth rates, trade acceleration, and logistics efficiency, thus enabling capital accumulation.

Spatial Rearticulations and the Emergence of New Boundaries within the City
Based on the previous discussion of authoritarian practices between Aqaba and Buenaventura, we now conceptualize the exclusionary and violent outcomes in both locales as similarly entangled. The TALS recasts existing and creates new boundaries both within and beyond the nation-state, particularly based on dimensions of class and racialization. Such spatial rearticulations are the result of capital accumulation, but would be impossible without employing the authoritarian practices described. The construction of ports as "secure spaces" produces complementary "insecure outsides." The port of Buenaventura advertises itself through the boundaries it has created, via reference to "23 security fences at vehicle access points, all controlled by a server housing detailed data on the port population, [a] Perimeter Control System [and] a team consisting of 265 armed security guards" (LCA 2018). In Aqaba, the spatial effects of the "shielding" operations that Bechtel (2003, section 8, 1) recommended, manifest in the multiplication of new boundaries. Security checks at the Israeli-Jordanian border crossing, which separates Aqaba from Eilat, and the Jordanian-Saudi border crossing, located 30 km south of the city, are complemented by security checks at the port facility, newly constructed gated communities, and luxury hotels.
The most palpable effect of spatial rearticulations, however, is that the TALS keeps pushing urbanites toward new spatial outsides. Pressures to expand logistics spaces do have causal effects on the spatial set-up of port cities. Masterplans in Aqaba and Buenaventura have led to or benefit from relocating poor neighborhoods, such as Al-Shalālah and Isla Cascajal, so that violent spatial rearticulations in one locale inform our understanding of developments in the other (for Aqaba see Debruyne 2014, 163-231). The Masterplan "Buenaventura 2050" aims to completely restructure urban life and space. The pressure to expand has been so intense that four more ports are currently planned.
This fundamental restructuring has led to growing intraurban displacements. Relocation efforts have entailed the 2015 inauguration of 568 residential units in Ciudadela San Antonio (Mundubat and Justicia y Paz 2015, 30-33), where forcibly relocated former fishermen now live in 45 square meter houses in a rural area 40 minutes from the sea. Similarly, after an initial failed attempt at forceful eviction in 2007, inhabitants of Al-Shalālah were-financed by a loan of the Abu Dhabi Fund-relocated to the Al-Karāmah (Arabic for "dignity") district on the outskirts of Aqaba in 2010.
The relocation of Al-Shalālah's inhabitants and the breakup of strikes testify to the violent nature of spatial restructuring in Aqaba. Strikingly similar, in Buenaventura, this violence manifests in direct pressures by armed actors and state officials to realize the envisaged relocation of Isla Cascajal, including frequent murder and forced disappearances. In both locales, interviewees draw links between the enormous investment interests and threats (Debruyne 2014;CMH 2015, 190-99). In Aqaba, relocation projects cleared the way for a range of large-scale luxury tourism and real estate projects, a development the Buenaventura masterplan also foresees. In Aqaba, one prominent such project is the $10 billion Marsa Zayed project by UAE-based Al-Maabar real estate firm, which is currently constructing what it dubs "the vibrant heart of Aqaba." Waterfront redevelopment in Buenaventura is based on similar visions (Esteyco and Findeter 2015).
Public-private masterplans attempt to separate the urban poor ('politics') from the ports ("economic development"). Rearticulated boundaries manifest both on a spatial and-more insidiously-on a cultural level. Securing global logistics spaces has facilitated the production of dwellers as outsiders. These new "others" are remarkably similar in both Aqaba and Buenaventura, underscoring our argument about dwellers' location at the margins of one common TALS.
In both cities, the modernized ports operate as secondary nodal points for global capital flows, which are presumed to require protection against urbanites, who at best constitute a source for cheap labor and at worst a threat port authorities actively secure against. The successful "liberation" of the prime real estate formerly "occupied" by the residents of Al-Shalālah cleared the way for "maintaining a focus on the creation of financial value for ADC's shareholders" (Bechtel 2003, section 2, 2), even in this once "economically depressed, teeming community," as a US Embassy Amman cable (2004) states.
Our discussion of Aqaba and Buenaventura demonstrates that logistics power in the TALS has not made borders less important. Instead, they become rearticulated, partly based on transregional entanglements. Such boundaries are not equally permeable for everyone. The highly mobile actors of global logistics spaces may experience a gradual dissolution of borders, while new boundaries within city spaces limit the movement of racialized "urban others" more than ever. The transregional entanglements that link cities such as Aqaba and Buenaventura highlight the importance of challenging spatial imaginations.

From Hollow Regime Typologies to the "TALS"
Political scientists have paid insufficient attention to the transregional entanglements that characterize contemporary authoritarian power. Drawing on recent literature on "logistics space" (Cowen 2014;Khalili 2018;Ziadah 2019) and practices in "authoritarian neoliberalism" (Bruff and Tansel 2019), this article offers a starting point for thinking authoritarianism along transregional entanglements (Lowe 2015;Mezzadra and Neilson 2019). We argue that research on authoritarian power should complement the study of the state ensemble with a transregional perspective. Discussing the TALS as a unit of analysis allows us to explore new spatial imaginaries and constitutes one first step in overcoming hollow regime typologies that tell us little about the reality of contemporary authoritarian practices. In our discussion of two empirical cases in different world regions, and of the many similarities in the actors and practices that shape both Aqaba and Buenaventura, we highlighted the importance of rethinking context.
To decenter neoliberalism literature's attention on the Global North or on primary nodal points such as Dubai or Singapore, we focused on secondary port cities in the Global South. While processes of privatization and spatial rearticulations in primary nodal points may act as "success stories" for secondary port cities, the latter's integration in an increasingly interconnected global market is arguably more drastic than elsewhere and presents global logistic companies with enormous possibilities for profit. An analysis of cities such as Aqaba and Buenaventura can thus demonstrate particularly well the authoritarian nature of the transregional logistics space.
A methodological focus on connections allowed us to understand Aqaba through Buenaventura and vice versa. It stresses that contemporary authoritarian practices are neither "territorially bounded," nor isolated but entangled across nation-state borders and conventional conceptualizations of regions and territoriality. In fact, both locales studied in this paper have become nodal points of one and the same network, serving almost exclusively the smoothness of global flows of goods, and can be interpreted as a part of the same TALS. This unit of analysis allows us to become more aware of how state, corporate, and civilian sectors converge beyond conventional imaginations of territory in securing global flows of goods and capital, premised on preventing and criminalizing (opportunities for) dissent, technocratizing politics, and repressing oppositional activism.
Our focus on transregional authoritarian entanglements enables a more nuanced understanding of "Jordanian authoritarianism" and "Colombian democracy." It allows us to focus on actors that the literature on authoritarianism frequently overlooks (including global logistics players and "development aid" agencies, and their role in shaping highly similar authoritarian practices in both locales and beyond regime typologies). Our argument has considerable scope for application beyond our cases. Apart from studies on port cities, the TALS as a unit of analysis could enable scholars to explore entanglements apparent in authoritarian power, both in terms of spatial rearticulations, such as externalized borders across transnational spaces, and in terms of preventing or repressing dissent by governments all over the world.
The adoption of US President Trump's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) by supporters of Bolsonaro ("Make Brazil Great Again") and Duterte ("Make the Philippines Great Again") is just one example of the transregional dimension of the contemporary reinforcement of deeply nationalist and racist assumptions of difference. Likewise, any analysis of authoritarian power in Saudi Arabia remains incomplete without considering the role of transregionally active logistics and consulting firms. McKinsey delivered a report on critical social media activists to the Saudi regime. Saudi authorities immediately arrested at least one individual and hacked the phone of another, using spyware developed by the private Israeli firm NSO Group. Similarly, our conceptual framework grasps the ways in which European meat consumption boosts the power of international agribusiness firms and their role in authoritarian practices in Brazil.
We call on scholars of authoritarianism to focus on such newly emerging contexts and transregional authoritarian entanglements between different locales. We are convinced that rethinking the context of analysis helps us more adequately understand and resist contemporary authoritarian power.