The concept of resilience and critiques of international intervention

International interventions are often criticized by scholars for not doing enough, including not enough local ownership. The newly emerging concept of resilience also falls victim to these critiques. In a new article, Pol Bargués-Pedreny warns that this may lead to a dangerous nihilism in processes of international intervention: the acceptance of a permanent failure.

International policymakers assisting disaster and conflict-affected societies often appear confused. While overwhelmed by implementation dilemmas, they continue working nevertheless. Their policies are riddled with inconsistencies that regularly fail or lead to unanticipated consequences, and yet they learn and try again.

A commentator captures this well, when he writes: “policymaking has found its ways of living with affirmation. It has developed concepts of peace governance ambiguous enough to conceptually work even when failing in practice.” Why is it that policies to enhance resilience suffer from a chronic deficiency, which needs to be made good? 

Nowhere is the perception of deficit clearer than in accounts that promote “local ownership.” Drawing on the poor track record of international interventions designed from the “top-down,” the underlying assumption is that interventions should be locally-driven and context specific. Yet the policy of “local ownership” never seems to work out in practice. Sometimes local actors appear incapable of taking the lead, some other times interests of different groups conflict with one another. Thus the preferences of international interveners end up imposing themselves.

Today, the key concern is how to bridge the gap between discourse and practice of local ownership; how to fulfill the commitment to transferring competences satisfactorily, in every context and policy area, so that local actors are more than mere implementers of an external agenda. Critical scholars have insisted on the need to push the policy further. For them, as for policymakers, more resources and efforts are required to make local ownership real, meaningful. As one scholar notes, “[The international community must] rely more on the very people it is ostensibly trying to protect.” 

The perception of deficit can also be seen when looking at the new technologies that enhance humanitarian interventions. The bond between technology and innovation for humanitarian purposes started a decade ago and reached its climax in May 2016, in the firstever World Humanitarian Summit. The Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation was created to bring the aid industry, governments, private sector partners, and hubs together to scale innovation. New technologies are at the core of innovation ventures and bring the promise of “finding needles in haystacks,” penetrating up to the most isolated areas and leaving no one behind. Yet there are always biasis, deficiencies, glitches, that need to be corrected. 

For instance, digital maps collect large amounts of diverse information at unprecedented speeds with the promise that the information that is updated and verified by local actors could help practitioners understand, be attentive and respond to the everyday needs and concerns of the people affected by conflict or disaster. However, the conclusion seems to be that information given by crisis mapping projects is incomplete, distorted, tinged with power biases and false representations of space.  Thus, the demand is that more (and better) data should be gathered to meet expectations. Innovation always requires new and better maps and gadgets.

The third example where the perception of deficit energizes international intervention can be seen in accounts that demand longer missions and operations. International policymakers that  seek immediate results provide reductionist and simplistic analyses, neglecting several unforeseen effects. Instead, prolonged engagements offer the opportunity to build contacts and strengthen alliances; make insightful observations and conduct more accurate, context-specific and in-depth analyses; also, they increase the likelihood of witnessing the evolution of events and allowing serendipitous discoveries.

Although current international missions and operations are already committed to long-term conflict prevention (before conflict starts) and peace consolidation strategies (after conflict ends), “more” is always better. A generalised feeling is that implementation programs are still dominated by short-term concerns and are not open enough to unpredictability and change. They operate with too much haste. Therefore, long-term perspectives are always necessary to be able to foster resilience and adapt to uncertainty. There is never an end-state called resilience, where peace and harmony could settle: no mission, initiative or policy seems to get us close enough to finally achieve resilience. 

What are the consequences of thinking that policies are always in the wrong? On the one hand, by identifying a “lack” in processes of promoting resilience (something was absent, someone was omitted, something else could be done) may be liberating and useful, giving another chance of genuine improvement. On the other hand, however, it is important to relate this perception of deficit to contemporary forms of neoliberal governance that continually expand. A sense of “deficit” sustains “the economic logic of late-capitalism”: “the endless willingness to happily fail-forward into the future.” By “governing through failure and denial” and interpreting crises and past failures as new opportunities, measures for further monitoring and control are legitimized, while critiques and challenges to broader structures are deemed impossible.

The feeling that resilience is “always more” also leads to a dangerous nihilism in processes of international intervention: the acceptance of a permanent failure. As Jessica Schmidt puts it, resilience approaches today accept the problem of “never getting it right” and, in consequence, translate it into a virtue: “always having to adapt.” As practitioners are in awe with resilience, skepticism about programs and policies spreads. Results seem impossible to achieve and the end appears remote. The general direction is towards accepting idleness and despair.

Pol Bargués-Pedreny is a researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and the author of “Resilience is ‘always more’ than our practices: Limits, critiques, and skepticism about international intervention”, Contemporary Security Policy, 41(2), pp. 263-286. The article is available here.

Security research on COVID19

The coronavirus is rapidly spreading across the world affecting all aspects of our societies. As a scholar, I have been truly impressed by all the quality medical research and the joint effort to understand COVID-19, treat patients, develop vaccines, and formulate prudent policy responses.

At the same time, it is clear that medical research is not enough. Experts in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) also have important things to say about the effects of the securitization of healthcare, border closures, varieties in security cultures and policy-making across countries, the psychological effects of quarantine, international cooperation and global health governance, legal provisions and individual rights, ethical questions and moral dilemmas, and many more things.

To facilitate the publication of SSH scholarship on COVID-19, in mid-March 2020, as one of the first journals in the field of political science and international relations, Contemporary Security Policy launched a call for papers on the security (policy) implications of the coronavirus to be published as a special forum. The response was impressive. Within a month, by the initial deadline of mid-April, we received around a dozen papers on a variety of topics.

Of those submissions, three articles on security research and COVID-19 are included this special forum. Not surprisingly, these articles all engage with the concept of securitization (Buzan et al., 1998) in one form or the other. Securitization indeed has many things to say about how COVID-19 is framed, the state of emergency, and the exceptional measures taken across our societies. More surprisingly, all three articles are interdisciplinary using insights from border studies, educational sciences, and the legal discipline. In normal times some of these articles would perhaps be slightly beyond the scope of Contemporary Security Policy, but in this time of crisis it is encouraging to see disciplines talking to each other and we are pleased to make our pages available.

The articles in the special forum are:

In line with our existing editorial standards, the format of special forums is flexible. Forum articles are shorter in length than research articles and authors are given more leeway, with the purpose to trigger debate and quickly react to unfolding events. Nevertheless, Contemporary Security Policy is an academic journal. We do not run commentary or publish policy papers. Especially with COVID-19, where policy-makers rely extensively on experts, articles have to be of the highest possible academic standard. All three articles have, in this respect, gone through one round of external peer-review and subsequently the usual one or two rounds of editorial review and editing. When shooting at a moving target, there is the risk that data and conclusions may soon be outdated, but if SSH scholars are to have a say, this is a risk worth taking. 

At the time of writing in mid-May 2020, the COVID-19 crisis is far from over. The coronavirus is still spreading across the world and a lot of uncertainty remains including over the prospect of a potential second wave. Beyond this special forum, Contemporary Security Policy will remain available for research articles on COVID-19 and we are also keen on publishing articles that go beyond the concept of securitization. It is likely that the coronavirus will have security implications around the world for the years to come and we will analyze them in this journal.

Hylke Dijkstra
Editor-in-Chief

Reference list

Buzan, B., Wæver, O., & De Wilde, J. (1998). Security: A new framework for analysis. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Shaping Public Risk Tolerance During Deterrence Crises

In a recent article, Jeffrey Berejikian and Zachary Zwald use seven survey experiments to analyse how the general public evaluates the risk of military options, such as the number of potential casualties, during an imminent deterrence crisis. Informed by prospect theory, they demonstrate that by simply reframing the language used to describe the possible outcome of military options, the public’s willingness to accept risks changes.

The manipulation of public opinion can determine the likelihood of deterrence success in myriad ways. Surprisingly, neither the academic nor policy communities fully appreciate the importance of domestic politics in shaping deterrence bargaining dynamics—let alone how the public processes risks during immediate deterrence.

To the extent that scholars focus their attention on domestic politics during deterrence crises, they usually depict public opinion as a constraint that can either enhance or undermine deterrence stability—depending upon one’s orientation. Consider, for instance, decades of research on “audience costs,” which highlights the presumed difficulty of committing to escalatory military actions because such commitments may carry domestic political costs if they fail.

In the context of deterrence, we see a similar concern among some policymakers; that public opinion may constrain U.S. leaders at critical junctures during a crisis and subsequently prevent them from communicating credible threats to an adversary. However, the concept of domestically-imposed constraint also suggests that the public will serve as a check on the worst impulses of political leaders. Since the prospect of electoral punishment constrains elites if they fail—in democracies, at least—we may hope that the public serves as a mechanism to prevent our leaders from engaging long-shot gambles, escalating conflicts, or straying too far from the national interest.

By contrast, our research shows that the choice of language alone can shift the public’s preferences in favor of risky military escalation during the opening stage of a deterrence crisis. It follows, therefore, that neither of these views on how the public affect bargaining dynamics is wholly correct.

In our study, we conducted seven survey experiments covering a range of potential deterrence crises, including when the stakes are high and nuclear use is on the table. In each experiment, we presented subjects with a vignette that describes a bourgeoning crisis where an adversary has taken some action that challenges a long-standing U.S. extended deterrent commitment to an ally. Each scenario contained a degree of uncertainty and risk–i.e., the adversary may be preparing to launch a military attack that results in the loss of American and allied lives, or it could be that they are posturing in an attempt to probe the strength of the U.S. commitment.

We utilized a Prospect Theory framework to evaluate how the language used to frame the potential outcome of two military options—one defensive and the other offensive—affects the public’s willingness to support a risky offensive act that escalates the crisis.

We asked participants to choose between a conservative defensive course of action (e.g., bolster air and missile defenses in the region) and a riskier pre-emptive military escalation (e.g., deploying special forces to eliminate the specific military capability the adversary threatens to use). Each participant randomly received either the “gains frame” or “loss frame” treatment that only varied the language used to describe the potential outcomes from the two military options. For example, we presented a “Nuclear Blackmail” scenario by framing the possible deaths that may result in terms of either the number of “lives saved” or “lives lost.”

Consistently, we found that simply reframing the exact same “facts on the ground” produces statistically and substantively significant shifts in favor of a riskier military escalation option as a preferred response to a deterrence crisis.

Going forward, these results raise concerns that have not yet received the serious consideration they deserve. First, over the last few years, commentators have downplayed President Trump’s aggressive language toward North Korea as just “loose talk” with little, if any, real effect on the actual course of the crisis at hand. Yet, our research demonstrates how language alone can itself cause deterrence failure—even when a nuclear response by the adversary is on the table. A leader’s bellicose rhetoric may inadvertently produce a loss frame for the public and, thus, create the domestic political incentives for unnecessary, or harmful, military escalation.

Second, U.S. policymakers must now consider the challenge posed by the vulnerability of the public’s risk preferences to manipulation by an adversary in the lead up to, and during, a deterrence crisis. The growing trend towards employing cyber operations to weaponize information, in conjunction with our finding demonstrating the malleability of the public’s risk preferences during a deterrence crisis, suggests that an adversary can manipulate the public’s risk tolerance during immediate deterrence to create political incentives that dictate which options democratically elected leaders support. An effective 21st century U.S. deterrence strategy, therefore, must be able to identify points of public vulnerability and develop counter-framing strategies that stand to prevent foreign manipulation.

Jeffrey D. Berejikian is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. Zachary Zwald is in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. They are the authors of “Why language matters: Shaping public risk tolerance during deterrence crises”, Contemporary Security Policy, which is available here.

THAAD and South Korea’s alliance dilemma

The July 2016 decision of South Korea to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) triggered unprecedented retaliation from China even though Seoul and Washington conceded that THAAD could not protect the capital region of Republic of Korea (ROK). In a recent article, Yong Sub Choi analyses why the South Korean government decided to deploy THAAD anyway. 

To answer this puzzle, it is necessary to connect the THAAD deployment in South Korea with the U.S. conception of a strategic rebalancing to Asia. Seoul’s THAAD decision was primarily intended to sustain and strengthen the U.S.-ROK alliance amid escalating nuclear threats by North Korea and deepening Sino-American rivalry. Placing the current state of the alliance at the center of its investigation into this controversial issue, the article pays particular heed to the ongoing adjustments being made between the two powers to better cope with the rise of China. Thus, by examining the underlying causes of the THAAD decision, it can also contribute to an understanding of the reconfiguration of the alliance amid the growing rivalry between the United States and China.

Conceptually, this article links South Korea’s decision to deploy THAAD with contemporary alliance politics in relation to extended deterrence and abandonment and entrapment risks. First, the deployment of THAAD on the peninsula itself may improve the security of South Korea by enhancing the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence through its contribution to the defense of U.S. territories and U.S. forces in East Asia and the western Pacific.

Second, the United States, following its rebalancing strategy, applied increasing pressure on South Korea to install THAAD on its soil, which decided to comply owing to much higher costs of abandonment of the alliance in the face of, most of all, possible nuclear attacks by North Korea. Technically, unlike what the South Korean government has publicly claimed, THAAD has only limited direct utility for the protection of South Koreans from North Korean missile. However, the THAAD deployment can contribute to its national security in a strategic way by reinforcing the U.S.-ROK alliance.  

Once deployed on the Korean peninsula, THAAD can substantially enhance the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence by providing an additional layer of defense for U.S. territories and U.S. forces in East Asia and the western Pacific. The credibility of extended deterrence is determined by a complex mix of factors, where what counts is the degree of contribution by the client state to the national interest of the patron state. The deployment of THAAD in South Korea provides significant benefits for the United States, such that the former offers strategically important advantages to the latter, including enhanced protection of U.S. territories from North Korean and Chinese ICBMs and containing China’s military expansion in the South and East China Seas amid growing tensions between the two superpowers. 

The wide gap in military capability between the United States and South Korea and the existence of North Korea have put the relationship between the two democracies on an asymmetrical footing, which required South Korea to adopt behaviors that were consistent with the former’s strategic interest, to a greater or lesser degree. The United States, following its rebalancing strategy, asked South Korea to side with it as it contained China’s military expansion with THAAD deployment as arguably the most important task for that ally at that moment. In the presence of escalating nuclear threats by North Korea, which heightened the costs of abandonment even further, South Korea decided to deploy THAAD, although it acknowledged that China would likely retaliate against South Korea for the decision. Seoul, showing a nuanced understanding of the alliance security dilemma, made this strategic choice because it believed that the costs of being abandoned by Washington surpassed those of being entrapped in conflicts with Beijing. 

The most important strategic considerations for the United States at the global level involve dealing with or balancing China. By strengthening the U.S.-ROK alliance and providing its assistance to the United States to contain China’s military expansion, South Korea can bolster its status as a reliable ally, which is vital for taking the initiative in settling North Korean nuclear issue peacefully.

The growing tensions between the United States and China can bring harm to many countries’ national interests across the world. Nevertheless, it is rare to find countries, such as South Korea, which would so severely suffer both militarily and economically in the event of discord or conflict between the two superpowers. South Korea can contribute to improving strained relations between them only to a limited extent, but it can still minimize them, at least as regards North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles, by pursuing peace on the Korean peninsula in a manner that both sides can agree with. 

If ongoing international efforts to put an end to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs go awry, the tensions between the United States and China could be exacerbated even further. In that case, in response to U.S. demands, South Korea would not be able to avoid risking entrapment again in strife with China because of the nuclear threat that North Korea poses. Then, the degree of retaliation from China would be more severe than the one it imposed in the wake of South Korea’s decision to deploy THAAD in 2016.

Yong Sub Choi teaches at Seoul National University. He is the author of “Keeping the Americans in: The THAAD deployment on the Korean peninsula in the context of Sino-American rivalry”, Contemporary Security Policy, which is available here.

Stepping out of the comfort zone: Scenario Analysis in IR

Today’s international order is changing into a multi-order one and is characterized by a high degree of complexity and uncertainty. In a new article, Monika Sus and Marcel Hadeed argue that scenario analysis can be used as a complementary method to traditional IR methods.

To grapple with the “epochal shift” and “to develop strategies to deal with uncertainty, to be prepared for the unexpected”, an increasing number of actors in the realm of IR conduct foresight exercises. NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis, for example, forms a fundamental pillar for its defense planning process; the new European Commission features a portfolio for Inter-Institutional Relations and Foresight. Yet, the methodology has so far gained little traction among the academic community. Scenario analysis can nonetheless be used as a complementary method to traditional IR methods. It allows scholars to simultaneously remain rigorous and to provide policy-relevant input.

For IR scholars, complexity and uncertainty constitute formidable challenges. Traditional IR methods examine present- and past patterns and cannot account for sudden changes or grasp potential future developments. They rarely question the assumptions underlying a particular line of reasoning and engage in interdisciplinary discourse only after the research phase. We suggest scenario analysis, as a systematic analytical process to create visions of alternative futures, can be a valuable additional tool in IR scholars’ toolkit to detect early signs of change and identify possible shifts in trajectories. 

In our article we introduce the Multiple Scenario Generation (MSG) as a robust foresight method.  It is multi-step process, centered around a structured exchange between experts, that produces a set of scenarios elucidating a plausible interplay of trends deemed likely to shape the future. The process can be summarized in three phases.

  1. In the preparatory phase, a common understanding of the world around us is established. A research question is defined, key assumptions tested (including against empirical data) the most important drivers of change identified and defined.
  2. In the developmental phase, these drivers are combined into sets and checked for internal consistency. Those combinations considered plausible are chosen as the kernels of the scenarios. Narratives are constructed around them, detailing the path from now to the timeframe in question. Once a scenario is completed, it is fed into a review process, where it is validated – commonly based on the criteria of plausibility, coherence, and innovation. Scenarios can also produce early indicators, allowing academics and practitioners to monitor the extent to which a scenario manifests itself and what indications of such a possible manifestation might occur.
  3. In the use phase, the scenarios serve as bases for innovative and relevant policy recommendations. They can also help draw attention to neglected, but potentially impactful trends. By elucidating blind spots in our thinking, scenario can increase policy-makers capacity for anticipatory governance.

But a crucial question for its admissibility into academic’s toolbox remains: Are scenario approaches academic enough? We argue that, if executed systematically, scenario analysis can satisfy the criteria of a social science methodology. In our paper, we tested scenario analysis against eleven criteria established by John Gerring. We found that it satisfies most of them as it can be considered a cumulative, evidence-based (empirical), generalizing, rigorous, skeptical, systematic, transparent and grounded in rational argument. 

Of course, since foresight deals with the future, its results are inherently not falsifiable. Moreover, its results are neither nonsubjective, nor replicable. As interactive group exercise, they are reliant on participants’ perspectives, interpretation of data, as well as the interaction between them. This disqualifies the method for ardent positivists. However, falsifiability is not always a prerequisite for acceptance of the IR community. Some of the discipline’s most fundamental theories, such as Weberianism, Marxism, or rational-choice theory are hard to falsify. Moreover, while we readily concede the approaches inability to test knowledge, to appraise other findings, it excels in the generation of new knowledge.

Furthermore, scenario analysis can enrich the IR discipline. Making the case here for the proliferation of this approach among IR scholarship, we found a fourfold added value it can bring to the discipline. 

  1. Confronting enduring assumptions: scenario analysis starts with participants revealing and challenging their own and others’ assumptions. This process uncovers and corrects enduring preconceptions and cognitive biases. The use of empirical data to justify assumptions ensures the eradication of false truths. 
  2. Bringing forward new research questions: scenario analysis challenges its participants to break out of linear thinking, challenge their deeply held beliefs and consider the possibility of sudden shifts in trajectories. This explorative process focuses on detecting weak signals of change and overlooked trends. Discovering them and their potential consequences can drive researchers into new fields. 
  3. Dealing with complexity and interdisciplinarity: scenario analysis allows for multicausal reasoning and nonlinear interaction between variables. The analysis is the result of an interdisciplinary exchange between participants. As opposed to more traditional academic exchange, this conversation takes place early in the research phase, and not ex post. Such multifaceted and dynamic analysis is suitable for the complex and changing nature of world affairs.
  4. Stepping out of the ivory tower: scenario analysis exercises are often centered around a workshop, at which practitioners and academics of different disciplines come together. The interactive exercise creates shared knowledge and understanding, and functions as a platform of exchange between the two worlds. Policy-makers get the opportunity to contemplate long-term trends, and scholars learn what issues drive politics. This enables them to check and ultimately enhance the relevance of their work.

The world of international relations is a complicated and messy one. The shift towards a multi-order world is accompanied by sudden shifts in trajectories and strategic surprises. We believe scenario analysis is a useful tool for IR scholars to confront the complexity of today´s world and – in the best-case scenario – inspire the policy world to be prepared to the unexpected.

Monika Sus is an assistant professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences and a fellow at the Center for International Security at the Hertie School. Marcel Hadeed was a research associate at the Dahrendorf Forum between 2017 and 2019. They are the author of “Theory-infused and policy-relevant: On the usefulness of scenario analysis for international relations”, Contemporary Security Policy, which is available here.

 

Is this the end of the liberal international order?

Today, the liberal international order is in crisis with urgent attention needed if the order is to continue to be of relevance. Yet so far little action has been taken to repair or reform the order and the value of the liberal international order is increasingly questioned even from within its own ranks. The possible end of the liberal order is therefore a prospect to be taken seriously. 

The current malaise in the liberal international order is puzzling because although the order always has encountered a fair share of adversity and crisis, the order was thought to be resilient because on the one hand, it had a remarkable ability to adapt in response to crisis and change and, on the other hand, it was able to maintain stable institutional practices, which provided certainty and predictability for those living within its realm and working on its behalf. However, in the current situation, it is no longer clear exactly what the liberal order is, or should be, and those working within its institutions and on its behalf seem paralyzed and unable to undertake the necessary repair and reform.  

My recent article uses insights from the resilience-thinking literature supplemented with insights from the literature on social theory and ontological security, to understand why the necessary repair and reform of the liberal international order is not taking place.

The article develops a conceptual framework which links resilience and ontological security in order to better understand what makes an entity resilient and why agents only sometimes undertake the necessary action for maintaining its resilience. The framework may help us to better understand the very complex issues that face us today and can make us better prepared to meet the risks and challenges that clearly are facing the liberal international order. 

The conceptual framework allows me to trace the finer nuances in the present crisis, revealing that the liberal international order is currently being pummeled by three separate crises located in each of its constitutive elements–a crisis of leadership is challenging its traditional power patterns; a crisis of democracy is challenging its traditional principles and a crisis of multilateralism is challenging its traditional institutional patterns.

The three crises each go to the very essence of what we understand the liberal international order to be and they make it near impossible to maintain a stable identity, a strong narrative and reinforcing practices with detrimental effects on the ontological security of those we would normally expect to undertake the necessary reform and repair of the order. The three crises interact with each other in ways that further deepen liberal order’s crisis. As a result, the resilience of the liberal international order is in a bad–and currently–deteriorating condition. 

It is noteworthy that where previous crises primarily have been caused by externally generated pressure and contestation–which certainly is still a factor–the current three crises seem to be internally generated. Especially, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House and the emergence of populist politics, which have broken the post-war cross-party consensus on the value of the liberal international order, has added to the intensity of all three crises with significant implications for the liberal order’s ability to remain fit for its traditional purpose.

Although each of the three crises are well-documented in the expanding literature on the crisis in the liberal order, they have not so far been brought together within one analytical framework. The article brings all three crises to the forefront and demonstrates how each of the crises affect the liberal international order in detrimental ways. 

The article has both a theoretical and an empirical contribution. Theoretically, the article adds to resilience-thinking by adding an agent-level theoretical perspective as well as an ideal-type conceptualization of the social structure of entities within which resilience is forged. The article shows a plausible link between the resilience of the entity and the ontological security of the agents acting on its behalf.

Empirically, the article adds to our understanding of the current crisis of the liberal international order by identifying the three separate crises and placing them with each of the three constitutive elements of the liberal order and by demonstrating how each of the  crises affect both the resilience of liberal order as an entity and the ontological security of those “real people” who act on its behalf and are subject to its policies.

Unfortunately, the link between resilience and ontological security shows that although the liberal international order is in desperate need of repair and reform–those who should undertake necessary repairs and reforms lack ontological security and are not therefore able to invoke their agency to do so. As a result there is a significant danger that the liberal international order is indeed coming to an end. 

Trine Flockhart is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the author of “Is this the end? Resilience, ontological security, and the crisis of the liberal international order”, Contemporary Security Policy, which is available here.

Resilience and EU refugee policy: A smokescreen for political agendas?

“Resilience” enjoys widespread uptake across many and diverse domains – including security and crisis response. Shrouded in ambiguity and uncertainty, however, it may be just a buzzword as we know little about the implications of resilience as a strategy to insecurity and crisis. Exploring resilience in EU humanitarian and development policy and how it translates into practice in Jordan and Lebanon, we argue in a recent article that resilience-building may function as a smokescreen for buttressing “Fort Europe” against migrants and refugees. 

 “Resilience” enjoys widespread uptake across many and diverse domains, from technology to business management, to urban planning and counselling. The word stems from the Latin “resilire” – to leap or jump back. It gained traction in the 1970s, when the Canadian ecologist Holling defined resilience as the ability of ecological systems to absorb change and disturbance. Borrowing from Holling, risk scholars like Wildavsky viewed resilience as “the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back”. Wildavsky argued that resilience was a more effective and cheaper strategy to deal with risks than anticipation and prevention. From the 1990s onwards, resilience became an integral component of disaster risk reduction (DRR) programmes, aimed at minimising the impact of natural disasters and enhancing recovery.

Policymakers have recently started to use resilience in the context of man-made disasters and crisis. For example, resilience has been identified as a major leitmotif in the 2016 European Union (EU) Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy. Prior to the Global Strategy, resilience was already an important component of EU humanitarian and development policies, especially in the context of migration and forced displacement. The EU was not the first to use this buzzword: the UK placed resilience at the centre of its humanitarian and development aid in 2011. Shortly thereafter, USAID published policy and programme guidelines for “building resilience to recurrent crisis”. United Nations (UN) agencies and large international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) currently all have policies, guidelines and programmes aimed at building resilience. 

Despite its widespread uptake, uncertainty remains about what resilience is, how it translates into practice, and the implications of resilience-building as a response to insecurity and crisis, qualifying resilience as a buzzword. The ambiguity surrounding buzzwords often lead scholars and practitioners to dismiss them as empty and meaningless. Yet buzzwords generally espouse strong (normative) ideas about what they are supposed to bring about. The assumptions and rationales underlying buzzwords, moreover, frequently remain unquestioned, making them interesting to study. In our recent article, we examine the EU turn to resilience by analysing key EU humanitarian and development policies. Subsequently, we delve into an empirical example of resilience-building in Jordan and Lebanon to explore how this buzzword translates into practice.  

Our policy analysis yields two aspects that are key in EU resilience thinking. First, resilience-building requires humanitarian and development actors to be simultaneously involved in crisis response and to work closely together. The so-called “humanitarian-development nexus” resonates with older concepts aimed at bridging the ideological and institutional divide between humanitarian and development actors, such as Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development (LRRD). 

Second, resilience assigns significant importance to ‘the local’. This means, firstly, that the EU recognizes the importance of understanding context-specific vulnerabilities and their (root) causes, as well as what local capacities exist that humanitarian and development interventions could tap into, build upon, and strengthen. Next, resilience is strongly framed as the responsibility of national governments and local authorities. Finally, the EU constructs refugees in particular as an asset to host-country economies, their resilience dependent on access to host-countries’ formal labour markets. Refugees are turned into a development opportunity for refugee-hosting states – but at the same time constitute a threat to Europe.

How do these different aspects of resilience translate into practice in Jordan and Lebanon? Jordan and Lebanon host the largest number of Syrian refugees in respect to the size of their population. Government estimates indicate Jordan hosts up to 1.3 million refugees and Lebanon 1.5 million – respectively 13 and 25% of their population. In response to the challenges of Syria’s neighbouring countries, the multi-agency response framework – the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP) – was established in 2015. 

In line with EU thinking, the 3RP combines a humanitarian response to protect Syrian refugees with a development response to build the resilience of national government and affected host communities. Although the 3RP structure simultaneously engages humanitarian and development actors in the response, evidence shows that different funding modalities and tensions between (leading) UN agencies weaken rather than strengthen the humanitarian-development nexus in practice. 

Second, whereas the 3RP country chapters are officially under the leadership of the Jordanian and Lebanese government, significant challenges arise in practice. Especially the involvement of Lebanese authorities was limited at the start of the crisis, its later statements and measures straining its relationship with the international community. Evidence indicating that Lebanon may strategically maintain the precariousness of Syrian refugees’ lives, moreover, points at the need for caution in insisting on national governments’ responsibility. 

Finally, the same framing of refugees as a development opportunity underlies initiatives like the EU-Jordan Trade Agreement, which promises access to EU markets in exchange for refugee work permits. The nature of the Jordanian and Lebanese labour market – in combination with structural political, social and economic problems – makes refugees’ employment as a pathway to resilience an unlikely reality. It also constructs refugees as a commodity, to be exchanged for aid. 

In conclusion, the way in which resilience is understood and the challenges it generates when translating resilience into practice, make us wonder whether this buzzword is not just a smokescreen for ulterior political motives. Building the resilience of “countries of origin and transit” may conveniently prevent migration, meanwhile externalizing the control of migration and forced displacement to crisis-affected states. As Jordan and Lebanon continue to struggle with the impact of the crisis, the EU’s strategy of refugee containment may instead increase their vulnerability, ultimately threatening rather than safeguarding the security of Europe.

Rosanne Anholt and Giulia Sinatti work at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. They are the authors of “Under the guise of resilience: The EU approach to migration and forced displacement in Jordan and Lebanon”, Contemporary Security Policy, which is available here.

Changes to the editorial board

Contemporary Security Policy has an active Editorial Board, which reflects its aims and scope and its worldwide audience. The membership of Editorial Board is updated on an annual basis to capture emerging research agendas and to give new colleagues the opportunity to contribute to the development of the journal. I have made a number of changes to the Editorial Board.

First of all, Terry Terriff has decided to step down from the Editorial Board. He was the co-editor of the journal from 1991 to 2004 and has served on the Editorial Board since. When he took the reins, the journal was still known by its original name as the Journal of Arms Control and Disarmament. Together with Stuart Croft, he transformed it into Contemporary Security Policy as we know it today. I want to thank Terry Terriff for his exceptional service of nearly three decades. Second, several other long-standing members of the Editorial Board have also decided to step down. They include Lawrence Freedman, Keith Krause, Andrew Mack, Derek McDougall, Patrick Morgan, and David Sorenson. They have all served on the Editorial Board for more than a decade and have made valuable contributions to the journal. I equally want to thank them for their service. Their expertise and experience as leading scholars will be missed.

It is also time to welcome new colleagues. To reflect the development of the journal, I have invited four new colleagues to join the Editorial Board. These are highly qualified scholars, from a variety of countries, who bring along exciting new expertise. Many of them are from the new generation. All of them share a commitment to high quality publishing in peer-reviewed journals. They are also dedicated in terms of policy impact and outreach.

The new colleagues on the Editorial Board are:

  • Mely Caballero-Anthony (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
  • Myriam Dunn Cavelty (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
  • Jeffrey A. Friedman (Dartmouth College, USA)
  • Courtney J. Fung (The University of Hong Kong, China)

The Editorial Board will continue to be updated in the future.

Hylke Dijkstra, Editor-in-Chief

Resilience and local ownership in the EU’s Eastern Partnership policy

The EU Global Strategy (2016) and the Review of the European Neighbourhood Policy (2015) initiated a new approach in the EU’s neighbourhood policy, with resilience and local ownership being hallmarked as the guiding principles. In a new article, Irina Petrova and Laure Delcour explore what meaning the EU attaches to these concepts and whether the recent narrative shift also brought about changes in the EU’s practices in the neighbourhood.

In the face of increasing instability and multiple crises, the European Union has recently embraced the concept of resilience as a governance strategy. As argued by Nathalie Tocci, “the EU acknowledged the need to build risk and uncertainty into its policies: The fact that developments in our surrounding regions (and beyond) are not simply beyond our full comprehension, but also and above all beyond our control.” Resilience therefore implies a greater reliance on the partners’ domestic structures. This puts local ownership at the heart of the EU’s foreign policy approach.

Although resilience and local ownership have been, for over a decade, studied in the context of peacebuilding and development, the extension of these concepts to other EU policies has yet to be scrutinized. We seek to enrich the understanding of the interplay between these two concepts by exploring how they are used in the neighbourhood policy (more specifically, its eastern dimension), a key foreign policy priority of the EU.

Our analysis of the EU’s foreign policy documents highlights a narrative shift. While the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) policy was previously built on the modernization theory (according to which external actors provide ready-made policy templates to be applied by domestic actors), after the 2015/2016 policy revision it increasingly refers to tailor-made cooperation templates and broad societal involvement. This signals a shift to a hybrid perspective on resilience-building, whereby resilience envisages the adaptation of domestic structures based on external templates, but only under the condition that they fit well with the local context.

Yet to what extent has this narrative turn also brought about actual change in the EU’s practices in its eastern neighbourhood? To answer this question, we traced the EU’s objectives, instruments and mechanisms in three pivotal areas of cooperation with eastern neighbours: trade, mobility, and good governance. Our findings reveal similar patterns across all three sectors. 

First, in contrast to broad conceptualization of resilience and local ownership in the EU’s rhetoric, the toolbox used in the EaP reflects a narrow operationalization of these concepts. For instance, policy instruments used as part of the visa liberalisation process or the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements indicate the EU’s framing that resilience of the EaP states can only be enhanced via the adoption of Western/European (or EU-promoted) standards. Despite the promise of a tailor-made approach, the cases of Azerbaijan and Belarus are particularly illustrative of the fact that approximation with European standards is still expected (albeit on the smaller scale) even from those partners who insisted on building a truly common bilateral agenda.  

Second, all three sectors show that the EU has left little scope (if any) to accommodate the preferences of those countries seeking closer ties with the EU, when these preferences diverged from its own vision. This continued reliance on the modernization paradigm in resilience-building reduced the space for the local ownership. 

Third, limited local ownership implies a logic of subordination between domestic and  external actors. This is despite the emphasis placed on partnership, ownership and dialogue in the EU’s narrative. Hence, our article confirms that the vision of the EU’s resilience-building in the neighbourhood aims at an effective governance of the EaP countries, rather than the genuine empowerment of local actors [hyperlink to the Introduction to the SI]. Therefore, if the EU is serious about adopting resilience as a way to navigate in an increasingly unstable and uncertain world, a substantial overhaul of policy practices is still required to match the narrative turn.

Irina Petrova is a doctoral researcher at the Leuven International and European Studies (LINES) Institute at KU Leuven. Laure Delcour is an Associate Professor in European Studies and International Relations, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle (Paris). The are the authors of “From principle to practice? The resilience–local ownership nexus in the EU Eastern Partnership policy”, Contemporary Security Policy, which is available here

Deconstructing Scholarship on Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria

08/09/11- Mogadishu, Somalia – AMISOM Troops stand in Mogadishu stadium, the former al-Shabaab headquarters.

Mohamed Haji Ingiriis argues that scholars should develop a better understanding of insurgency groups in Africa, such as Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, including their origins and the state functions they provide.

Insurgent groups in Africa are to a greater extent attracting the attention of a new generation of scholars who are bent on deconstructing the previous misunderstandings of the activities of the insurgent movements. As they increase their local and regional operations, African insurgent groups remain resistant and resilient and frustrated in all military attempts to defeat them.

Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria are the two most crucial and critical insurgent groups in Africa. Because they do not constrain and confine them to insurgent activities, it is important to reconsider their other activities to move beyond the preoccupation of only exploring the aspect of their terror attacks.

Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram undertake more than insurgent activities. As a result, there is no serious scholar who can confidently call them as “terrorist organisations,” because for them terrorism is not an end, but a means to an end. They use terror attacks as a strategy (albeit evil) in a tactic toolbox than an essence of an organisational ultimate policy (see, for example: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/horn-sahel-and-rift/).

When examining Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, a new generation of Africanist scholars began to use the terms such as “extremist movements” or “extremist organisations”; “insurgent movements” or “insurgent organisations”; “Islamist movements” or “Islamist organisations”; “militant movements” or “militant organisations”; “radical movements” or “radical organisations” rather than making sentimental descriptions such as “terrorists.”

The new reconsideration and reconceptualisation of Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram has been obliged by the very fact that, in opposition to the Western-supported secular governments of Somalia and Nigeria, Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram have adopted state systems and structures on the basis of parallel Islamic governments (obviously with their own strict scriptural interpretation) in the areas under their control. 

The state-like rules of Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram provide more than social and security services that the governments of Somalia and Nigeria have failed to provide to the local population. Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram have achieved to capture and continue to rule peripheral societies where the failed state of Somalia and the fragile state of Nigeria cannot reach and as such where the provision of security is non-exist.

Despite their position as parallel governments, the ways in which Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram are often emotionally vilified is something that blinds and blocks us (as scholars studying those insurgencies in Africa) to present the everyday reality exist in the areas under their control. With the label of ‘terrorist organisations’, observers can hardly adventure into the other aspects of Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram.

However, it is thus quite difficult to overlook the fact that both Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram began as popular movements providing alternative governments to local populations, even though their approach and engagement had fundamental differences, because Boko Haram started as a social movement offering social services to marginalised communities in northern Nigeria, while Al-Shabaab started as a jihadist network right from the beginning.

Al-Shabaab was born out of the brutal Ethiopian invasion of southern Somalia in the winter of 2006, an invasion approved by the United States and allowed by the United Kingdom and the rest of the West. In the beginning, Al-Shabaab was not separate from the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) which emerged in the summer of 2006, but its founders behaved and pretended they were ruling a separate entity. Yet, Al-Shabaab could not exist without the legitimacy it had enjoyed under the shadow of the UIC.

In Somalia, scholars studying Al-Shabaab do not squabble about their research findings of Al-Shabaab. Whilst they backbite each other behind the backdoor privately, scholars tend to avoid disputing each other publicly. In contrast to Nigeria, scholars studying Boko Haram are arguing over the emergence and existence of Boko Haram to the extent that ideological positions in the form of left wing and right wing exist in the scholarship on Boko Haram, also including personal insults in the discussion.

Overall, nonetheless, there is a burgeoning scholarship on Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, but most of this scholarship is concerned more with Boko Haram than with Al-Shabaab. Academic and non-academic books have been published about these insurgent movements, even though more on Boko Haram than Al-Shabaab. Astonishingly, the third largest African insurgent movement Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) has not been attracted a book of its own.

Arguably, Nigeria is the most populated country in Africa and the highest oil-producing state in Africa and as such is much more important than Somalia, the most failed state in the whole world, but is not Al-Shabaab, the only insurgent movement in the world currently controlling a large swathes of territory, more important than Boko Haram, which is only concentrated in small parts of northern Nigeria?

Mohamed Haji Ingiriis is a Somali academic specialising in Somali history and politics at the University of Oxford. He is a research fellow at the CRP, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of “Building peace from the margins in Somalia: The case for political settlement with Al-Shabaab“, Contemporary Security Policy, 39(4), pp. 512-536.