Stabilising the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa

Regional Actors and New Approaches

Victor Gervais, Saskia van Genugten, Victor Gervais, Saskia van Genugten

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030252298
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the changing dynamics of stabilisation efforts in the Middle East and North Africa. Written by recognised scholars and practitioners in the field, this volume provides a rich overview of the broader spectrum of stabilisation. The topics range from a comprehensive set of lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq to transitional justice and reconciliation efforts in Tunisia and international attempts to protect the region's cultural heritage. Ultimately, this edited collection presents a comprehensive look at the attempts to increase stability in the MENA region.

© The Author(s) 2020

V. Gervais, S. van Genugten (eds.)Stabilising the Contemporary Middle East and North AfricaMiddle East Todayhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25229-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Victor Gervais¹ and Saskia van Genugten²

(1)

Emirates Diplomatic Academy, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

(2)

Ministry of Defence, The Hague, The Netherlands

End Abstract

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been characterised by great strife and conflict in the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, leaving many of the previously prevailing internal and external political balances uprooted. Protracted wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen have further complicated the already delicate political and social fabrics of this region. Fuelled from within as well as from the outside, the current instability in the region is likely to continue for decades to come as old rivalries have flared up and new ones have emerged, exacerbated by the shocks of the uprisings in the Arab world that started in 2011. Within this context, traditional Western ‘security exporters’ have reviewed their engagement in the region, while regional players have stepped up their involvement as they have increased ambitions to influence the course and outcome of ongoing conflicts in their neighbourhood. As a consequence, international interventions in the MENA region are increasingly carried out by coalitions that bring together the traditional Western players, most notably the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and France, and regional states such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. This was the case in the intervention in Libya and to a lesser extent in Yemen, as well as with the broader Global Coalition against Daesh, where all these state actors have been united in a common goal that entails stabilising the MENA region—even if they at times disagree on what that means.

Two decades into this century, policymakers from across the political spectrum and in many different countries are increasingly united in advocating ‘stabilisation’ as the way to contain the security risks stemming from the region, including radicalism and excessive and uncontrollable migration. Gradually, the concepts of democratisation and liberalisation that had dominated the agenda moved further to the background, and the idea that what the region really needed was security and stability gained in prominence. Indeed, a new concept of ‘stabilisation’ has emerged in recent years as the central guiding rationale behind international interventions and as a ‘platform for rethinking engagement in fragile settings’. ¹ This new emphasis is not unique to the MENA region, with stabilisation activities taking place in contexts as different as Mali, Haiti and Sri Lanka. The first appearance of this emerging paradigm arguably came with the international reaction to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, there was a reduced threat of large interstate wars. ² Instead, powerful players started focusing on consolidating fragile and failed states, as the real threat was believed to derive from ungoverned spaces that turned into safe havens for terrorism and transnational crime. Under the umbrella term of stabilisation, experiments with blending military, political, economic, humanitarian and developmental tools, as well as elements of (transitional) justice and reconciliation, became the norm. Predicated on the idea that development and security are mutually reinforcing, stabilisation efforts have striven to promote legitimate political authority in conflict-affected countries by using a range of integrated civilian and military instruments with the aim to reduce violence, give people basic livelihoods and lay the groundwork for longer-term recovery. In some cases, interventions have been rooted in the belief that peace and stability can be best achieved by ‘tackling structural sources of conflict through the promotion of responsive institutions, human rights, rule of law, accountable security services and broad-based social and economic development’. ³

But unfortunately, for all the experiments in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, the stated ambitions of stabilisation operations and the realities on the ground have remained far apart. International stabilisation efforts in the region tend to be costly, risky and in many regards, thankless. Especially in the wider MENA region, success stories, such as in parts of Afghanistan and initially in Iraq’s Anbar Province, have remained short-lived. ⁴ Partly, this is explained by the fact that many of the conflicts are fuelled by root causes that are difficult to tackle and include a mix of political, socio-economic, demographic and religious-cultural factors. The ongoing diversification in the region in terms of political constellations and preferred external allies also plays a role. At the same time, it also likely indicates a mismatch of instruments and intentions at the level of those external actors engaged with stabilisation efforts. The past decades have generated a large number of case studies, insights and lessons learned to draw from in this regard. ⁵ With this edited volume, we aim at documenting and analysing some of these recent efforts and lessons, both those efforts undertaken and lessons learnt by traditional Western actors, and also those undertaken and learnt by regional actors that have more recently started to raise their profile.

Distinguishing Stabilisation as a Concept: The Primacy of Politics

While the concept of stabilisation has become highly popular in policy, security and donor circles, it has also raised new issues, with regard to both its practice and its conceptualisation. Indeed, despite some broad agreement over its parameters and its frequent use in relation to current international efforts to increase security in the broader MENA region and elsewhere, there seems to be no actual consensus on what is meant by ‘stabilisation’. In particular, ambiguity prevails with regard to what the end goal is (other than an undefined state of stability), what activities it includes and when it begins or ends. Similarly, disagreement persists over whether stabilisation is a set of activities, a strategic objective or a combination of the two, which tends to generate confusion and exacerbate the core challenges of coordinating development, defence and diplomacy. ⁶

There is also a lingering question about how stabilisation efforts differ from or are linked to other approaches and concepts. Most notably, the ways in which military force and development assistance are expected to translate into local support bear a striking resemblance to counter-insurgency (COIN) practices carried out throughout the past century, as well as to aspects of the colonial and post-colonial nation-building enterprise. ⁷ In recent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as well, stabilisation has often been defined within COIN doctrine’s sequential steps of ‘clear, hold and build’. Specifically, in the Afghan case, after military forces ‘cleared’ an area of insurgents, the area was then stabilised—or ‘held’—and ‘built’ with longer-term recovery and development programmes aimed at fostering local resilience and legitimacy. ⁸ Yet, in recent years, the scope of stabilisation activities has greatly expanded. Moving away from mid-conflict, military-centric responses akin to counter-insurgency, stabilisation operations of the past decade have come to encompass a wide range of policies and practices intended to ‘fix’ conflict-affected or fragile countries. They have also drawn on a wider variety of actors—from police personnel and specialists to urban planners, relief workers, developments experts, diplomats, (state-led) businesses and others—and have often entailed a wider transformation in local patterns of governance than the more traditional civilian-led activities that supported COIN.

Similarly, the concept of stabilisation is often conflated with ‘reconstruction’. While the distinction between the two concepts is not always instructive, ⁹ key differences can be identified. Stabilisation activities are designed to address short-term priorities and focus on contested or recently secured areas, while development is regarded as a more long-term endeavour and focuses on already secured areas. Also, while reconstruction and stabilisation projects and programmes can be similar, they are usually undertaken for different reasons. As a recent report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) clearly puts it: ‘a development programme might build a school because education triggers a process that leads to greater long-term prosperity and development – educated children are more likely to grow up to be healthier and more qualified to administer government, succeed in business, and help grow the economy. In contrast, a stabilisation programme might build a school to trigger a process that leads to improved security: the school would demonstrate the government is working on behalf of the community, the local population would come to prefer government services over the return of insurgents, and insurgents would lose control over territory (they previously held)’. ¹⁰ As such, while development work usually requires a degree of insulation from political dynamics, combined with clear frameworks of operation to guarantee both effectiveness and accountability for longer-term objectives, stabilisation programmes, for their part, necessitate both direct political control and maximum flexibility. ¹¹

Part of the same overlapping continuum, the distinction between humanitarian response and stabilisation is also often blurred. According to the OECD, humanitarian assistance is ‘short-term help that saves lives, alleviates suffering, and maintains human dignity through the provision of shelter, food and water, hygiene, and urgent health care’. ¹² In this regard, the key distinction between humanitarian and stabilisation activities seems to be that the former is based strictly on need, while stabilisation tends to prioritise assistance primarily intended to bolster governing capacity (e.g. the ability of authorities to deliver services) and legitimacy. ¹³ Whereas humanitarian responses are universal and non-judgmental, stabilisation responses thus come with a political agenda. The stabilisation discourse is just as well linked to the literature around state resilience, which deals with the vulnerability of a country’s key institutions to external and internal shocks. ¹⁴ In a ‘resilient’ democratic system, for example, general elections would not lead to the breakdown of state institutions, as happened in Libya after its June 2014 parliamentary elections. Bringing in ‘resilience’ adds a certain level of sustainability to the end goal of stability.

Taking the above comparisons into consideration, the primacy of politics could be seen as the starting point of any attempt to identify the foundational dimensi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Changing Contexts
• Part II. New Actors
• Part III. Emerging Issues
• Back Matter