Blomkamp's vision of the transnational corporation Multinational United (MNU) draws on two strands: South Africa's past legacy of mercenaries and private military contractors such as Executive Outcomes, and the dystopian view of Weberian bureaucracies as echoed in District 9's vision of the transnational corporation has echoes in James Cameron's Aliens (1986) and Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987).
MNU's chief executive officer Dirk Michaels (William Allen Young) has created a 'dual track' organization that cultivates a public face of liberal internationalism, which has taken over United Nations (UN)-style peacekeeping and conflict management. This hides MNU's private face, a realist-driven management which manipulates the media through cover stories about terrorist incidents in District 9 and the eviction of aliens to District 10 as a utopian relocation.
MNU's shadow side is a covert R&D program into alien genetics and the 'fast prototyping' of new weapons derived from alien biology. The R&D program's outcome will position MNU as the monopolist and market-maker with government and corporate clients. The biological gap between the aliens and humans, however, poses an innovation barrier in a technology race, which leads Michaels to make self-serving decisions about his employee Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who is tasked to implement the aliens' relocation to District 10. Michaels also lies to Merwe's wife Tania van der Merwe (Vanessa Haywood).
View 2: Liberal Institutionalist versus Constructivist
In the first 15 minutes, Blomkamp's narrative structure establishes a tension between MNU's public face as a UN-style liberal institutionalist firm, and the constructivist role of academic experts and media to frame the aliens as a new civilisational norm. CNN-style conflict reportage and reality television shapes the film's aesthetics, cinematography and rapid editing. The alien arrival in 1982 over Johannesburg creates a global media event and a norm cascade, which is echoed more ambiguously at District 9's end when the alien mothership leaves, amongst mass crowds. The constructivist thread includes comments by sociologist Sarah Livingstone (Nathalie Boltt), doctor Katrina McKenzie (Sylvaine Strike), and entomologist Clive Henderson (Tim Gordon). The liberal internationalist thread blends a critique of South Africa's apartheid regime and Johannesburg's modernization gap, with an awareness of how international organizations and networks try to impose their will on an anarchical environment, such as via humanitarian peacekeeping in a post-conflict zone. Yet District 9 also hints at how liberal internationalist actors such as journalists may also be manipulated through grey and black propaganda.
View 3: Realist
Threaded throughout District 9 are references to a realist worldview, in which inter-group problems are unlikely to be resolved in the near-term future. This external environment also provides MNU with the internal justification for its covert R&D programs. The realist worldview focuses on background characters such as Nigerian warlord Obesandjo (Eugene Khumbaniya) and soldier Kobus Venter (David James), who recall the power-seeking individuals in William Shawcross and Robert Kaplan's reportage. District 9 references witch-doctors (Uganda); scams, compounds and trade in illegal small arms (Congo, Nigeria), combat footage (Afghanistan, Iraq), 'failed' nation-states and lawless borderlands (Somalia, Sudan), blade-wielding paramilitaries (Rwanda), and forced population relocations (ethnopolitical wars and the spectre of genocide). Despite its science fiction imagery District 9 is also a meditation on Robert Kagan's 'return of history'.
View 4: Jihadist
If the above views describe MNU, the background characters, and the external environment, how might the aliens perceive their situation? The jihadist ideologies of Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Abul A'la Mawdudi hint at some disturbing possibilities. In this ideological lens, the aliens arrive on Earth as a jama'a or group to engage in Da'wa (the call to Islam). In doing so, they cross from Dar al-Islam and into Dar al-Harb, where the aliens are kept in District 9 as oppressed (taghut) and without an integrative awareness of community (umma). MNU functions as a tyrannical Pharaoh ruled by jahilyya who lie to their own people (batil), such as the black propaganda in the media that Wikus van der Merwe's transformation is due to alien sex. Any compromise is impossible, as MNU uses its private military contractors to engage in fighting (qital) with the aliens.
Wikus van der Merwe's transformation in District 9 embodies the initiatory transition from unbeliever (Kufr) to Muslim believer. He provides protection (nisral) to muhajids who first manipulate him, with overtures to family and idealism, to recover a fluid canister from MNU's labs, and then engage in defensive jihad against MNU's security forces. The muhajid vanguard are unable to free the umma and to establish their Caliphate, so they leave Earth and promise to return in three years. In doing so, the aliens follow the Mohammedan path from the 'Meccan' to 'Hijra' (migration) phase, with Blomkamp hinting the sequel would venture into the 'Medinian' phase, if the aliens return to Earth and unleash war.
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