Kyle Harmse receives Dissertation Fellowship from Stanford Program in History & Philosophy of Science
Kyle Harmse is a 7th year PhD candidate in History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine at Stanford Department of History. His dissertation, tentatively titled Engineering the Counter-Revolution: The techno-military mobilisation of Apartheid South Africa, 1910-1994, explores state formation and white supremacy in connection to the development of military science and technologies in South Africa. In AY 2025-26, Kyle received a Dissertation Fellowship from the Stanford Program in History & Philosophy of Science.
Congratulations on your fellowship! Please tell us about your dissertation project.
Thanks very much! My project deals with formation and preservation of the modern South African state in the 20th century, and the substantial mobilisation of military force that was needed to secure its existence for most of that time period. I argue that, in many respects, the history of both the South African state and its military organs are extremely closely intertwined. I contend that significant insights into the logics and realities of South African statecraft are revealed when considering how processes from one affected the other. Militaries (as with most security forces) require an enormous and consistent effort to mobilise, and mobilisation really is the load-bearing word here: militaries require both personnel and materiel in order to function. Marshalling—mobilising— both is often a deeply involved process that closely intertwines both political and technical concerns.
What is technopolitics? How did it shape the South African state formation and politics?
“Technopolitics” is an analytical term that emerged in the field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, largely coined by Professors Gabrielle Hecht and Timothy Mitchell in the 1990s. Technopolitical analysis interrogates the connections between technology and politics, especially the causal effects– both subtle and obvious– that stem from the interaction between the two. Governments often wield large technical projects (like nuclear reactors, dams, and armies) as tools of policy, and STS scholars argue that these projects almost always embody some aspect of human political and social lives as a consequence. Simultaneously, as STS work often shows, these projects themselves also remain bound to the material laws of physics, the biological laws of nature, and the practical laws of economics and engineering. Both aspects shape each other significantly.
When applying technopolitical analysis to South Africa, it is important to bear in mind that the modern South African state was only formalised in 1910, predominantly as the product of imperial conquest. Military force was critical not only in the creation of the new state, but also for its maintenance: beyond open insurrection, as had been the case with the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906, Africans resisted European rule in a multitude of ways that often provoked intense discomfort in European settlers. White South Africans, in turn, also resisted many aspects of the new state: Boer-Afrikaners rebelled in 1914, seeking to restore the independent Boer Republics, then again in 1922.
Especially in suppressing the latter rebellions, the South African state marshalled armies made up of both Afrikaners and English-speaking troops, with the latter drawn first from British imperial formations and then as part of an integrated Union Defence Force (later, the South African Defence Force, SADF). In this fashion, the military played a critical role in the broader political project of reconciliation between British imperialism and Afrikaner nationalism, whilst simultaneously enabling the new state to assert a policy of racial dominance over Africans. Tellingly, the first three Prime Ministers of South Africa (between 1910 and 1948) were all military generals in some capacity. Almost uniquely for the Commonwealth, in fact, two amongst them– Louis Botha and Jan Smuts– remained actively commissioned as field officers during their premierships in WW1 and WW2. Though the military’s political significance declined somewhat in the 1950s and 60s, SADF regained its prominence again in the 1970s and 1980s, especially as a bulwark against the African National Congress (ANC) and fears of Soviet influence in Africa.
How did you get interested in this topic?
I was born in South Africa in 1990, in the midst of the first serious transitions to universal suffrage and true multi-party democracy. Repression in the name of racial superiority was an inescapable aspect of the state prior to that point, and the protection of the state in turn required a comparatively vast militarisation and mobilisation of white society. As a consequence, military service (both compulsory and voluntary) was universal amongst all my male relatives, and went back several generations. I wanted to think systematically about the breadth and implications of this sociopolitical feature in their lives; and how mobilisation of thousands of families fit into the broader social and political history of my home.
A second component of the story lies in the literal stuff of war. By the late 1980s, South Africa fielded a very well-armed military relative to the size of its population and economy. Consequently, the material legacy of that mobilisation, in the form of armaments and industry, remains visible across the country to this day. The realisation that human mobilisation and technical mobilisation were both part of the same institutional process– the same statecraft– was a critical penny-drop moment for me.
What sort of military science and technologies are you focusing on in your dissertation?
Military science—often organised around principles and practices called doctrine—is enormously shaped by assessments of who a perceived enemy is, how a military can be marshalled against that enemy, and at what scale that mobilisation will occur. In the South African case, there’s real utility to applying an analytical metric that works particularly well with technopolitics: scale. Most militaries apply a distinction between interstate conflict and other forms of warfare, and technology has played an increasingly important role in that distinction in the 20th century. Armaments employed in interstate conflict (tanks, artillery, fighter jets, and nuclear weapons) typically operate at superhuman scales. They are complex technical assemblies, and consequently require a commensurate investment in personnel and industry to maintain and operate. On the opposite end of the scale are small arms (rifles, hand grenades and machine guns) that are employed in the dirty, difficult, and dangerous affair of exercising state power on the interpersonal scale of humans.
The South African state was deeply interested in the development, manufacture and utilisation of arms across that entire technopolitical spectrum. On the interstate scale, the SADF employed sophisticated weapon complexes in the form of a large air defence network, and a highly mechanised ground army as a countermeasure against a feared Soviet-backed “Army of African Liberation.” On the other end of the scale, the SADF was also deeply involved in the formation of a vast counter insurgency apparatus, which often interpreted political developments in Africa through SADF’s own doctrinal frameworks. Critically, during a period of substantial counter-insurgency mobilisation during the 1970s, the articulation of the SADF’s own emergent counter-insurgency doctrine meant that African soldiers became increasingly critical as components of the South African state’s security apparatus.
A G-6 howitzer belonging to the SANDF, parked in a courtyard on Magazine Hill in Pretoria. One of my archival sites is located directly behind it. Deactivated military vehicles serving as monuments or “gate guards” remain a commonplace sight in South Africa. This is especially the case in Pretoria or Bloemfontein, cities that were especially central to the SADF’s mobilisation apparatus. A long-suffering Volvo is included for scale.
So the apartheid state had no choice but to recruit African soldiers for its technopolitical dominance. How did this influence its ideological coherence or legitimacy?
Great question. It really cuts right to an irony at the heart of the whole apartheid endeavour. Africans were always critical actors in South Africa, especially as sources of labour in gold mines and farms, and a massive part of the state’s raison d'être was to flatten out and limit African agency through various coercive means. Maintaining that coercive apparatus, however, meant a continual and expensive investment in manpower (a phrase I’m deliberately gendering) that was in turn drawn from a comparatively small white population. Hegemony on a shoestring only ever went so far, and white troops—though capable at interstate war—generally lacked the environmental and social skills to perform effectively as counter-insurgents without the critical help of African intermediaries. Once the state started the process of arming those black Africans, the apartheid regime’s weaknesses steadily manifested in pretty clear ways. Critically, though generally adept at coercion, the National Party largely failed to persuade Africans about the viability of alternative paths to political agency and aspiration. A major aspect of this political strategy involved the reformation of the old tribal reserves into the states of the so-called Homelands/Bantustan system. These states, however, were largely politically and economically unviable. Consequently, African troops had little interest in protecting the National Party’s proposed federal state.By 1990, the clock really was ticking for the entire endeavour, as two out of the four nominally independent Bantustans were overtaken by pro-ANC coups. By March of 1994, they were three for four.
Do you see continuities or breaks between the apartheid and post-apartheid state practices?
More continuities than breaks. The SADF, in its original form as the UDF, was an institution designed to provide the South African state with a military bulwark against secession, whilst also acting as a vessel for political integration of opposing nationalisms. The current South African National Defence Force (SANDF) largely inherited those aspects. In 1910, former Boer generals were incorporated into the South African state in many critical ways, and in 1994 both the Bantustan militaries and the liberation armies of the ANC and PAC were incorporated into the SANDF as part of the broader project to build a post-apartheid state.
One critical break, however, has been the declining relative importance of the military as an instrument of statecraft. Budgets have commensurately shrunk while personnel numbers have remained high. Consequently, much of the military’s capability has been hollowed, and its internal politics have become increasingly complex especially over the past decade.
Tell us about your sources.
My work draws on archival material, and oral history interviews. As far as archives are concerned, a major source for me was the archive of the South African Department of Defence. It is a sometimes complicated place to work: this archive’s collections are fully open for research up to December 31st, 1969. Files containing material after this period, however, are subject to a complex declassification and disclosure process. There are some key islands of declassified material available beyond 1969, though many topics– especially South Africa’s military alliance with Israel—remain sealed and subject to DoD review and right of refusal.
A declassified file from the South African DoD archive. Though there are a few critical islands of disclosure like this one, it is necessary to resort to interviews and overseas archival resources to generate a more complete picture of South African mobilisation after January 1st, 1970.
Tackling these access restrictions has meant turning to archives in Europe and the United States. Britain was a major techno-military partner and provider of equipment for South Africa prior to 1960, and it remained deeply invested in South Africa economically, politically, and socially. Critical insights about this political relationship can be found in the British Commonwealth and Foreign Office. Similarly, West Germany was a critical source of illicit technical support during the embargo period from the 1960s through the 1980s, and a rich vein of sources are available through the German Military Archive in Freiburg. The U.S. National Archives, particularly the Congressional hearings and the Department of Defense’s Defense Technical Information Center also proved particularly invaluable for my research.
The entrance to BAMA (Bundesarchiv Militär Abteilung, or the military department of the German Federal Archives) in Freiburg, Germany.
Tell us a bit more about your oral history interviews. Have you run into challenges?
The other alternative to dealing with archival restrictions was to interview those involved directly. This approach was critical for both filling in the spaces between archival islands of disclosure, and especially for fleshing out social contexts that are usually only inferrable from technocratically dense documents.
Funnily enough, most former SADF officers were fairly open to general discussion, especially when conversations were grounded in technical terms that addressed politics as only one component of their professional pasts. Former engineers and officials employed at Armscor (the state arms manufacturer) and its affiliates were usually more circumspect in agreeing to interviews, given a deeply interwoven culture of secrecy developed there to protect their international partners complicit in sanctions-busting. These conversations, if they occurred, were generally grounded in a requirement to carefully anonymise those involved. Again, technology, science and industry were both useful ways to ground the conversation in non-threatening ways—given the sheer scale and complexity of the operations, individual names and personalities were not the focus of my work anyway, when larger organisational, political and technical processes were at play.
What surprised you the most during the archival work?
The majority of my material is pretty technical, with lots of the politics and sociology within it inferred as subtext. Sometimes, however, the subtext becomes text, in surprising ways. Here’s a relatively benign example that produced a chuckle out of me: It is 1968. The SADF is in the midst of a secretive programme to codevelop an anti-air missile system with France. The project is proceeding according to plan, and a French contingent visits South Africa to inspect the firing range at the St Lucia estuary. Their SADF liaison officer is given a budget for their accommodation, transport and per diems. But, unusually, the budget includes a specific line item for wine. Two bottles of the good stuff, per guest, per day.