Global Governance, Local Rule: Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan as territorial politics (original) (raw)
Related papers
The concept of controlling territorial space informs Western conventions of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. The Islamic State surprised the West when it recently captured dozens of cities across Iraq and Syria. Eradicating failed states and ungoverned territories vis-à-vis more robust state-building also forms the backbone of U.S. efforts to reduce violence, provide order, and build stronger societies. I argue that clearing territory, while important, should be selectively employed. Greater stateness does not always correlate with reductions in violence, and conversely not all “ungoverned spaces” are terrorist safe havens. A number of these areas are natural, if non-integrated, parts of the international system. Second, I posit that state-building can have its own negative externalities, such as pushing nonstate actors across state borders and thereby externalizing internal conflicts. The policy implications of my theory are twofold: First, territory is often a poor metric to capture military progress in the fight violent nonstate actors; second, fixing failed or fragile states does not always reduce the threat of violence but often just relocates it, as nonstate actors get squeezed out of areas of increasing stateness and move toward areas of weak stateness.
Limits of internationalized state-building: The stabilization of post- 2001 Afghanistan
2014
The September 11 terrorist attacks put Afghanistan and other fragile states in the spotlight of international attention. They were exposed as breeding grounds for transnational terrorism and recognized as a crucial threat to global security. State-building, the approach adopted by the international community to ‘fix’ fragile states, has become a major preoccupation and opened fragile states to interventionist and regulative policies. As seen in Afghanistan though, these international efforts are not bringing the desired stability. The objective of the paper is to understand why state-building is not delivering expected results by unpacking and analyzing the key concepts of fragility, internationalized state-building and contemporary conflict through a critical post-colonial perspective. This leads to a broader examination of what constitutes state legitimacy, what fosters or inhibits stability and how this is influenced by the external component of the state-building processes. Grou...
A grounded theory of local ownership as meta-conflict in Afghanistan
Cooperation and Conflict, 2019
Internationally-sponsored interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states are often resisted by domestic actors who have deep local knowledge, profoundly different expectations of political processes, and keen desires to shape their country’s future. Many forms of local resistance can damage or stall the progress of externally driven peacebuilding, but the critical peacebuilding literature has suffered from an inability to articulate coherent strategic alternatives to the dominant paradigm of liberal interventionism. This paradigm, we argue, is actually part of what fuels continued resistance: as external actors seek to implant liberal democratic norms into local bureaucratic and political cultures, countless sites of conflict emerge, with local and international actors jockeying between and amongst each other for position, resources, and control over the specificities of reform. These struggles – effectively a competition over local ownership – are at the centre of peacebuilding and will determine short- and long-term intervention outcomes. Focusing on the case of political reform in Afghanistan, this article develops a grounded theory of ownership as ‘meta-conflict,’ in which participant voices from local and international peacebuilding leaders, working in-country, are given a primary role in determining the compatibility of the donor community’s prevailing liberal agenda with local requirements for building peace.
The Interplay Between Territorial Control and Violent Non-State Actors (VNSAs)
World Politics and the Challenges for International Security, 2022
The conundrum of the violent non-state actors (VNSAs) became the center of gravity in global politico-military settings especially after the disappearance of “patron-proxy” relationships. The threat to the authority of the central administration in internationally recognized boundaries by both deploying an assortment of tactics and more sophisticated structural stand points strengthened their competence. On the other side, social, economic, religious, environmental, and demographic conditions of the current century also contributed minacious divaricated frondeurs to sprout up. This chapter examines the interplay between territorial control and VNSA. There are empirical case studies related to the position of the VNSAs in the relevant literature, but little is known about the interplay between them that leads to governance functions and even foreign policy. The intention is to substantiate how these actors created legitimacy that ended up in almost all state activities although they ...
Interventionism and the Fear of Urban Agency in Afghanistan and Iraq
In this book chapter, I investigate state weakness in the Greater Middle East as a hegemonic discourse that eclipses state-building effects of sub-national non-violent collective action in countries emerging from externally induced regime change. Focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq,I posit that this eclipse reflects a level of analysis problem grounded in a predominantly statist conceptualization of governance. This characterization of governance as state-led enforcement is rooted in post-9/11 hegemonic concerns about state weakness and failure. A decade of this discourse has sensitized policy-makers in Washington and major European capitals to this discourse and resulting assessments of national-level governance performance. However, these arguments and instruments preclude a deeper understanding of sub-state dynamics as a potential building block for both human security and improved service delivery.
Wroclaw Review of Law, Administration & Economics
Some say that we live in a post-national world, in which affiliations are not solely or even primarily based on identities founded on nationality but rather on ideological, religious, and even economic considerations, sometimes related to transnational actors such as religious groups or multinational structures. 1 Furthermore, the global social landscape challenges States in different ways. Among other things, States face challenges of actors as varied as transnational corporations, drug cartels, or terrorist and rebel groups, many of which have something that States do not: territorial and political flexibility. Indeed, many non-state actors focus on narrower issues while States have a myriad of responsibilities, and are also freer to pursue their aims across borders, ignoring territorial constraints, while States and their power are still largely determined by the territories they exert jurisdiction over. 2 To this, it must be added that non-state actors sometimes have considerable power that rivals even the power of some States. We can think, among others, of some transnational corporations and multinational groups whose economic resources surpass those of developing countries, or
2017
Led by Brookings Senior Fellows Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shadi Hamid, and Harold Trinkunas, the Brookings Seminar on Reconstituting Local Orders seeks to better understand how domestic political order breaks down and is reconstituted. It draws out policy implications and recommends more effective action for local governments and the international community. It examines these issues by bringing together top-level experts and policymakers. The present disorder in the international system is significantly augmented by the breakdown of domestic order across a number of key states. Around the globe, the politics of identity, ideology and religion are producing highly polarized societies and deepening conflicts among non-state actors and between non-state actors and the state. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring disrupted long calcified political systems in ways that are still producing unpredictable effects on the regional order. The collapse of political order in Libya has wideranging consequences for governance across the Sahel, intensifying Mali and Nigeria's fragility and highlighting the many deficiencies of their states. Meanwhile, Russia's annexation of Crimea was facilitated by a breakdown of political order in Ukraine, and Russia's aggressive external posture also partially reflects and compensates for its internal weaknesses. But even emerging powers such as India and Brazil face profound and persistent governance problems, including in public safety and the rule of law. Among the topics explored in the Seminar are the construction of institutions and counter-institutions in the Middle East and South Asia; the role of external interveners and local militias in conflict settings; and forms of governance in slums and prisons, such as by criminal groups. The Seminar is a collaborative research space that serves as a launching pad for cutting edge debate and research around questions of local and transnational order. The core of the analytical and policy-prescriptive exploration focuses on how political and social orders are reconstituted, the resulting impact on regional order and the international system, and what roles the international community should play. Among the products of the Seminar are analytical and policy papers as well as shorter articles and blog posts that examine crossregional comparisons and identify policy implications and recommendations.
Multidimensional Security, “Ungoverned Areas” and Non‐State Actors
Calgary Papers in Military and Strategic Studies, 2013
This article discusses the theoretical flaws as well as evidence concerning the shortcomings of the concept of hemispheric security that has tacit underpinnings related to standard doctrine of counterinsurgent and stabilization operations, particularly in dealing with the challenge represented by non‐state actors criminalized by the state‐centric multidimensional security doctrine. Lack of nuance in this regard has led policymakers to characterize territories not under control of state‐centered governance structures as potential threats to national security. Hence the concepts of “ungoverned” or “undergoverned” areas negatively express the preference of states for state‐centered territorial governance structures, and legitimize international crusades to criminalize non‐state actors that govern these territories not following proper “democratic governance standards.” Contempt for territorial “vacuums” outside the control of a nationstate may lead to wrongful demonization and criminalization of non‐state actors that are able to legitimately deliver to a compliant social base adequate governance services and goods more effectively than the nominally “legal” territorial sovereign. Such policies may lead to more instability in the future without bringing the world any closer to resembling the simplistic, nationstate based “political map of the world.”