Global Politics and Security Review
2009
Introduction
2
Myanmar in ASEAN: An Asset or a Liability? Ko Ko Aung
3
State-building and the law of occupation in Iraq: Promoting democracy or inhibiting
imperialism Philip Robson
14
The ‘securitization’ of migration: A discourse of discrimination? Zoë Wilson
26
The limits of empire: Western strategic failure in sub-Saharan Africa Daniel
O’Sullivan
38
The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Transformation Agenda: Influential
Advocates, Flawed Assumptions Charles Brown
49
The freedom to run, fight and die: a study of civil liberties in Afghanistan during the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Ferelith Gaze
61
1
Welcome to the Global Politics and Security Review – a showcase of some of the best Masters
dissertations by students from Birkbeck’s Global Politics and International Security and Global
Governance programmes. The six essays of this volume are edited versions of dissertations written
by Birkbeck students, selected on the basis of their academic excellence and the breadth and
importance of their subject matter. By compiling this review it is hoped that current and future
students at Birkbeck will be able to learn from and be inspired by the work of students who came
before them.
All of the essays of this review speak to some of the most important political and social issues of our
time in the international arena: the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan – with their implications for
state-building and contemporary warfare - loom large in a number of the essays, as does the issue of
human rights. Beyond their relevance to those events that have dominated the headlines of the first
decade of the twenty-first century, these essays also encompass many of the long-standing debates in
international affairs of continued pressing concern to academics, policy-makers, and civil society:
the role and nature of the state; great power rivalry; imperialism; and how to live in a world marked
simultaneously by both increasing integration and fragmentation in the political, economic and
cultural spheres.
The essays as they appear in this volume have been heavily edited to about half of their original
length. The intention has been to present the reader with the core arguments and ideas of the authors,
rather than to reproduce their work in its entirety. Inevitably, therefore, much has been omitted from
the essays in terms of background, and elaboration and extension of ideas beyond the central
argument. All effort has been made to preserve the spirit of the original work, but the reader should
bear in mind that the essays that follow are only a snapshot of the extensive research and analysis
and of the development of ideas and arguments that the authors put into their dissertations.
Our profound and sincere thanks go out to the six former students who very kindly consented to have
their work edited for inclusion in this review – their work speaks for itself.
The Editorial Team
2
Myanmar in ASEAN: An Asset or a Liability?
Ko Ko Aung, M.Sc. Global Politics
1. Introduction
For ten years now since Myanmar has become a member of ASEAN, the relationship between the
ASEAN and Myanmar has never been trouble free. While proponents argue ‘ASEAN Way’ works
better than Western approach of sanction and isolation, a decade long co-operation, or noncooperation, evidences that Myanmar being a member of ASEAN is increasingly a predicament.
This paper argues the ‘ASEAN Way’ is grossly ineffective to persuade Myanmar from making a
serious political change, consequently hindering deeper integration of ASEAN as a whole.
The word ‘ASEAN Way’ is preferred by its leaders. It can be understood as ASEAN’s desire
for independence from what is perceived as ‘Western Way’ in Asia. While ASEAN leaders seem to
accept, at least in principle, universal values such as human rights and democracy, which are the
values originated from ‘the West’, they tend to reject ‘importing’ those values the same way as
they are practised in the western countries. A common assertion by ASEAN leaders is what is
called ‘Asian Value’ which is closely linked to the culture and practices in Asia. The word ‘Asian
Value’ has been highly politicised and it was championed by Lee Kwan Yu and also staunchly
advocated by Mahathia Mohammad, former prime ministers of Singapore and Malaysia
respectively. One understanding of ‘Asian Value’ was written in Los Angeles Times by Ian
Buruma:
Asians, according to this theory, have their own values, which include - among such
things as thrift, obedience to authority and the sacrifice of individual to collective
interests - the notion that nations should not stick their noses into the affairs of others.1
This element of ‘Asian Value’ combined with the ‘ASEAN Way’ in effect has been accused of
being used to shield authoritarian countries like Myanmar from harsh criticism of the West.
Singapore Foreign Minister S. Jayakuma offered an account of what involves in ‘ASEAN Way’:
the ASEAN Way stresses informality, organizational minimalism, inclusiveness,
intensive consultation leading to consensus and peaceful resolution of disputes.2
This notion of ‘ASEAN Way’ is very similar to Joseph Nye’s theory of ‘Soft Power’ although they
are not exactly the same. For Nye, soft power is ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction
rather than coercion or payments.’3 This is an alternative way of wielding power than traditional
methods of solving the problems using military force. ‘ASEAN Way’ conforms to Nye’s idea of
avoiding use of force but the point of departure is that it is not just about persuasion and imitation
but also about inclusion and integration. This is what Amitav Achaya called creating ‘we feeling’.4
While Nye’s soft power emphasis on promoting values – by way of movies, media, ideas, way of
doing things etc. – the ASEAN Way is exercised by engaging and socializing.5 Just like ‘Asian
Values’, the ASEAN Way considers Asian culture as somewhat a homogeneous entity throughout
the region despite enormous diversity among and even within individual countries. It seems the
politicized version of Asian culture is defined in a negative sense against the differences with other
regions rather than similarities within the region. It tends to assume that there is a unique culture in
Asia which is not the same as cultures from other regions – Europe, America, Africa, etc.
For the purpose of this paper, ‘ASEAN soft power’ is used in the context specific to
Myanmar in wielding alternative power by ASEAN in an attempt to change the political system of
the country from military authoritarianism to one that is acceptable for the ASEAN countries by
using the policy of ‘ASEAN Way’. It involves ASEAN principles of ‘face saving’, ‘noninterference’ and ‘constructive engagement’, as well as criticizing the country behind the public
1
LA Times, 03.06.08
Quoted in Achaya, A., Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia (Routledge: 2001)
3
Nye, J., Soft Power: the means to success in world politics (Public Affairs: 2004)
4
Achaya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia
5
Ibid.
2
3
eyes, although frustrations sometimes led to harsh words spilled over to public sphere by some
leaders of ASEAN.
For Myanmar, ASEAN is a perfect ground for it to associate by joining as a member. It is a
norm base organization which requires little commitment compare to rule base organizations such
as EU or NAFTA. The fact that there is no immediate prospect of transferring sovereignty to a
supra-state institution makes ASEAN more attractive for Myanmar to be part of. Any attempt by
ASEAN to introduce a rule that can potentially infringe sovereignty – human rights council for
instance – is likely to be rejected by Myanmar. And the policy of making decision by consensus
means every country has a veto, including Myanmar. As a country that consider security as a
priority over everything else, rational for Myanmar government is a zero-sum calculation
concerning with any political concession which may be taken as a sign of weakness that can lead to
losing control over political power. Myanmar government’s view of joining ASEAN is reflected in
an article by Khin Ohn Thant, a government official, written for a forum of ASEAN summit in
2001.6 She suggested two reasons. Firstly, by joining ASEAN, Myanmar has reacted to the
challenges of globalization at the end of Cold War realizing that it cannot isolate itself from the
international community. Secondly, after agreeing ceasefire with up to seventeen rebel groups
during the late 1980s and early 1990s freed it up to concentrate on international relations. There is
some truth in that Myanmar reacted to the impacts of globalization. Years of self-imposed isolation
has brought the country down from a leading economy in the region to the level of a least
developed country in the world by the UN standard. There have been a number of cross border
issues as well – problems, such as, drug trafficking, refugees and illegal immigrants – but Myanmar
is not a receiving country. Moreover, if Myanmar is reacted to the impact of globalization in the
area of economy, its reaction is only a half-measure because Myanmar’s market liberalization is far
from free. So far, Joining AFTA as part of a package of joining ASEAN has not increased
Myanmar’s trade within the region substantial enough to develop the country. The other claim that
ceasefire agreements helped Myanmar to concentrate on external relation did not sell very well. As
an example, when U Nu was prime minister in 1950s, Myanmar had excellent relations with
countries in the region and beyond despite the level of insurgency which was not better than in
1980s. Then, Myanmar was a founding member of Non-aligned movement and a signatory to many
important international agreements including the GATT. More realistic and compelling reason was
that Myanmar needed to divert pressure of sanction and isolation from the west because of its
human rights records and failure to live up to its own promises to transfer power to a civilian
government. Khin Ohn Thant herself highlighted the official position stated in government
controlled news paper, the New Light of Myanmar, soon after it became a full member of the
ASEAN:
•
•
•
•
Myanmar, through ASEAN, can now meet the groups wishing to pose a threat to her
collectively, and make her attitude known to them in a specific and precise terms and act
accordingly.
Opportunities emerged to open the door wider politically and economically with the help,
understanding and sympathy of fellow ASEAN members.
With greater co-operation with the friends in the region in various sectors, Myanmar does not
have to place more emphasis on investments from the other parts of the world (Western
hemisphere) than that from its own region.
With more contacts and communications among the peoples of the region in multifarious
fields, the ten nations, with a common historical background, sharing common cultural
traditions and colonial experience, can now formulate specific characteristics of ASEAN. 7
It is clear from the above that political reason to circumvent western pressure was dominated in
making decision for Myanmar to join ASEAN.
Arguably, the most important attraction to Myanmar for ASEAN is the growing influence
of rising China. Beginning from the 1980s, China abandoned the policy of supporting the
6
Quoted in Mya Than & Gate, C. (eds.), ASEAN Enlargement: impacts and implications, (Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies 2001)
7
The New Light of Myanmar, quoted in Mya Than, Myanmar’s External Trade: an overview in the Southeast
Asian context (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 1992)
4
Communist Party of Burma (CPB). That policy shift compounded with resentment of ethnic armed
groups against the control of CPB led to the split of once the strongest armed rebellion in the
history of Burma. Almost all the communist splinter groups and allies separately reached ceasefire
agreements with Myanmar government throughout early 1990s8. Soon after the State Law and
Order Restoration Council (SLORC) came into power, exchange of high level visits between
Myanmar and China started since 1989 and the relation between the two countries has been
growing ever stronger9. Over the years, China becomes one of Myanmar’s major arm suppliers.10
The key question is whether ASEAN can persuade Myanmar to undertake political
liberalization. Because ASEAN always seeks consensus on making any important decision, it was
divided on Burma from the outset. When Myanmar’s accession to ASEAN was debated in 1992,
Philippine and Indonesia supported but Malaysia opposed the idea of inviting the foreign minister
of the country as a guest to attend the ministerial meeting in Manila. Due to differences in opinion,
invitation for Myanmar was deferred until 1993.11 At that time, Malaysia’s foreign minister urged
the ASEAN to demand a time-table for political liberalization in Myanmar. In the end, ASEAN had
to wait for ten years before Myanmar eventually came up with a timetable. The Myanmar
government announced in August 2004 a vague plan called “seven-step road map” to transform the
country into a democracy albeit without a concrete time frame.12 Only after the mass
demonstrations in September 2007, the government finally set the date as 10th May 2008 for the
national referendum to ratify the new constitution and also promised to hold the general elections
in 2010. So far, Myanmar government claims that they have completed the step four of the
proposed road map. The referendum was conducted as planned and the constitution approved.
However, it was widely criticised as fraudulent amidst accusations of vote-rigging. This is but one
of many evidences which show that ASEAN soft power is starkly ineffective to persuade unwilling
Myanmar leaders to make genuine political reform. ASEAN uses the notion of ‘constructive
engagement’ in dealing with Myanmar which is a part of ‘ASEAN Way’ to project ASEAN soft
power. Quoting to an official source in the ASEAN in 1992, Achaya said, ‘Constructive
engagement, means that each ASEAN country can do what it wants, say what it wants as what it
sees fit, but not to take a collective (then) six-country position.’13 As the “constructive
engagement” still prevails as a cardinal principle of ASEAN, the organization tends to praise
whatever spin by Myanmar – be it a political road-map, the promise to release ASSK, or to allow
ASEAN fact-findings to visit the country – but without any substantial progress. On the other hand,
it tends to shrug off any suggestions to take harder measures against the regime.
Most researchers agree that Myanmar’s accession to ASEAN was more likely to be triggered
by political reasons than economic reasons. However, economic expectations also played an
important part. According to Kyaw Tint Swe and Aung Htoo, Myanmar hoped to be boosted
economically by joining ASEAN thus,
When AFTA is realised new members like Myanmar will also benefit from the enhanced
market access for agricultural goods to other members due to reduction of tariff and
trade barriers. Benefits such as increased import of manufactured goods and services,
greater opportunity to receive FDI from the region as well as from outside, gaining
experience in entrepreneurship from other ASEAN countries were also expected by
joining the regional association.14
If this is the case, then one can expect that ASEAN has considerable economic leverage over
Myanmar. In reality, however, because Myanmar mainly exports primary commodities related to
its natural resources, economic leverage works the other way round. Countries in the region,
particularly its neighbours have to bargain with the military rulers for business concessions. In
8
Linter, B., Burma in Revolt: opium and insurgency since 1948, (Silkworm Books 1999)
Seekins, D., ‘Burma-China relations: playing with fire’, Asian Survey, 37(6), June 1997
10
Amnesty International, Myanmar Needs a Comprehensive Arms Embargo, September 1997
11
Achaya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia
12
The New Light of Myanmar, 31.08.03
13
Achaya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia
14
Quoted in Mya Than, Myanmar in ASEAN: regional co-operation experience (Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies 2005)
9
5
terms of economic gains by joining the ASEAN, Myan Than, a Myanmar scholar compared the
effects of trade creation and trade diversion. He argued that there was more trade creation than
trade diversion. However, this analysis is flawed by at least two problems. First and foremost,
statistics from Myanmar government are, at best, not reliable and, at worst, outright
misinterpretation by corrupt officials. Secondly, Viner’s theory of trade diversion is more relevant
to an arrangement of a custom union than a free trade area (FTA), such as ASEAN (Asean Free
Trade Area or AFTA?), although it is not necessarily wrong to use the theory for FTA. One reason
is because each individual country retains its own external tariff. It is more likely that outside
investors may take advantage to assemble imported goods in the region to export again at lower
level of tariff within the region, and of course the rule of origin applies. The truth is that ASEAN’s
trading with countries outside the region is far greater than intra-regional trade.
2. Myanmar in ASEAN: a theoretical perspective
One of the key problems of ASEAN is the tension between its efforts to integrate the organization
deeper into a strong regional grouping on the one hand, and the state-oriented view of maintaining
autonomy by individual states on the other. Theoretically speaking, it is a tension between
constructivist view of the ASEAN as a group and the realist view of individual countries when it
comes to the question of sovereignty. While there is a desire by ASEAN to construct a regional
identity and a security community from within the region as a single front vis-à-vis outsiders, soft
power approach of ASEAN limits itself to bring about the changes towards closer integration.
There seems to be a conflict of interests between ASEAN integration and the principle of noninterference in internal affairs which is a clear indication of the desire by member countries to
maintain autonomy. Such a clash between constructivist approach by the ASEAN and the realist
view at the level of individual countries is typified in the relation with Myanmar.
Soft power of ASEAN is encapsulated in the notion called ‘ASEAN Way’. It is all about
what is perceived to be an alternative to the other ways, particularly the Western way of approach
in international relations. Amitav Acharya has observed that ‘ASEAN Way’ centres on the
principle of non-interference, decision making by consensus, and peaceful resolution of disputes
which are the key principles of ASEAN. Main tenets of ASEAN Way also include informality and
institutional minimalism.15 However, ‘ASEAN Way’ of exercising soft power has little affect to
change the behaviour of Myanmar – at least so far – in more than ten years since it has become a
member of the organization.
‘ASEAN soft power’ is the quality of ASEAN in projecting its influence by its principle of
‘ASEAN Way’ both in intramural and in external relations. In fact, ‘ASEAN Way’ and ‘ASEAN
soft power’ can be used almost interchangeably. However, ASEAN soft power is the capacity or
the quality of the grouping to influence, persuade or attract others while ‘ASEAN Way’ is the way
that ASEAN exercises that capacity in practice. Soft power, according to Joseph Nye, is about
attraction and imitation in contrast to command or active control by means of hard power such as
military threat or economic sanctions. Although Nye’s concept of soft power is the projection of
power ‘external’ to a region, ‘ASEAN soft power’ is used here specifically as ASEAN exercising
its power to persuade Myanmar for a political change. As far as Myanmar is concerned in this
context, ASEAN’s soft power lies in the degree of admiration by Myanmar leaders in their
economic success and the way governments in ASEAN sustain political legitimacy despite
imperfect democracy in leading member countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. Myanmar’s
military leaders clearly want to control the country until their ‘perceived political-security
imperative’16 is diminished to an acceptable level in their view. It was manifested, for example, in
the future role of the military guaranteed in the 2008 constitution. ASEAN is not rejecting the role
of the military in the future politics of Myanmar but it certainly wants Myanmar government to
reform themselves to become acceptable to the international community. To put it differently,
ASEAN wants Myanmar to change, at least, to become politically legitimate in the eyes of the
international community but it is not necessary that Myanmar government abandons control of
political power in the country. Under these circumstances, it will be a gross exaggeration to say
ASEAN wants Myanmar to transform into a liberal democracy, as most Myanmar activists
envisage, when almost all of the countries within ASEAN are not.
15
16
Achaya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia
Haacke, J., Myanmar’s Foreign Policy: domestic influences and international implications (IISS 2006)
6
In order to achieve the objective of transforming Myanmar to become politically
acceptable to the international community, ASEAN has extended its soft power in multiple ways
albeit with considerable limitations. Apart from official channels within the framework of ASEAN,
some member countries allowed their parliaments to form a parliamentary caucus on Myanmar
clearing a way to establish the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AMPIC). The
AIPMC works hand in hand with non-governmental groups as well as with the governments within
and outside the ASEAN, making it possible to get inputs from people to a degree in pressuring
Myanmar government. Within the framework of the AMPIC, it is also possible to lobby
governments and institutions at home and abroad to shape the agenda in relations with Myanmar.
Another resource of soft power in the ASEAN member countries is the media. The media in the
freer countries in the region are often critical of the way ASEAN handles the issue of Myanmar.
Information through the media has a huge impact on the opinion of people and also on some
government officials within the ASEAN. Government leaders themselves occasionally comment
their frustration over lack of progress in Myanmar through the media. However, not all government
officials like to see the media reporting the way they have been doing now. Malaysia even initiated
to establish an alternative media to counter the influence of western media albeit it never took flight
until now despite some initial attempts after the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur in 2007.
ASEAN also attempted to limit the soft power wing in non-governmental sectors by denying visas
to activists blocking them from attending mass meetings often held in parallel with official ASEAN
events. The ASEAN Way limits the ASEAN soft power not only in non-governmental private
sphere, it also severely limits the soft power within the organization. The strongest principle of
ASEAN in engaging with Myanmar is what is called ‘constructive engagement’. According to this
notion, direct criticism on Myanmar is allowed only to the individual countries but not ASEAN
itself. All these limitations contribute to the failure of the ASEAN in its efforts to change the
behaviour of Myanmar.
Myanmar has become a member of ASEAN for more than ten years now but its efforts to
change the behaviour of the country through ‘constructive engagement’ has yet to prove a success.
All the time, ASEAN maintains that Myanmar has a better chance to transform into a democracy
by inclusion and association rather than pursuing the western approach of isolation and
punishment. This assumption relies heavily upon the ‘ASEAN soft power’, to change the behaviour
of the Myanmar regime which has a number of deep rooted domestic problems. The question here
is whether ASEAN soft power is persuasive enough to change the behaviour of Myanmar. What
then would be the model best suited to describe the behaviour of the Myanmar regime?
The behaviour of Myanmar regime is fairly interpretable in a neo-realist perspective. For
the rulers of Myanmar, individual rights come only after collective rights of the state and the
people as a whole. And the political state of Myanmar is predominantly security-oriented. This
orientation comes from the perceived threat of disintegration of the country due to ‘destructive
elements’ from within and outside the country operating ‘above ground and underground’. This
was reflected in numerous occasions within the speeches of the leaders of Myanmar. This
excessive emphasis on security has severely compromised individual rights of the people in the
country. Consequently, the regime constructed a constant threat of the possibility of disintegration
of the Union of Myanmar in order to legitimise the use of force to counter this perceived security
imperative. Because of this, the regime continuously seeks to maximise its own power, primarily in
terms of military capability, to sustain the survival of the country. According to a report by the
International Crisis Group (ICG), Myanmar has doubled its annual military budget by 2002
compared to 1988 when it came into power.17 Likewise, it has increased the number of servicemen
and women in the armed forces from estimated 190,000 to 400,000 in the same period. It also has
tried its best to modernise the military. So far, the regime relies heavily on the military power than
democratic legitimacy for its survival. Ironically, the military considers itself a saviour of the
country from the danger of disintegration. They tend to blame numerous insurgencies since the
country has gained independence form the British colonial rule in 1948, and not least, the mass
protests in August 1988 and similar events in August and September 2007 as the attempts to derail
the country into ‘anarchy’.
17
International Crisis Group, Myanmar: the future of the armed forces, (Asia Briefing September 2007)
7
The Realist view of Myanmar is not only reflected in the domestic politics but also in its
foreign policy. Jurgen Haacke observed that the military regime’s perceived political and security
imperatives actually drive its policy agenda. He said:
Essentially, this imperative encapsulates the regime’s main political and security
objectives and the belief that these objectives must be secured if at all possible whatever
the political and economic cost and whatever the objections of foreign governments.18
Myanmar’s foreign policy has been shifted from strictly neutral stance to now one of antiwestern position, particularly anti-American position, mainly in response to the sanctions imposed
by the latter on Myanmar. It is included in the basic concepts of Myanmar’s foreign policy that:
“Myanmar firmly opposes imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, racial discrimination,
domination and subjugation.”19
While one way to interpret that concept can be that it is an indication of how Myanmar
government reacts the pressure from the western world, it can also be translated as an indication of
realist sentiment in the foreign policy agenda. For Myanmar, the world order is the one dominated
by super-powers, namely the US and Europe, who are expanding neo-colonialism onto the weaker
countries like Myanmar. Bearing that in mind, Myanmar has tried to seek balance of power by
associating with the countries that tend to resist western position in international relations. That
explains why Myanmar has joined the ASEAN. It also explains why it has sent hundreds of
military officers to train in Russia, why it has strengthened the relationship with China and recent
normalization of diplomatic ties with North Korea severed since 1983. It is not surprising that
Myanmar is naturally a strong supporter of non-interference policy. At least, it protects Myanmar’s
internal security measures from open criticism of the ASEAN. It also mitigates criticisms upon the
regime from the powers outside the region. Myanmar saw there was so much to gain from entering
the ASEAN as a member. Therefore, although there is not enough evidence to support the view that
Myanmar’s embracing of the ‘ASEAN Way’ is because it has serious intention to transform, there
are ample evidences that it has done so because of its rational calculation of relative gain by joining
the organization. All these arguments converge to a conclusion that behaviour of Myanmar best
suit a neo-realist paradigm.
ASEAN is a norm-base rather than a rule-base organization guided by the ‘ASEAN Way’
which encapsulates the principle of non-interference and decision making by consensus. While
‘ASEAN Way’ is friendly enough to attract participation of countries such as Myanmar that is
sceptical about any ‘outsiders’, ASEAN’s approach to change the behaviour of Myanmar is always
limited to its ‘soft power’ and not beyond. Interstate relation of ASEAN can partly be explained
but, paradoxically, members of the ASEAN are realist oriented when it comes to sovereignty.
Myanmar is a case at the point that its behaviour fits almost perfectly with neo-realist paradigm.
‘ASEAN Way’ is the way ASEAN exercise its soft power but the quality of attraction and
persuasion of ASEAN is not good enough to have any influence over neo-realist Myanmar. This is
a clear example of the limitation of soft power only approach.
3. Myanmar in ASEAN: Political Challenges
ASEAN soft power approach is not only grossly insufficient to change the behaviour of the State
Peace and Development Council (SPDC), it is also hindering domestic reforms in Myanmar as well
as the deeper integration of ASEAN. The support landed by ASEAN on the SPDC in the
international sphere, in fact, constituted a moral hazard for the junta thus undermining the
possibility of domestic reforms in terms of badly needed improvements in human rights situation
and genuine transition to democracy that can guarantee the security and welfare of the people of
Myanmar. At the same time, Myanmar was able to resist any pressure by ASEAN with ‘noncompliance’ – fully exploiting the soft spot of ASEAN, namely the policy base on ‘ASEAN Way’
of projecting ‘ASEAN soft power’ by non-interference and ‘constructive engagement’. The stark
failure of the policy was manifested in a series of events over the past ten years since Myanmar has
been a member of the regional organization and even the leading members of ASEAN recently
started to concede the fact.
18
19
Haacke, Myanmar’s Foreign Policy
http://myanmargeneva.org/basicfacts/foreignp.htm
8
ASEAN’s rationale in engaging with SPDC is that “‘constructive engagement’ would do
more to democracy and human rights than isolation and punishment”.20 When Myanmar was
acceded as a member of ASEAN, Philippine’s Foreign Minister Siazon said integration of
Myanmar “would have a positive impact over the long-term on the human rights situation”.21 In
ASEAN’s view, political repression in Myanmar could not be used to justify the exclusion of it
since such a move would constitute interference in its internal affairs.22 Non-interference policy is
so important for ASEAN that the organization even had chosen not to address the genocidal acts of
the Pol Pot regime on similar grounds.23 However, as Achaya puts it, Myanmar’s admission is a
first major test for ASEAN in post Cold-War doctrine. What has happened in reality indicates the
opposite to ASEAN’s expectations.
3.1 Saffron revolution: a test for ‘constructive engagement’
Myanmar regimes hard line position was ever clearer in the crack down of peaceful protests led by
Buddhist monks in 26-29 September 2007. The protests were sparked by surprise increase of fuel
prices up to five fold on 15th August. This made worse the economic hardship of people who were
already facing difficulties due to crippling economy of the country. Started from small peaceful
rallies on 19th August, the demonstrations flared up in the following month after a number of
monks were beaten up by the authorities in Pakokku on the 5th September. After that the protests
escalated and increasing number of people came out to the road in the main cities of the country to
express their discontent with the SPDC. On 24th September, the crowd in Yangon reached to
100,000 people led by “saffron” colour robbed Buddhist monks – the largest since 1988 mass
uprising.
Two days after that, government started to use lethal force to crack down the protests. UN
Human Rights Special Rapporteur Paulo Sergio Pinheiro reported that:
From 26 to 29 September, the State and its agents cracked down severely on peaceful
demonstrators. Through the lens of the international media, the world witnessed killings,
severe beatings and mass arrests of people. During the crackdowns, the security forces
comprising police and army or riot police (Lone Htein), as well as members of the Union
Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) and the Swan Ah Shin (SAS) militia,
used excessive force against civilians, including unnecessary and disproportionate lethal
force.24
Although ASEAN was quiet in the beginning as the demonstrations unfolded, it broke the
silence once the SPDC started using force on peaceful demonstrators. On the 27th September,
Singapore’s Foreign Minister George Yeo released a statement as the chair of ASEAN that:
(The ASEAN foreign ministers) “were appalled to receive reports of automatic weapons
being used and demanded that the Myanmar government immediately desist from the
use of violence against demonstrators. They expressed their revulsion to Myanmar
Foreign Minister Nyan Win over reports that the demonstrations in Myanmar are being
suppressed by violent force and that there has been a number of fatalities. They strongly
urged Myanmar to exercise utmost restraint and seek a political solution25
The statement also reminded the SPDC that “the developments in Myanmar had a serious impact
on the reputation and credibility of ASEAN.” It was released in New York on the sideline of the
UN meeting to take a common position over the crisis. Already, the UN Security Council has
called on Myanmar government for utmost restraint and planned to send the Special Advisor to
Secretary-General Ibrahim Gambari. He arrived the country on 29th September as the government
announced that "Peace and stability has been restored," from the state-run newspapers. Gambari
20
Guyot, J., ‘Burma in 1997: from empire to ASEAN’, Asian Survey, 38(2), February 1998
Achaya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Pinheiro’s Report to the UN Human Rights Commission, 07.12.07
25
www.aseansec.org/20974.htm
21
9
was able to meet with the top leader of the military regime, Senior General Than Shwe and the
opposition leader ASSK who has been under house arrest for the third time since after the violence
at Depayin. On 11th October, the President of the UN Security Council released a statement
expressing that “(t)he Security Council strongly deplores the use of violence against peaceful
demonstrations in Myanmar”. Later in November that year, Singapore invited Gambari to brief
about Myanmar at 13th ASEAN Summit but the official briefing was cancelled because Myanmar
government objected. Clearly, this is a manifest failure of consensus principle – a part of ‘ASEAN
Way’ – in the case of engaging with Myanmar. Amid all the unsuccessful attempts to co-opt
Myanmar to change its course, ASEAN still showed solidarity with the country. When the UN
Third Committee voted to condemn Myanmar in December, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia voted
against the resolution and none of the ASEAN members voted for it. However, Myanmar is not
forthcoming with the requests of ASEAN, i.e. to release ASSK and to “resume its efforts at
national reconciliation with all parties concerned, and work towards a peaceful transition to
democracy”. Individually, some ASEAN members conceded that it is a policy failure.
While ASEAN cannot find a way better than ‘constructive engagement’, the US and EU
increased sanctions on the SPDC. Whether sanctions are a better option than ‘ASEAN soft power’
is a subject beyond the scope of this work but it seems the western countries have at least clearer
options to deal with the junta accordingly. For the international community, “Saffron Revolution”
is one more indication of the illegitimacy of the military junta as an observer puts it. 26
3.2 ASEAN soft power: is it time to rethink?
ASEAN’s articulation of ‘constructive engagement’, at best, renders minimal cooperation of the
SPDC and, at worse, just acting as shield for the regime from outside pressures. ASEAN has tried
to change the position a few times in the past but is not still moving beyond the original norms. The
policy of “constructive engagement” in relation with Myanmar was first adopted in 1991 attributed
to then Thai Foreign Minister Arsa Sarasin. It is a policy to engage with Myanmar in a hope that it
would change the political system of the country oppose to the western policy of sanctions and
isolations. Later, when Democrat Party came into power in Thailand in 1997, Foreign Minister
Surin Pitsuwan started to call for “flexible engagement” in order to increase political leverage on
Myanmar.27 However, consensus cannot be reached on that policy and what is called “enhance
interaction” was agreed as a compromise.28 This means that individual countries can comment on
Myanmar but ASEAN as an organization would not. As already mentioned, Myanmar government
has not been moved by criticisms of individual states. A common position of ASEAN also was
restricted by the policy of non-interference. Politically, non-intereference policy was not quite
neutral. As Achaya puts it, non-interference policy, at best, ‘implied a particular kind of
interference in support of the regime’ because it strengthened the position of the regime vis-à-vis
opposition.29 Non-interference policy encourages member countries to maintain national autonomy
to pursue their national interest regardless of group interest (contrary to constructivist view of
national interests shaped by ‘we-feeling’). Furthermore, it has been used as an effective tool to
shield the involvement of outsiders in the regional affairs as we have seen in Myanmar. However,
ASEAN is unlikely to change its norms anytime in the near future. Already in the ASEAN Charter,
non-interference is upheld as a principle in Chapter I, Article II (2.e) and also ‘consensus’ policy
was included in Chapter VII, Article 20 (1). With the principles and norms of the organization
unchanged, it is not likely that Myanmar will be moved to the direction as desired by the
organization. Illegitimacy of the country in the eyes of the international community also may not
help ASEAN in the relations with the countries outside the region. ASEAN soft power is not
sufficient to bring Myanmar neither international legitimacy nor economic progress.
4. Myanmar in ASEAN: Economic challenges
Myanmar joined the ASEAN with high expectations to gain international legitimacy and economic
progress. So far, neither has been achieved as expected primarily because of the policy failure on
26
Steinberg, D., Asia Times, 5.10.07
Quoted in Kyaw Yin Hlaing et al (eds.), Myanmar: beyond politics to social imperatives, (Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies 2005)
28
Haacke, Myanmar’s Foreign Policy
29
Achaya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia
27
10
both ASEAN and Myanmar sides. Non-interference policy of ASEAN cannot open up the market
of Myanmar and, conversely, the lack of favourable economic environment in the country can
attract little trade and investment from the region and beyond. Outside the region, western
sanctions are major challenges for Myanmar and ASEAN. Joining ASEAN, for the SPDC, is an
economic means to political ends. Economic development is just an aspiration but not a priority for
the SPDC. Myanmar is a country where economic policy is overshadowed by political security
imperatives. Even the sympathetic viewers cannot deny the fact. One observer said in benign
fashion that Myanmar joined the ASEAN “in the belief that gradual exposure to the market
economy and regional co-operative efforts would be the best way to ensure regional security and
the socio-economic development of Myanmar itself”.30 Contrary to that view, two decades of
exposure to nominal market economy fails to bring the country out of desperate poverty.
When Myanmar joined ASEAN in 1997, Mya Than argued that it was ‘technically more
ready’ than other new members in joinning ASEAN because it had a better position to sign off new
treaties required by acceding the organization.31 He also claimed, among other things, that
Myanmar can attend some 300 ASEAN meetings a year. What was more important here though,
was not that Myanmar was qualified, but whether Myanmar would be a resposible member in
implementing the objectives of ASEAN. Participation in the ASEAN activities are not only limited
to regularly attending the meetings. It requires the quality of member countries to work together
towards the objectives of the organization. In terms of hosting the ASEAN meetings, Cambodia
and Laos are doing better than Myanmar. What is more, Myamar lacks expericience of institution
building32 and gives priority on regime security than the development of the economy. 33
Participation, or the right to participate, certainly enhances legitimacy of the SPDC. That is a part
of the reason for Myanmar to become a member, but it does not mean that the military government
is fully recognised as being legitimate.
Longer term economic challeges of ASEAN in relations with Myanmar depend on two key
issues. First, the economic sanctions posed by the US and the EU makes the difficult to negotiate
bloc-to-bloc trade agreements, for example with EU and NAFTA. Trade negotiations with the EU
are already underway but the Secretary-Genreal of ASEAN Surin Pitsuwan said “it is probably one
of the most challenging agreements that we are negotiating”.34 Secondly, Myanmar’s domestic
economic policy needs a number of structural adjustments in order to become a competitive
member of the grouping. The country’s multiple exchange rate systems, severe control over foreign
trade as well as domestic economy and the lack of efficient taxation are some of the key reasons
why the economy fails to take off. Without the necessary structural adjustments being carried out,
there is little reason to hope that Myanmar’s participation will boost the economic leverage of
ASEAN. As far as economic integration is concerned, the agreement of ASEAN Free Trade Area
(AFTA) is the main driving force towards economic cooperation.
4.1 AFTA and the role of Myanmar
Many scholars attribute the economic integration of ASEAN to two things – first, the end of the
Cold War and, second, the rise of second wave regionalism due to the slow progress in the WTO
trade talks. (First wave regionalism was in 1970s inspired by the New International Economic
Order or NIEO). Economic cooperation is becoming more important for ASEAN in 1990s than in
the earlier decades. The rise of NAFTA and the deeper integration of the EU also accelerated
regionalism in Asia. Trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization during the decade attracted
FDI from Asia and beyond. With the economy growing at one of the fastest rates in the world,
ASEAN leaders decided to integrate their economies even further by signing an agreement in 1992
to establish the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) within fifteen years.35 One key objective of
AFTA is to reduce tariff barriers on trade in manufactured and processed agricultural goods to 05% within fifteen years under the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) scheme, apart
30
Mya Than, Myanmar in ASEAN
Ibid.
32
Mya Than, Myanmar’s External Trade
33
Haacke, Myanmar’s Foreign Policy
34
AFP, 29.08.08
35
Garnaut, R., & Drysdale, P. (eds.), Asia pacific Regionalism: readings in international economic relations,
(Harper Education 1994)
31
11
from some exceptions to protect sensitive sectors such as national security etc. CEPT also required
the participating countries to bring down non-tariff barriers like quotas, restrictive licensing and
prohibitions. The AFTA agreement gives a new headway for ASEAN cooperation with ambitious
trade liberalization. It is a new hope for ASEAN to become a regional economic power as a single
group. However, ASEAN did not have a history of successful economic cooperation.36 The
ASEAN Industrial Projects (AIP) and the ASEAN Industrial Complementation (AIC) in 1970s, and
the ASEAN Industrial Joint Venture (AIJV) in1980s were all failed to achieve substantial
economic progress due to either lack of political will or genuine cooperation among the
participating countries. The projects were foundered on squabbles between the member states,
incompatibility of products produced in different countries and national jealousies.37 Nevertheless,
the significant difference between AFTA and earlier types of cooperation is that AFTA is exportoriented market model based on market liberalization whereas the other models are importsubstitution to bring up a protectionist wall to curb outside influence. AFTA is still in the making
and its potential cannot be underestimated. However, uneven development of ASEAN countries
forced AFTA to set different target dates for less developed country in terms of implementation
and, more importantly, the pattern of ASEAN trade is such that external trade is much more
important than intra-ASEAN trade. In the case of Myanmar, exports from the county to ASEAN
has been decreased after joining ASEAN while import from ASEAN to Myanmar is on the
increase. This may be because of Asian financial crisis. But the crucial point is that joining ASEAN
so far has not substantially increase trade and investment of Myanmar to see the development of
the country.
4.2 Economic environment: another challenge for ASEAN
Arguably, it is the regime’s imprudent economic policies that are the real cause of the country’s
deepened poverty. Ever since the military has come into power in 1988, market economy is the
official policy of the state. In practice, though, the economy is still heavily controlled by the
government. The ruling SPDC has inherited a legacy of eonomic incompetence from Ne Win’s
socialist era whose 26 years rule by the ‘Burmese way of Socialism’ brought the country down to a
least developed country declared by the UN in December 1987.38 More than twenty years since the
downfall of Ne Win, things has change little under the military’s ‘Myanmar’s way to capitalism’.
Most of the incumbant military leaders served under Ne Win’s socialist government and they
hardly have a different view in the way economy is to handle, apart from the realization that
market economy is a better option than socialist command economy, at least in the name. The junta
did several attempts to reform over the yeas in terms of liberalization in regulations such as the
promulgation of investmemt law in 1988 and other measures in the economic sector including
privatization. However, Corruption, ignorance of economic correlations and international isolation
have led to economic stagnation. The private sector is dominated by a handful of business people
who are trusted by the regime and often employ relatives of senior SPDC members. State’s
continued interventions in the economy caused macroeconomic imbalances. Although Myanmar
has reduced tariff level in line with AFTA agreement, government interventions in the private
sector economy and licensing export and import raised non-tariff barriers. Because the government
control the economy severely, a parallel black market in the form of illegal trading rife, especially
in the border trade. Restrictions over normal trade (international trade other than border trade) also
encourage official corruption. The problems outlined above are stumbling blocks not only for
Myanmar but they also hinder AFTA which is an important part of economic integration. Reducing
economic barriers will have little effect unless trade and investment improve substantially.
‘ASEAN soft power’ – here in the form of emulation and imitation to the good practices of
economically successful countries in the grouping – has not been working for Myanmar. During
the recent years, revenue from the export of natural gas has increased the income of the country
substantially. Trade with neighbouring China, India and Thailand are also on the rise. However,
agricultural sector which comprises of more than a half of the national economy needs to
36
Ravenhill, J., ‘Economic co-operation in Southeast Asia: changing incentives’, Asian Survey, 35(9),
September 1995
37
Ibid.
38
Kyaw Yin Hlaing, ‘Myanmar in 2003: frustration and despair?’. Asian Survey, 44(1), January-February
2004
12
modernise and liberalise. ADB recommended improvements in the investment climate which
include, among other things, to enhance greater transparency and predictability in regulations, to
move away from administrative measures in the form of price controls and period bans towards
greater reliance on market-based mechanisms.39 Without the structural reforms to correct the
economic imbalances, Myanmar is unlikely to develop and it will only be a burden for the ASEAN
in terms of economic integration.
5. Conclusion: is Myanmar an asset or a liability?
This paper has argued that ‘ASEAN soft power’ projected in the form of ‘ASEAN Way’ is not
effective to change the behaviour of the country and, consequently, it is hindering the effort of the
organization towards deeper integration. The whole reason of Myanmar wanting to join ASEAN is
all about political leverage over the west, legitimacy and to a lesser extent economic aspirations to
be like the successful countries in the grouping. From the part of ASEAN, major driving force is
the ‘ASEAN Way’ which encapsulates the desire of doing things free from outside influence.
‘ASEAN Way’ prefers to use soft power in contrast to a mixture of soft and hard power as in the
carrot and stick policy of the west over Myanmar. What has been neglected here is the clash of
political views between the ASEAN, when considered as one whole group, and the view as
individual member country. ASEAN as a regional group inspires constructivist view of regional
integration whereas the individual countries are very much realists when it comes to national
autonomy. Myanmar is the case at the point that its behaviour is closely conforms to neo-realist
paradigm. National security or rather regime security comes before the interest of the people of
Myanmar, thus overriding socio-economic issues. The regimes heavy reliance on power is
manifested by the expansion of the military forces even without significant external or internal
threat. The only real threat ‘constructed’ by the regime is the possible ‘anarchy’ due to the
destructive elements – usually refers to the democratic opposition. The two different political views
– constructivist and neo-realist – seem to be in the clash. ASEAN soft power has not been able to
convince the Myanmar government to render domestic political and economic reforms. Politically,
challenges on the ASEAN over the domestic tensions in Myanmar since the violence at Depayin in
2003 has been intensified due to the regime’s hard-line policies even worse than before.
Increasingly, ASEAN felt that the internal problems of Myanmar become that of ASEAN.
Eventually, ASEAN decided to put on record in the joint statement of 36th AMM in Phnom Penh in
2003, urging the junta to release democratic opposition leader ASSK and to engage in political
reforms. As a result of international outcry, the SPDC had to let go its right to take the position of
ASEAN Chair in 2006. Nevertheless, when it comes to domestic reforms, the regime’s response on
the ASEAN’s demands has been only non-compliance and false promises. ASEAN Way of
projecting soft power has not been able to make a difference on the regime.
In sum,
•
•
•
•
ASEAN soft power fails to tackle cheating
Supportive attitude of ASEAN on the regime is not neutral but against the opposition
deliberately or unwittingly
ASEAN soft power fails to change neither political nor economic policy of Myanmar. The
SPDC’s neo-realist stance still dominates in Myanmar’s politics and there is no ‘regulative’ nor
‘constitutive’ affects can be seen.
Policy failure of ASEAN backfires the grouping in the direction of deeper integration by the
presence of Myanmar in the grouping
With the current political order in the country, there is little hope that the ruling generals of
Myanmar will facilitate a smooth transition to a liberal democracy. What is apparent now is that the
leaders of the country would want a working political system in the name of ‘democracy’ to
continue the leading role of the Tatmadaw (armed forces) in Myanmar’s future politics. Unless a
miracle happens (and the miracles never happened) the Utopia of ‘the ASEAN Way’ is not a
reliable
political
tool
to
bring
about
changes
in
Myanmar.
39
Asian Development Bank, Economic Update (Myanmar), November 2001
13
State-building and the law of occupation in Iraq: Promoting democracy or inhibiting
imperialism
Philip Robson, M.Sc. International Security and Global Governance
Introduction
Where state building missions are launched following the occupation of the country by an external
power, the scope of the mission is regulated by the international law of occupation, a branch of
international humanitarian law which has evolved with the approaches taken to state-building
missions. The evolution has been affected by changes in international human rights law and
multilateral and unilateral state-building interventions. This law sets the restrictions and
responsibilities applicable to the occupying power before the return of a local sovereign government.
Following the occupation of Iraq, this law was modified further by the UN Security Council through
Resolution 1483. Within this new framework the occupying forces were enabled to make sweeping
changes to the institutions of the Iraqi state with disastrous consequences. Arguments for permitting
such reform in the name of “democracy” and “human rights” have resulted in the legitimisation of a
new form of empire. Instead of continuing down this treacherous path I will argue that the law of
occupation is not in need of continued reform, instead it must return to the principle upon which it
was founded. Through analyzing the development of the law of occupation and its application in
Iraq, I conclude that in order to stay within the ethical boundaries of state-building missions the law
of occupation and its re-interpretation, rather than reform, play an important role.
In his study into statehood, Samuel Huntington1 placed the utmost importance in the role of
local political dialogue to establish consensus leading to a government with domestic popular
legitimacy. Recognising the sovereignty of the people to choose the ways and means by which they
are governed must play an important role in modern state-building missions. An intervening state or
occupying power must see as its primary role the creation of an environment secure enough for
domestic political dialogue to take place between all parties resulting in the creation of a legitimate
government. Within this space and as a neutral mediator there is scope for the occupying power to
influence the adoption of some recognised norms, including the institutions of democratic
governance and international human rights. The local dialogue must be as broad as possible in order
to derive the maximum amount of legitimacy. The external force should adopt a light touch approach
to managing the tensions between differing regional ideas and interests which form the constituent
elements of both state and society2. The exclusion of groups such as those under Muqtada al-Sadr
serves only to weaken the legitimacy of the elected representatives and through this exclusion, the
institutions of the state will not be able to re-build social bonds where society is divided.3
Where state-building missions in the latter part of the twentieth century have differed from
the approach above was in the actions of the occupier/external administrator within the secure space.
Instead of facilitating local political dialogue the role of the external force was to build the
institutions for governing the state before passing them to a domestic government, thereby removing
politics from the mission. This approach is elaborated upon in Roland Paris’s theory of
“institutionalisation before liberalisation” which focuses on the creation of the state institutions
before passing control to the domestic government. This approach is based upon a view of
sovereignty as capacity based rather than upon sovereign equality. Making themselves responsible
for “capacity building” in the occupied territory, the imperialistic tendency is for the external force to
impose mirror images of its institutions upon the local population and then build the capacity of the
domestic population in order to run the institutions. This a-cultural and a-political approach to statebuilding is fundamentally flawed.
The imposition of models of governance in a post-conflict or occupied country will only
produce decreased legitimacy, increased violence and ultimately instability. Firstly they are based
upon a flawed assumption that the intervening power knows what is best for the occupied territory.
As Feldman observes “there are simply too many instances of abject failure in the annals of nationbuilding, perpetrated not only by the enlightened amateur post-colonialists of yesteryear but by
1 Huntington, P., Political Order in Changing Societies, (Yale University Press 1968)
2 Migdal, J., Strong States and Weak States: State – Society Relations and State Capabilities in the 3rd World,
(Princeton University Press 1988)
3
Chandler, D., Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building, (Pluto Press 2006)
14
modern experts as well”4 for this approach to be accepted. Secondly, they deny legitimacy to
domestic politics and political actors, disenfranchising them from the future operation of the state
and pushing them towards violent means of engagement. Finally, the outcome of such an approach is
a lengthy occupation and the production of a state held together by the support of external actors to
guard the functions of the alien institutions.
Operation Iraqi “Freedom”
On 20th March 2003 the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies (the “Coalition”), began
military operations, un-authorised by the United Nation, against the sovereign state of Iraq with the
aim of ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime and establishing a democratic, free-market state. Very
quickly, the capital city, Baghdad fell to Coalition troops and Saddam’s government collapsed,
allowing American President George W. Bush to declare on 1st May 2003 that “major combat
operations in Iraq have ended”.5 Whilst the Coalition preferred to think of themselves as the
“liberators” of the people of Iraq, the clear position of the Coalition under international law was that
they were the occupying power and therefore were subject to the international laws of occupation, as
a US officer later admitted “there is no liberation law, only occupation law”.6 Yoram Dinstein, the
international legal scholar, argues that from the 20th March “pursuant to international law – the legal
status of the Coalition forces in Iraq [was] not that of liberators but that of belligerent occupants.”7
The responsibilities of occupying powers under international law are regulated by the Hague
Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land 1907 (Hague Regulations), the
Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (the Fourth
Geneva Convention or Geneva IV) 1949 and in the Additional Protocols I and II of 1977. In
addition, the UN passed Security Council Resolution 1483 to clarify their view of the legal
framework within which the coalition should operate. The law of occupation applies when a territory
is “actually placed under the authority of the hostile army” and the occupying power is in a position
to impose its control over the territory.8
The responsibilities of an occupying power under these treaties are founded on the
underlying conservationist principle. This places the occupant as the temporary custodian of the
occupied state. They are recognized as having de facto power, but this power cannot be used to make
legislative, economic, constitutional or political changes in the occupied territory. Article 43 of the
Hague Regulations provides the overview of the occupying powers responsibilities:
The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the
occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as
far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented,
the laws in force in the country.
The interpretation of the use of the words “unless absolutely prevented”, is central to the
conservationist principle and its effects on the occupier’s powers and obligations. At the time of
drafting, it was understood that the occupying power would have little interest in wide scale reform
of the occupied state. Therefore “unless absolutely necessary” was understood to mean unless
absolutely necessary for military necessity for maintaining law and order.9 The phrase received a
much broader interpretation for the allied occupations of Germany and Japan following World War
Two. There it was argued that the moral case for not respecting existing laws can also be applied to
require the laws to be repealed. Article 64 of Geneva IV builds on the provision in the Hague
Regulations:
4
Feldman, N., What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation-Building, (Princeton University Press 2004)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html
6
Rosen, N., ‘When a Liberator is an Occupier’, Asia Times, 4 December 2003
7
Dinstein, Y., ‘Jus in Bello Issues Arising in the Hostilities in Iraq in 2003’, Israeli Year Book of Human
Rights (2004)
8
Dorman, K., and Colassis, L., ‘International Humanitarian Law in the Iraq Conflict’, German Year Book of
International Law (2004)
9
Benvenisti, E., The International Law of Occupation, (Princeton University Press 1993)
15
5
The occupying power may…subject the population of the occupied territory to
provisions which are essential to enable the Occupying Power to fulfill its obligations
under the present Convention, to maintain the orderly government of the territory, and
to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the members and property of the
occupying forces or administration, and likewise of the establishments and lines of
communication used by them.
The Security Council passed Resolution 148310 relating to the occupation of Iraq declaring
the US and the UK as the “occupying power under unified command”, recognizing the
responsibilities of the Coalition under international occupation law. Going further, the
Resolution states:
[The Security Council] Calls upon the Authority [the Coalition Provisional Authority
or CPA], consistent with the Charter of the United Nations and other relevant
international law, to promote the welfare of the Iraqi people through the effective
administration of the territory, including in particular working towards the restoration
of conditions of security and stability and the creation of conditions in which the Iraqi
people can freely determine their own political future
Whilst the language of Resolution 1483 does not give a carte blanche to the Coalition to govern Iraq
with the same authority and legitimacy of the sovereign, there is a tension between the Resolution
and the activities of an occupying power regulated by the codified law of occupation. Resolution
1483 provides some scope for the Coalition to transform limited aspects of the Iraqi state, following
the growing trend from the 1990s of transformative “state-building” missions. The Resolution,
accepting the threat to the Iraqi people which Saddam’s oppression posed, gives the CPA the power
to make some political changes towards Iraqi self-government. The Resolution is clear though, that
this does not permit the Coalition to impose its view of a reformed Iraq. The Resolution reaffirms the
right of the Iraqi people to self-determination and to be able to select a truly representative and
democratically elected government. Finally the Resolution makes it clear that the occupation is
temporary.
Preceding SCR1483, the Coalition recognised their responsibilities under the law of
occupation in a letter sent from the Permanent Representatives of the United States and the United
Kingdom to the President of the United Nations Security Council. Also in that letter the Coalition
announced the creation of the CPA with the new authority “exercising powers of government
temporarily in Iraq”.11 It would be through the CPA that the Coalition would discharge its
responsibilities under the law of occupation and UN Security Council Resolution 1483. Recognising
the words of SCR1483 and their responsibilities under the law of occupation, the CPA declared in its
first Order, the self-defined scope of its powers:
The CPA shall exercise the powers of government temporarily in order to provide for
the effective administration of Iraq during the period of transitional administration, to
restore conditions of security and stability, to create conditions in which the Iraqi
people can freely determine their own political future, including by advancing efforts
to restore and establish national and local institutions for representative governance
and facilitating economic recovery and sustainable reconstruction and development.12
The Order goes further than the Law of Occupation and SCR1483 to provide that the CPA can
“exercise the powers of Government” to “restore and establish national and local institutions”.
Unopposed by the UN this provided the basis for the Coalition’s transformative actions which went
beyond the law of occupation, de-legitimised the interim and post-occupation governments and
added to the instability. The CPA was invested with all executive, legislative and judicial powers and
10
11
Security Council Resolution 1483, U.N. SCOR, 58th Session, 4761st Meeting., U.N. Doc S/RES/1483 (2003)
Letter from the Permanent Representatives of the UK and the US to the UN addressed to the President of the
Security Council, S/2003/538, 8 May, 2003
12
Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation Number 1, CPA/REG/16 May 2003/01
16
the Regulations of the CPA would take precedence over existing Iraqi law. The UN, fearful of the
possibility for self-interested abuse on the part of the Coalition required that an indigenous Iraqi
body be created to advise the CPA and to play a role in the occupation decision making. The
Coalition selected the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and described it as “the
principal body of the Iraqi interim administration, pending the establishment of an internationally
recognised, representative government of the people of Iraq”.13 The CPA committed to “consult and
coordinate” with the IGC on matters of governance. The powers of the IGC and its role in governing
Iraq were not clear. SCR1483 makes no provision for its role in decision making. Whilst the CPA
committed to “consult and coordinate” with the IGC, this did not change its position as the holder of
all executive, legislative and judicial power in Iraq. The reality of the partnership between the CPA
and the IGC saw the CPA assume the key decision making role and the IGC serve as an advisor. The
IGC gave an appearance of domestic legitimacy to what were in fact, decisions and policy imposed
upon Iraq by the occupying power.
Law of Occupation v Resolution 1483
The law of occupation, as Roberts puts it, was created principally to prevent or regulate “bad
occupants occupying a good country”.14 The scope of possible transformations by the occupying
power within the law of occupation was expanded in the Geneva Conventions 1949 following
developments in international human rights norms, recognition of individual’s rights in international
law and the transformative occupations of Nazi Germany and Japan by the Allies after the Second
World War. During these occupations it was felt that the restrictive obligations on an occupying
power in the Hague Conventions would mean that Nazi laws could not be legitimately repealed by
the Allies. The Geneva Conventions go further than the Hague Convention to protect individual
rights, recognising that transformation may be necessary but that the occupying power conduct itself
in the interests of the occupied people rather than in its own self interest. Certain provisions of the
Geneva Convention have been likened to an “international bill of rights,” inserting human rights
protections beyond the Hague Convention.15
The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty published its report on
the Responsibility to Protect,16 supported by the United Nations, providing guidance on the
responsibility to rebuild states following intervention continued this approach:
The responsibility to protect implies the responsibility not just to prevent and react, but
to follow through and rebuild. This means if military intervention action is
taken…there should be a genuine commitment to helping to build a durable peace…
Conditions of public safety and order have to be reconstituted by international agents
acting in partnership with local authorities, with the goal of progressively transferring
to them authority and responsibility to rebuild.
In discharging this responsibility to protect, the sovereignty of the occupied territory does not pass to
the occupier. This is founded upon the principle of sovereign equality of all the U.N. member
states.17 If the sovereignty of Iraq had passed to the Coalition then this would be the equivalent of
annexation of Iraq, which is strictly prohibited. The function of the occupying power, the Coalition
in the case of Iraq, is akin to that of a temporary administrator. The articles of Geneva IV and the
Hague Regulations clearly provide that the occupying power has a “restricted capacity to implement
reforms in occupied territory where those reforms may prejudice the eventual exercise of discretion
by a sovereign government in the occupied state”.18
13
Governing Council of Iraq, Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation No. 6, CPA/REG/13 July 2003/06
Roberts, A., ‘Transformative Military Occupation: Applying the Laws of War and Human Rights’, American
Journal of International Law, 100(3), July 2006
14
15
Fox, G., ‘The Occupation of Iraq’, Georgia Journal of International Law, 2005
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect
(2001)
17
U.N. Charter, chapter 1, article 2, paragraph 1.
18
McCarthy, C., ‘The Paradox of the International Law of Military Occupation’, Journal of Conflict and
Security Law 10(1), 2003
17
16
How do the requirements of the law of occupation and the conservationist principle operate
when the purpose of the intervention was to liberate the people from an oppressive regime? One of
the primary stated justifications for the war in Iraq was the need for regime change.19 The Coalition
felt that an Iraq founded upon democratic principles with an emerging free market economy would
be in the best interests of the people of Iraq, the region and world peace. To achieve such an
administration in Iraq would clearly require a considerable transformation from Saddam’s regime.
The Iraqi constitution under Saddam was socialist in principle, protecting domestic markets and
resources and emphasizing the redistribution of those resources. In practice, the constitution became
deformed by years of arbitrary decision making favouring those closest to Saddam. To bring about
the necessary changes to Iraq to make it a functioning liberal democracy would appear to be
inherently at odds with the responsibilities of an occupying power outlined above in the codified
laws of occupation. In Security Council Resolution 1483, the United Nations and the Coalition
sought to reconcile any tensions between the regime change ambitions of the mission and the
restrictions and responsibilities under the codified laws of occupation. The Resolution
simultaneously states that the Coalition must respect its responsibilities under the law of occupation
but also provides that the CPA must work “to promote the welfare of the Iraqi people through the
effective administration of the territory.
The Resolution was interpreted by the Coalition to allow the wide-scale reforms necessary to
transform Iraq during and after the occupation. It is in this space created by the ambiguity of
SCR1483 and the roles and responsibilities of the occupying power that the disastrous occupation of
Iraq found its home. Undertaking the responsibilities of an occupying power as set out in a
conservative understanding of the law of occupation, including a strict reading of the conservationist
principle, would allow the occupying power to create a state where “public safety and order” are
guaranteed. This may be achieved by the occupying power positioning itself as a benevolent dictator.
Indeed this would have been possible in Iraq.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and now Gordon Brown, are committed to a spread of
liberal, free market democracy as the key means of achieving peace. This essay is not the place to
debate the validity of this belief, but I acknowledge that it must form some part of the motivation for
the transformative occupation of Iraq. Therefore, pursuing this goal the Coalition required the legal
basis for bringing about fundamental change to the state infrastructure of Iraq to establish their view
of the liberal democracy that would bring peace to Iraq and act as a beacon of hope in the region.
Resolution 1483 provided the exception to the international law of occupation which, upon the
Coalition’s interpretation, legalised this transformation.
The Evolution of the Law of Occupation
The law of occupation has gone through a considerable evolution to reflect the changing practices of
international intervention in failing states to spread democracy and liberate people from oppressive
regimes.
Realist
This analysis of the law of occupation requires a consideration of the period of time in which the
different treaties of the law of occupation were written. Firstly, the Hague Conventions 1907 were
the culmination of a tumultuous period of revolution, intervention and war in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth century, in particular the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. These wars
challenged the order of the political elite in Europe through transnational revolutionary movements,20
particularly those which led to transformative occupations led by “liberators” rather than conquest
and annexation. To the political elite in Europe this posed a threat to their power and so:
[b]y enjoining the occupant from changing the political order of the occupied territory,
and by interdicting the legal transfer of sovereignty until the state of war was formally
concluded, the legal category of belligerent occupation effectively facilitated the
mediation of territorial and constitutional change…the negotiated concurrence…of the
Great Powers was a practical pre-condition for the appropriation of territory…. The
19
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html
Bhuta, N., ‘The Antinomies of Transformative Occupation’, European Journal of International Law, 16(4),
2005
18
20
revolutionary transformation of the domestic order of a state through the intervention
of another state was effectively bracketed.21
Therefore the Hague Conventions 1907 regulated belligerent occupation through the
legalisation of the conservationist principle. The intended effect of this was to enable the established
elites of the European Great Powers to protect their (and implicitly those of their states) interests.
Carl Schmitt’s influential text on international law clearly presents this interpretation of the law of
occupation, noting that it did not apply to the colonies of the European Great Powers and only on
Europe itself.22 This made possible the system of sovereign states in Europe where states with
opposing political and constitutional regimes could co-exist, rendering attempts of revolutionary
transformation in domestic affairs through the intervention of another state illegal. 23
The Schmittian interpretation of the laws of occupation also withdrew any legitimacy of
domestic insurrection against the occupying forces. Since the protection of the ousted sovereign’s
regime was the uppermost object of the occupying forces, therefore as trustee of the sovereign
regime, attacks against the occupying forces are akin to attacks against the sovereign itself. This
interpretation permits aggressive and draconian actions by the occupying power in order to maintain
“security” and the supremacy of the regime of the ousted sovereign. This again serves to delegitimise any attempts to either oust the existing sovereign or the occupying power.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949, reforming the law of occupation and the conservationist
principle, were written in the context of an international system which differed from that during the
drafting of the Hague Conventions 1907. Geneva IV was drafted following the end of World War
Two and the allied occupations of Germany and Japan where the sole purpose of the occupation was
to transform the socio-economic, political and constitutional structures of the state. Benvenisti argues
that the resurrection of the conservationist principle in 1949 provided, from a realist perspective, the
allies with the legal justification to return those colonies in Southeast Asia which had been occupied
by the Japanese to the ousted imperial sovereign.24 The maintenance of the conservationist principle
also meant that the Occupying Power was free to use wide powers to quell any resistance in order to
protect the regime of the ousted sovereign.
Under this analysis the wording of SCR1483 served a dual purpose for the interests of the
occupying power. Firstly, it de-ligitimised any insurgency by reaffirming the laws of occupation as
enshrined in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. This meant that the Coalition security forces could
exempt themselves from constitutional constraints on the exercise of power in the interests of
preserving the security of the domestic regime. Secondly SCR1483 was worded in such a way so as
to question the application of the conservationist principle. The CPA was required to create a secure
environment where the Iraqis could freely decide their own futures. This was construed by the CPA
as giving the Coalition the scope to rebuild the institutions of Iraq in their own image and for the
benefit of their self-interest.
The recognition in SCR1483 of the duty to allow the Iraqis to determine their own futures is
key to any reform of the law of occupation and the conservationist principle. However a realist
interpretation of SCR1483 and a further examination of its protection against abuse from the
unilateral imposition by the imperial powers, expose its fundamental weaknesses. The Security
Council Resolution 1483 lent a degree of UN legitimacy to the occupation of Iraq, which the US and
the other Coalition forces felt necessary given the refusal of the UN to sanction the invasion. No role
was afforded the UN to oversee the elections in Iraq nor was the UN to take any roles in which it has
considerable experience from previous nation-building missions. The context in which the
Resolution was made, where the only remaining super power can declare which states are failing and
therefore at risk of unilateral intervention, exposes the dangers of SCR1483. Without sufficient
oversight or accountability the Resolution creates the scope for the Coalition to construct a state,
within which the Iraqis can choose how they are governed but in which they have no say in the
systems of governance and institutions of the state. Considering the transformative actions of the
Coalition across a number of sectors such as security and the economy, it seems that on the
21
Ibid.
Schmitt, C., The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum, translated by
Ulman, G., (Telos Press 2003)
23
Bhuta, ‘The Antinomies of Transformative Occupation’
24
Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation
19
22
Coalition’s interpretation of SCR1483 very wide reforms were legitimised with the effect being to
take even more control from the Iraqi people. The potential for the occupying power to act in its self
interest is too large to ignore. The Resolution was correct in insisting that it is the Iraqis who govern
themselves, however judging by the response from the UN to the CPA’s actions, this was not
strongly protected by the international community. Under a realist interpretation of the law of
occupation and the effects of the reforms under SCR1483, it would appear that the law of occupation
and the conservation principle is beyond reform and to do so to provide for self-determination would
serve only to legitimise transformative intervention against the interest of the occupied.
Humanitarianism/Human Rights
A humanitarian view of the law of occupation would be to “moderate the excesses of modern
warfare and military rule, the focus being the welfare of the helpless civilian population at the mercy
of a foreign army”.25 The ousted sovereign is no longer in a position to protect his people and
therefore the law of occupation was drafted, under this interpretation, to compel the occupying
power to take care of the population.
The Hague conventions, which installed the occupying power as the trustee of the interests
of the ousted sovereign, sought to protect the civilian population by including them in the interests of
the ousted sovereign. During the negotiations leading to the Hague Conventions it was the smaller
nations, those most susceptible to invasion and occupation, who sought to insert a duty on the
occupant to protect the occupied peoples. It was understood at the time that the motives for the
actions of the occupant would be short-term military concerns that would not negatively effect the
local population or inhibit the transactions of their daily life.26 The phrase used in the final draft of
article 43 of the Hague Conventions to ascribe the occupant its responsibility to protect the occupied
people was that it must protect “l’ordre et la vie publique”. This form of words was accepted by all
parties as being able to achieve the aims above. Perversely, when the Conventions were invoked, it
was this phrase which was called upon by the occupying power to justify intervention into all
manner of aspects of civilian life.
The humanitarian interpretation of the law of occupation was furthered by article 47 of the
Geneva Conventions 1949. Article 47 states:
Protected persons [occupied citizens] who are in occupied territory shall not be
deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of the present
Convention by any change introduced, as a result of the occupation of a territory, into
the institutions or government of the said territory, nor by any agreement concluded
between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power, nor by
any annexation by the latter of the whole or part of the occupied territory.
The article makes no mention of the illegality of changes to the political, economic, legal or
constitutional aspects of the occupied state. Rather it seeks to ensure that the rights of the occupied
people are protected should any changes be made. This ground breaking treaty shifted the focus from
the rights of governments to recognising that individuals as citizens of states had rights which must
be respected in international law. The move towards recognising individual rights as opposed to
interstate rights was further entrenched in the Geneva Protocol I which expanded the number of
people included in “protected persons” beyond just the occupants of the occupied state to include all
people on the opposite side who fall into the hands of the occupying power. As Benvenisti observes,
this is not to say that the Geneva Conventions do not recognise the legality of any internal changes to
the occupying state. Indeed the continued applicability of the Hague Regulations in article 154
strengthen this view.
Clearly from the increasing protection of individuals who are in contact with the occupying
power and the expansion of the duties of the occupying power, the move towards humanising the law
of occupation is profound. Dietrich Schindler wrote “[A] tendency may be detected in the Geneva
conventions of 1949 for their provisions to be considered not only as obligations to be discharged by
25
Cohen, JL., ‘The Role of International Law in Post-Conflict Constitution-Making: Towards a Jus Post
Bellum for “Interim Occupations”’, New York Law School Law Review (2006)
26
Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation
20
the High Contracting Parties but as individual rights of the protected persons”.27 The logical
conclusion of this progression would be to require the occupying power to actively protect the
human rights of the occupying people. The danger that this presents is that it may require
considerable legislative action by the occupying power, particularly given the wide range of rights
protected under modern international human rights norms.
The humanising trend continued with SCR1483. Benvenisti, who is a supporter of the
humanisation of the law of occupation and who has criticized the Geneva Convention for not having
gone far enough recognizes that SCR1483 served four purposes:
1. Revived the law of occupation and therefore refuted claims that such an occupation is illegal.
2. It reaffirmed the territorial sovereignty of Iraq, therefore since the collapse of the ousted regime,
the sovereignty lay in the hands of the people.
3. It recognized that human rights law can complement the law of occupation.
4. It saw the occupying power as the administrator of a modern welfare state.
This humanistic reading of the law of occupation essentially transforms it into the law of
transformative occupation. SCR1483 requires the Coalition to act in accordance with the “charter of
the United Nations and other relevant international law, to promote the welfare of the Iraqi people
through the effective administration of the state”. This reference is made in addition to requiring the
Coalition to “comply fully with its obligations under international law, in particular the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907”. An expansionist reading of this language
would include a requirement to implement international human rights law in Iraq. Benvenisti’s
reading of SCR1483 would require the Coalition to make many fundamental changes to meet its
obligations. To implement human rights law in occupation would require considerable changes. As
the “administrator of a modern welfare state” the occupant would be authorised to make changes to
the provision of services based upon whichever model it chose. Following this interpretation to its
logical conclusion would require that the occupying power be given a relatively free hand in
changing the legal, economic, political and constitutional framework of the occupied state to ensure
that international human rights norms are respected and therefore renders the conservationist
principle redundant.
There is a real danger in granting the free hand to the occupying power, as it presents the
opportunity for it to achieve its self-interested aims. A realist response by the occupying power to the
humanistic development of the law is a distinct possibility, especially if the intervening power has
done so unilaterally showing contempt for the international standards and legal obligations.
SCR1483 provided too much freedom to the occupying power and in doing so has in fact legitimized
imperial actions of the occupying power. As with the realist analysis of the law of occupation, the
humanitarian approach reveals some notable points for reform. There must be room in a reformed
law of occupation for modern human rights standards, however this must be done in such a way as to
avoid justifying imperial actions in the occupied territory.
Is reform of the Law of Occupation required and what options do we have?
No change of the law is necessary to either give more power to the occupying power or to stay his
hand to protect the occupied people, instead the Coalition needs to be held accountable for its failure
under existing international law.
The other policies of the Coalition during the occupation, the de-securitisation, deba’athification, the economic reforms and the interim constitution shows that any reform of the law
of occupation must be certain to stay the excesses of imperial decision making, such as that of the
CPA. It is true that some of the CPA decisions and Orders were legal under the framework
governing the occupation of Iraq. However some of the major actions of the CPA have manifestly
lead to the dire security situation in Iraq and the increasing feeling of disenfranchisement created by
imperial rule which has fed the insurgency. Not only this, but the decisions lack a sense of legitimacy
as they have been imposed upon Iraq by the occupying power without any genuine or meaningful
Iraqi input.
27
Schindler, D., The International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights: International Review of the
Red Cross, No. 208, January-February 1979
21
Is reform needed?
As Scheffer notes, the law of occupation “permits tinkering on the edges of societal reform, but it is
not a licence to transform”.28 Should the law of occupation have been strictly applied to Iraq? If the
Coalition had been strictly bound by the conditions of the laws of occupation and the SCR1483 had
not been passed, then they would have been very closely limited as to any reforms they could have
enacted. The responsibility for the protection of the Iraqi population would have been assured as the
law of occupation requires the occupying power to protect them. The effects of a strict interpretation
of the law of occupation would have proven beneficial. Remembering the international dissent
against the invasion of Iraq and the need of the coalition to engender some international support for
their post-war activity, they would have been compelled to focus rather more intently on the security
situation and the protection of the Iraqi people rather than beginning widespread, illegitimate and
misinformed policy transformation. Once sufficient security had been established the Coalition’s
main concern would have been returning power to the ousted sovereign.
In the case of Iraq the definition of the ousted sovereign to whom the power should be
returned is in need of re-interpretation. Clearly the power cannot be returned to Saddam, his family
or even the Ba’ath party. Instead the sovereignty rests with the Iraqi people. This interpretation of
popular sovereignty would mean that the obligation would be for the Coalition to return power to a
legitimate and democratically elected Iraqi government. Such an interpretation would also not have
the effect of de-legitimising certain internal political actors who are perceived by the occupying
power as attempting to undermine the regime of the ousted “sovereign”, thereby requiring the
occupying power to include such actors in negotiations on the future institutions of the state. There is
a recognised danger in this construction that it could justify external intervention in states where the
ruling power does not represent its sovereign citizens. As Cohen notes, the principle of nonintervention and sovereign equality must remain as central principles of humanitarian law to avoid
unilateral interventions to impose democracy.29 Instead military intervention can be avoided through
international political associations committed not to tolerate such governance structures, for example
the prospect of EU membership has served to “democratize” many previously authoritarian regimes.
On a strict interpretation of the law of occupation, during the interim period the occupying
power would be required to respect the laws, no matter how abhorrent, of the ousted regime. Whilst I
am in favour of retaining the conservationist principle I can see situations, such as Iraq, where the
occupying power will need to change certain laws within the occupying state, particularly those
which manifestly contravene international human rights treaties. A reformed version of the law of
occupation must retain the aspect of the conservationist principle which restricts imperial imposition
and which retains focus on security and humanitarian assistance, but it must also allow changes to
the occupied state’s infrastructure in certain circumstances. Those circumstances would include
actions to promote self-determination and the transfer of power.
An alternative to reforming the law of occupation in this way is for the occupying power to
seek a Security Council Resolution which establishes their roles and responsibilities, taking them
beyond occupation law. SCR1483 did not go so far as to put the obligations and responsibilities of
the Coalition beyond occupation law, instead it re-affirmed the importance of their responsibilities
under the relevant treaties. This negotiated middle ground is a result of many members of the
Security Council not wishing to show post facto that the invasion of Iraq was legitimate. Scheffer
proposes that “a UN Security Council mandate establishing the transformational tasks of a military
and civilian administration of a liberated society that explicitly or implicitly implemented only the
provisions of occupation law relevant to the particular situation”30 would have been appropriate. This
option was rejected by the United States with regards Iraq. Scheffer continues that the law of
occupation would remain in its current restricted form to regulate the actions of aggressor armies
occupying a state, but it should not be used to inhibit the actions of a liberating army. The liberating
army would have its reconstruction and occupation mission governed and assisted by the UN.
Arguing that “an occupied population can turn against the liberator-turned-occupier if that
population’s quest for self determination is severely restricted by the occupying power’s necessary
28
Scheffer, D. J., ‘Beyond Occupation Law’, American Journal of International Law, 97(3) 2003
Cohen, J., ‘Whose Sovereignty? Empire versus International Law’, Ethics and International Affairs, 18(3)
2004
30
Scheffer, ‘Beyond Occupation Law’
22
29
focus on occupation rather than liberation if it is to remain in compliance with international law”,31
therefore a UN mandated “liberator” force with a UN defined role would be able to avoid this
situation.
His proposals are deeply flawed. Firstly, it presumes that the UN would be able to restrict
the transformative will of a single global superpower. The United States rejected UN involvement in
Iraq and negotiated SCR1483 through the Security Council with enough scope to legitimize many of
its transformative objectives. Such a proposal also presumes that the UN Security Council would be
able to reach agreement on a desire to respond to such a situation, which given the ambiguities of
SCR1483 as a result of the individual aims of the member states, looks unlikely in the case of Iraq.32
Secondly, it presumes that a UN mandated interim administration would be better able to support the
occupied people’s “quest for self-determination”. The UN has imposed regimes on Kosovo and
Bosnia which have installed the “autocratic rule of unelected and unaccountable international
mandarins, like Lord Paddy Ashdown, the High Representative of Bosnia”.33 Finally it affords the
UN Security Council a degree of democratic decision making capability which it simply does not
have.
The tendency of UN mandated missions, as seen in Bosnia and Kosovo is to reach for a
distorted, externally imposed “rule of law” solution rather than seeking a consensus-building, bottom
up political solution. A legal framework created and imposed by external governors may well result
in a new state, but the state will be devoid of legitimacy, will be dependent on external support and
will be prone to descend into conflict. E.H. Carr points out that the legal sphere cannot and must not
be completely separated from the political sphere in a functioning state:
…law is a function of a given political order, whose existence alone can make it
binding…Law cannot be self-contained; for the obligation to [be] obey[ed] it must rest
on something outside of itself. It is neither self-creating nor self-applying. ‘There are
men who govern.’ says a Chinese philosopher, ‘but there are no laws that govern’.34
Chandler notes that the external application of a legal framework in Bosnia, without local
consultation or engagement has undermined “the political process, the standing of the law and the
transition to self-government”.35 The Coalition has attempted to circumnavigate such criticism in
Iraq by giving the Iraqi Governing Council a role in governing Iraq. However the council and its role
are deeply flawed and do not legitimacy.
Continued humanization
As I have outlined above the development of the law of occupation has been one of ever increasing
humanization, towards a “cosmopolitan world order [which] brings about a very significant priority
shift from international law to human rights”.36 A continued humanization of the law of occupation,
it is argued, must take into account the development of international human rights norms since the
Geneva Convention in 1949.
The rights protected in the Geneva Convention are minimal and so if the Convention is the
“bill of rights for the occupied population” as Benvenisti claims then it is one which is not as
ambitious as other international human rights treaties or domestic bills of rights. The Convention
does not contain protection for rights which may be considered essential for popular participation in
a functioning democracy such as freedoms of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience or
protection of ethnic minorities or children. It is possible that these gaps in the protection of human
rights could be filled with the extra-territorial application of the occupying power’s obligations to its
31
Scheffer, ‘Beyond Occupation Law’
Chesterman, S., ‘Occupation as Liberation: International Humanitarian Law and Regime Change’, Ethics
and International Affairs 18(3), 2004
33
Chandler, D., ‘The Problems of “Nation-Building”: Imposing Bureaucratic “Rule from Above”’, Cambridge
Review of International Affairs, 17(3), 2004
34
Carr, EH., The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations,
(Palgrave-Macmillan 2001)
35
Chandler, ‘The Problems of “Nation-Building”
36
Beck, U., ‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity’, British Journal of
Sociology, 51(1), 2000
23
32
own people. There is some definite advantage in extending the protections afforded the domestic
citizens of the occupying powers. For example, the Al-Skeini case, which found that a civilian who
was beaten to death by British soldiers was protected by the UK’s obligations under the European
Convention on Human Rights and therefore had recourse to the European Court of Human Rights.
This shows the utility of such extra-territorial application providing recourse to justice. Situations
may arise where individuals’ rights with regards to the occupying power are not protected under the
law of occupation but they are under international human rights treaties, where this is the case then
they should have recourse to justice. Such a policy represents a dual benefit for the occupied
territory; it affords additional protection to individuals beyond the law of occupation or domestic
human rights protection and it offers institutional learning for the application of human rights
protections. This institutional learning would go on to inform domestic debate within a legitimate
government for future human rights protections.
The occupying power should be able to implement changes to domestic human rights law or
monitoring systems where there are situations on the ground where rights abuses prevent citizens
going about their normal life. For example, freedom of expression may have been repressed through
pre-occupation legislation. The occupying power should repeal such laws so as to create the
opportunities for the domestic debates for the political resolution to the occupation. Repealing such
laws, along with any laws banning freedom of protest, is essential for the citizens to engage with the
occupying power and to debate the political solution to the occupation. Undertaking such a policy on
the in an occupied territory does not require the type of reform of the law of occupation which would
reduce the impact of the conservationist principle and which would result in further opportunity for
imperial imposition. Instead a reformist reading of article 43 of the Hague Convention which
requires the occupying power to protect public order and safety in the occupied territory could allow
such human rights reforms, as are necessary in the particular circumstances, to be enacted.
There is a role for the application of human rights norms in occupied territories, but they
must be carefully applied. An unrestrained application of human rights principles in Iraq could have
allowed the CPA to “impose a new constitution…wholly rewriting its civil and criminal laws,
restructuring the judiciary or imposing a new federalist structure”.37 The CPA would have been able
to choose between competing treaty obligations for legitimacy of its actions depending on the
outcome it desired. Recommendations that a human rights framework should be developed by the
occupying power do, I think, go too far in this direction. Returning to E.H. Carr, it is vital that there
is some domestic debate around the essential protection required and the mechanisms for their
protection to ensure long term viability. There is scope for institutional learning through extraterritorial application of human rights obligations during occupation, during debate on the system for
the election of an interim government and through the observation of the basic rights protected under
the law of occupation. Once a domestic government is in place it can decide upon the protection of
human rights most appropriate for their country.
Instead the role for human rights norms must be limited to repealing those laws in existence
at the start of the occupation which are offensive to recognized international human rights standards.
This kind of tinkering around the edges, permitted by the Geneva Convention, would limit the
possible reforms an occupying power could make within an occupied territory. Major reforms would
be left to the returning indigenous government. The international community must seek to influence
the implementation of these reforms through the normal diplomatic channels rather than imposing
them during the opportunity which occupation presents.
Taken to the extreme, the idea of expanding human rights law to the law of occupation posits
that where a power has intervened with the intention of overthrowing an oppressive regime with the
ultimate aim of establishing a new, representative and democratic government, then it would be
counter productive to tie the hands of the occupying power through the application of the
conservationist principle in the law of occupation. This line of argument was present in the approval
of the “humanitarian” interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia. Where the intervention has been legally
sanctioned, the argument continues, then that approval implies that once the repressive regime has
been removed, the intervening power has the approval to transform the state with a new democratic
government at its head. As Fox states, the danger here is that the line between jus ad bellum (the
legality of the intervention) and jus in bello (the actions of the parties during the war, and including
the law of occupation) are blurred. He continues that in the case of unilateral intervention, there is no
37
Rosen, ‘When a Liberator is an Occupier’
24
consensus as to the right of unilateral humanitarian intervention. If the conservationist principle was
abandoned then an intervening power would be able to validate and realize war aims under
occupation law that may well be invalid under law regulating the use of force. In turn this would
have the effect of undermining to the point of collapse the international legal doctrine of the
sovereign equality of states. This founding principle enshrined in the Declaration on Principles of
International Law Governing Friendly Relations and Co-Operation Among States in Accordance
with the Charter of the United Nations that “every state has an inalienable right to choose its
political, economic, social and cultural systems, without interference in any form by another state”.38
The precedent set by such a reform of the law of occupation would have serious and lasting
implications for the protection of less powerful states against those with more power.
Conclusion
A modern interpretation of the international law of occupation can play a central role in future statebuilding missions. Intrinsic to this is the maintenance and application of the conservationist
principle. Applying the conservationist principle to require the occupying power to respect the
sovereignty of the occupied people presents a considerable barrier to the imposition of institutions
and imperial transformation of the legal, economic, political and constitutional constructs of the
state. The arguments that the occupying power should transform state institutions so that they accord
with international human rights law must be dismissed. Such an approach would serve to legitimize
the imperial transformation of the occupied state. The UN Security Council Resolution 1483
provided too much scope for interpretation to allow for externally imposed transformations within
Iraq.
However, the law of occupation should not be read in such a way as to require the occupying
power to respect laws which would require it to contravene its human rights obligations. Repealing
such laws should be permitted. Furthermore, the recourse to international human rights courts for the
actions of the occupying power against the occupied people should be allowed. This presents
opportunities for institutional learning during the occupation which can continue through the creation
of human rights remedies post-occupation.
This reading of the law of occupation would focus the energies of the occupying power in
creating a secure environment within which the sovereign people can decided the future direction of
the state. The occupying power can play a facilitative role in these negotiations and all parties must
be encouraged to the table in return for renouncing violent means. Within the secure environment
political actors can negotiate the return to a legitimate domestic government. The ethical
responsibility of the occupying power must be to create a legitimate, domestic government. This can
only be achieved by resisting imperial urges, respecting the right of the occupying people to choose
and participate in their government. The law of occupation, properly applied reinforces sovereign
equality and provides the appropriate framework for an ethical approach to state-building.
38
General Assembly Resolution 2625, UN GAOR, 25th Session, 1883rd Meeting, Annex (1970)
25
The ‘securitization’ of migration: A discourse of discrimination?
Zoë Wilson, M.Sc. Global Politics
1. Introduction
In a world characterised by transnational flows, global interconnectedness and universal rights,
international migration is increasingly framed as a security issue. Migration has risen up political
agendas and into mainstream consciousness as a problem to be dealt with rather than a development
to be embraced. Barriers to global flows of capital, information and goods are dismantled, yet
physical and legislative impediments to the movement of people are erected.
1.1. Critical Focus and Argument
This paper will explore the evolution of the migration-security nexus and critically examine the
implications of a securitized migration discourse to assess whether it is discriminatory, either
intrinsically or in application. To do so it will look at the basis for an expanded concept of security
and the process by which issues become securitized. It will then apply this framework to migration.
Through this approach the ramifications of a discourse which frames migrants as a security threat
will be explored. During the discussion, the role of securitizing actors, their motivations and the
mechanisms of securitization will be examined, as will the ways in which the lived of migrants are
affected.
This dissertation will argue that the current security-migration nexus is an inevitable product
of the widened realm of security adopted since the end of the Cold War, the supranational trends of
globalization and, more recently, the heightened security context of the ‘War on Terror’. The
relationship between security and migration will be shown to be complex, problematic and
overemphasised. While acknowledging the power of discourse in issue framing, the agency of states
and other political actors in constructing and applying this discourse will be stressed. The paper will
conclude that while the securitization of migration discourse is not inherently discriminatory, it can,
and frequently does, lead to discriminatory practices because power hierarchies are reflected in the
privileging of the security of some groups at the expense of others’.
1.2. Context of the discussion : “The age of migration”
Migration is as old as mankind, and far older than the sovereign system of states and borders. Today
there are more migrants than ever before and more than double the number there were 25 years
ago.1 An estimated 200 million international migrants constitute roughly 3% of the world’s
population (IOM 2007). Improved access to international transportation and communications
technology through globalisation has facilitated the development of transnational networks,
enabling and encouraging migration. The rise of ethic conflict and state failure has also displaced
vast numbers of people who are forced to seek safety in another country.
International migration has increased prominence in both domestic and international
politics. Links between international migration, diaspora and transnational criminal activities such
as the trafficking of people, drugs or arms are emphasised, as are social problems related to
immigrants. The media portrays a negative image of migration, as a security threat, and political
machinations are designed to rally popular support.
The securitization of migration has come to dominate both academic and political discourses
relating to the movement of people. Links between international terrorism and the international
movement of people have been made. Consequently, most developed states have sought to restrict
immigration, often at the expense of liberal or humanitarian principles. The pervasiveness of a
securitized migration discourse means that the application of security logic to migration policy has
come to be regarded as neutral.
The ‘securitization of migration’ is a preoccupation of the developed nations. Immigration
does have a significant impact on the security of developing countries, but the role discourse plays
in constructing these issues is limited. The ‘securitization of migration’ never refers to the security
of the migrants themselves. These concerns are deemed to be ‘humanitarian’ rather than security,
underlining the disparity between a people-centred approach to security in theory and in practice.
1
2005 figures, cited in Koser, K., International Migration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press
2007)
26
1.3 Definition of Terms
The complexity of the relationship between security and migration is due in great part to the
subjectivity of definition. This section outlines the general referents of terms used in this paper.
Discrimination – Discrimination is the unfair treatment of an individual or group based on prejudice
against a perceived difference, whether it is gender, disability, weight or age. Racial and religious
discrimination are the most relevant to the migration-security nexus. This paper will look at
discrimination against migrants based on any aspect of their identity or status as a migrant.
Discrimination can be direct and indirect. It can create feelings of marginalization, insecurity and
resentment, which in themselves can become a risk to the dominant social order and a security
concern.
Migrant – International migration refers to the movement of people, ‘migrants’, across national
borders. The UN definition of a migrant as “a person who moves to a country other than that of his
or her usual residence for a period of at least a year, so that the country of destination effectively
becomes his or her new country of usual residence”2 is widely accepted. This broadly plotted
definition, embracing all categories of migrant, will be used throughout this paper.
Security – At the most general level, security can be thought of as a state of existence which is free
from threat. However, security is an ‘essentially contested concept’.3 The multiple and conflicting
meanings of ‘security’ reflect particular moral, ideological and normative positions, and therefore
prevent agreement on a definition.4 Security for one party does not necessarily mean security for all.
Indeed, the security of one group may often be obtained at the expense of another’s. The
understandings of security and their implications will be examined in later chapters.
2. Conceptual Background “Security Studies”
2.1. A New Kind of Security
Traditional conceptions of security focused on military strategic issues and threats to national
security. The approach was state centric and reflected the pessimism typical of realism. While the
adequacy of scope and rigor of the orthodox model of security were first questioned during the
1980’s, it was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the decade that the need for
examination and re-conceptualization of security was widely recognised.
The end of the Cold War brought with it a radical transformation in political agendas and
globalization further undermined the centrality of the state in security relations. Consequently,
security studies, as a field of knowledge and expertise, underwent something of an identity crisis.5 A
radical reframing of the security agenda was required. The questions of what constituted a ‘security’
threat, and whether states alone should be able to claim security threats, were examined in the
context of the new non-bipolar world. This re-conceptualization was led by the Copenhagen School
of Security Studies. Their work suggested that the process by which an issue becomes a ‘securitized’
and the implications of this ‘security framing’ were of the greatest significance .
The increasing salience of environmental degradation and population movements as problem
areas within international relations contributed to a push to expand the range of areas considered as
security issues. No longer was state security privileged above human security.6 The focus on the
security of the individual allowed for a wider range of threats to be viewed through a ‘security’
prism.
The state ceased to be the natural referent object of security threats. Discussion of how
‘human security’ could be usefully adopted as an analytical tool came to the fore. The 1994 United
2
United Nations ‘Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration’, (1998)
See Buzan, B., People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post Cold War
Era 2nd Ed. (Longman 1991)
4
Ibid.
5
Huysmans, J., The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (Routledge 2006)
6
Graham, D., & Poku, N. (eds.), Redefining Security: Population Movements and National Security (Praeger
1998)
27
3
Nations Development Report consolidated this shift of focus, calling for a ‘new development
paradigm’ in which human security was integrally linked to development. However, removing the
state as the central referent of security was not without problems. The security of ‘people’
encapsulates a multitude of issues, including those of economic welfare, health, environmental
concerns, and cultural identity. Opponents to widening the scope of the security agenda argued that
expanding the realm of security beyond its orthodox parameters undermined its coherence as a field
of knowledge.
Security, defined in terms of its subject (threats) and its referent objects (e.g. state,
individual, collective), is subjective and contested. Rather than defining it by its external subjects and
referents, the Copenhagen School 7 takes a constructivist approach to security, analysing the process
by which issues are rendered as security threats.
2.2. Securitization Theory
The theory of securitization is based on the idea that security issues are not defined by the nature of
the threat they pose, instead they are presented through the particular use of language. In this way,
the debate regarding subjects of ‘security knowledge’ are sidestepped and ‘security’ becomes a
framing mechanism, more specifically a linguistic action, or speech act.
The obvious question arising from this assertion is ‘what is done?’, or, what is achieved
through the use of a securitizing speech act? Buzan maintains that through ‘securitizing’ an issue it is
‘dramatized and presented as an issue of supreme priority’8 and in such situations action is required
to offset the risk posed. The agency of the ‘securitizing actor’ in this process is of the greatest
significance. It is through evoking a sense of emergency and exceptional circumstances that
‘securitization’ is set apart from ‘politicization’. However, the process of securitization does not rest
simply on utterance of a securitizing speech act. The securitizing move must be accepted by the
audience.9
The shift from an objective to subjective (or inter-subjective) understanding of security alters
the nature of security analysis. Huysmans recognises that by analysing security through language,
speech becomes instrumental in the construction of the issue, altering the understanding of a problem
in a manner dependant on ‘the framework of meanings that security language implies’.10 Security
speech acts are, then, in all cases political:
At the heart of this linguistic turn is a change from a representational to a performative
and generic understanding of language. Security utterances are […] thus performing a
modulation of a policy question in a political context rather than simply describing a
situation.11
As ‘security’ is socially constructed, the extent to which an issue poses a ‘real’ threat is less
significant than the means by which it has become perceived as one. The objectivist analysis of
traditional security discourse remains problematic with this understanding of security.
The weakest element of the securitization theory outlined above is its lack of consideration of
non-discursive security practises. By focussing on the linguistics of securitizing speech-acts, the
Copenhagen School fails to explore the external (social and contextual) conditions which influence
the process of ‘securitization’. Neither does it explore the potential for alternative forms of
securitizing acts. Jef Huysmans and Didier Bigo 12 have argued for a broadening of the
securitization framework to include securitizing practices, technologies and the role of ‘security
professionals’. Indeed, Huysmans 13 points out that policy (security practice) does not always result
7
Referring to the work of the European security research group at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, of
which Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver were the most prominent scholars
8
Buzan, B., Wæver, O., & de Wilde, J. (eds.), Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Lynne Reiner 1999)
9
Ibid.
10
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity
11
Ibid.
12
Huysmans, ‘The European Union and the Securitization of Migration’, Journal of Common Market Studies,
43(5), 2000; Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity; Bigo, D., ‘Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of
the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives, 27, 2002
13
Huysmans, ‘The European Union and the Securitization of Migration’
28
from security discourse, it can itself transform issues into security problems ‘by mobilizing specific
institutions and expectations’.
2.3. Security Theory: A Basis for Analysis
Understanding the roots of the ‘securitization’ discourse provides an interesting point from which to
assess potentially discriminatory outcomes. In broadening the field of security to include notions of
human and cultural security, the relevance of migration to security expanded far beyond its potential
to create, or result from, conflicts between states. It is within this theoretical context and that of an
altering political agenda following the end of the Cold War that early writing14 considered the wider
security implications of migration.
Since this early work security has become the hegemonic discourse for the modulation of
migration issues. Ironically, for a process initiated by move towards a ‘people-centred’ conception of
security, ‘securitization’ in practice creates tensions with human rights, civil liberties and democracy.
The potential for discrimination is born out of these tensions. However the securitization does not
automatically lead to liberal and humanitarian values being discarded. The people focus of human
security actually provides a means by which threats to the survival of individuals can be accessed.
Instead these values are threatened and discrimination occurs when the security of one group of
people is privileged at the expense of another’s.
This paper will assess how far the securitization of migration is a discriminatory discourse.
For these ends the Copenhagen School’s theory of securitization is the most coherent and applicable
framework. By treating ‘securitization’ as a process, the discourse can be broken down into
constitutive elements in an attempt to uncover how or whether discrimination may occur as a result.
This paper will, however, diverge from the Copenhagen School’s purely linguistic approach to
securitization by considering both discursive and non-discursive practices of securitizing actors. On
initial consideration, it is possible to say that securitization is not fundamentally discriminatory. To
securitize an issue is not to sanction prejudicial behaviour. Nevertheless, as those in a position of
power often represent the interests of particular groups, it can be used to frame issues in such a way
as to facilitate discriminatory policy.
3. Securitizing Migration: Discourses of Threat and Fear
3.1. Securitizing Migration: Discourse Context
Until relatively recently, immigration was primarily driven by economic considerations and
considered a concern of domestic public policy bodies. The public, media and academia largely
ignored the security implications of international migration. Situations where migration was
recognised as a security concern were generally ‘localized and outside of the West’,15 such as the
role of Palestinian migrants in conflict in the Lebanon. Immigrants themselves were not the focus of
security policies. However, as we have seen earlier, changes in the world system and migration
trends prompted an increasingly diffuse sense of insecurity, which incorporated the movement of
people across national borders.
Restrictive immigration policies contribute greatly to the ‘securitization’ of migration. They
shift migration from legal and traceable routes to spheres of illegality, including ‘global’ criminal
networks. Illegal migration is by its status a security threat and the irregular migrant is thus
‘criminalised’ by association. This construction of migration as a threat rather than an asset to
society is self-reinforcing. The process of ‘securitization’ produces societal pressures which
supports restricting immigration and the further removal of rights.
States react to the shift in structural power and assert their sovereignty in alternative ways.
Their territorial boundaries acquire a greater symbolic power, both as institutions defining the
sovereign state and as processes for marking identity.16
Rudolph17 notes that despite a past emphasis on the economic aspects of migration, ‘migration
and border policies in most advanced industrial countries have displayed an acute sensitivity to the
14
Weiner, M., ‘Security, Stability, and International Migration’, International Security, 17(3), 1992-3
Tirman, J., ‘Introduction: The Movement of People and the Security of States’ in Tirman, J., (ed.) Maze of
Fear: Security and Migration after 9/11, (The New Press 2004)
16
Ceyhan, A., & Tsoukala, A., ‘The Securitization of Migration in Western Societies: Ambivalent Discourses
and Policies’, Alternative, 27, 2002
29
15
racial, ethnic, and cultural composition of flows’. This would suggest that discrimination has been
present in policy before the securitization of migration discourse and that prejudiced immigration
policies are not always the result of securitization. Rather, it is argued that the securitization of
migration has exacerbated this tendency. In this way migration has been altered from an issue which
may cause unease, to one which may educe fear. A likely consequence of this shift is a concurrent
move towards a more restrictive immigration policy and potentially discriminatory attitudes to
migrants in general.
3.1.1. Security and Terrorism Link
More recent geopolitical events have also had a huge impact on security issues. As described above
the connection between migration and security had become increasingly salient during the final years
of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, once it became apparent that the perpetrators of the
September 11th attacks were foreign-born, these connections were crystallized and accepted as
incontrovertible truths. Porous borders and irregular migration became viewed as acute
vulnerabilities. At the same time the Arab origin of the attackers meant that entire communities
became stigmatised as potential terrorists. The direct line of association between foreignness and
security threats consolidated the development of the migration-security nexus outlined above.
Consequently, the rights and legal status of aliens have been eroded in several Western nations by
new laws and measures aimed at combating terrorism.18 This is indicative of the knee-jerk conflation
of terrorism and migration, which is based on the assumption that by virtue of their foreignness
migrants do not share allegiance to the native community and therefore pose a danger to the state.
The truth behind these gross generalisations is that while terrorism is dependent on the movement of
people and money around the world, in reality only a very small minority of immigrants are involved
in terrorism. It also conceals the role states play in encouraging networks of irregular migration.
None of the nineteen 9/11 bombers were economic immigrants, or indeed refugees. Their presence in
the United States was purposeful and each had gained admission by legal means on temporary visas.
The existing ties and long history of migration between the Islamic periphery and liberaldemocratic states are often obscured in accounts of the security-migration nexus focussing on this
period. While in the US, 9/11 shifted attention to the nexus between migration and security, within
Western Europe migration had already been an important security issue for many years.19 In
particular due to the problems in France related to North-African migration during the 1980s and the
movement of asylum seekers from Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s. By 2002 Europe was
home to 15 million Muslims.20 Many factors influence the large scale of migration from the Islamic
periphery to Europe including historic ties (colonial legacies), proximity, demographic pressures and
violent conflict within the Islamic periphery, established migrant communities and networks from
previous migration policies (i.e. guestworker policies of 50/60s) and economic inequality. Within
Western Europe integration has traditionally been thought of as the best way to diffuse cultural or
political threats posed by migrants to the host country.21 Nevertheless, the political and social effects
of 9/11 and the subsequent terrorist attacks on transport systems in Madrid and London, have
brought underlying concerns about potential insecurities related to immigration to the fore:
the widespread association of Muslims with the escalation of global terrorism has
sharpened perceptions of threat, especially in Europe, where Muslims have long been
associated with societal insecurity.22
This shift has huge implications, affecting international relations’ issues such as Turkish
accession to the EU and restrictive asylum policies, while also having profound repercussions within
17
Rudolph, C., ‘Security and the Political Economy of International Migration’, The American Political
Science Review, 97(4), 2003
18
Castles, S., & Miller, M., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World,
(Palgrave 2003)
19
Zucconi, M., ‘Migration and Security as an Issue in US-EU Relations’, in Tirman, Maze of Fear
20
Castles, & Miller, The Age of Migration
21
Rogers, R., ‘Western European Responses to Migration’, in Wiener, M. (ed.), International Migration and
Security, (Westview 1993)
22
Rudolph, ‘Security and the Political Economy of International Migration’
30
societies. The various forms of social exclusion faced by Muslims across Europe contribute to
‘underlying socio-economic tensions’ which are then ‘overlaid with highly politicized religious
identity issues’.23 This is a dangerous dynamic, which can lead to a downward spiral of insecurity
driven by discrimination, anti-immigrant extremism, and religious fundamentalism.
3.2 Theoretical Development of the Security-Migration Nexus
The nature of the connection between security and migration is complex and contested. According
to Choucri conceptualisation and analysis of the relationship is especially problematic ‘because
migration, security and the linkage between the two are inherently subjective concepts’.24
Definition, therefore, is once again at the heart of the matter. The Copenhagen School’s Theory of
Securitization provides us with a tool to assist in tackling the tangled composition of the migrationsecurity nexus. By refocusing our attention on securitization as a process, rather than as a label, we
can look at how migration has been positioned as a security issue, by whom and for what ends.
3.2.1. Framing Migration as Insecurity (How and By Whom?)
Myron Weiner’s pioneering work identified five categories of situations in which migration could be
deemed a security issue: (1) when a diaspora population organises in opposition to the regime of
their home country; (2) when migrants are perceived as a risk to the security of the host country; (3)
when immigrants are perceived as a cultural threat; (4) when an influx of migrants challenge the
social or economic position of the native population; (5) when, as in the first Gulf War, foreign
populations are used to threaten the home country.25 Tirman 26 has suggested that following the 9/11
attacks the second of these situations has taken precedence over the others. This is an overly
simplistic assertion, which reveals the limitations of Weiner’s original paradigm. The central issue,
common to a great deal of literature, is that ‘security’ is not defined in any clear terms. For Weiner’s
framework this undermines the distinction between the security risk posed by migrants (scenario
two), and the cultural, social and economic security threatened in the two scenarios which follow. In
reality such distinctions are impossible; the fields of societal and cultural insecurity are inextricable;
economic and human security are mutually dependent. What Weiner’s framework does however
highlight (with situations one and five) is how wider notions of the links between migration and
security have been elided in a discourse which solely focuses on the risks posed to the recipient
country. Nevertheless, there is still no consideration of the security threats faced by migrants.
The strength of Weiner’s work lies firstly in its recognition that security is a social
construct, which is variable over time and between societies. Secondly, it acknowledges the
significance of the volume of migrants, the absorptive capacity of the recipient country and the
ethnic/cultural affinity of the immigrants which affects whether a particular migration flow is
perceived as a security threat. This latter point is central to the argument that the securitization of
migration is a discriminatory discourse, in that migration is constructed as a threat by placing it in
opposition to the existing culture and societal values of the native community.
‘Societal security’ is one of five interdependent security sectors identified by the
Copenhagen School.27 The others are military, political, economic and environmental. Although
migration is a potential security threat in all these areas, it is in relation to ‘societal security’ that it is
most readily cited. Developing from the idea that society, as a distinct from the state, can be an
object of security, ‘societal security’ is defined as ‘the ability of a society to persist in its essential
character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats’.28 Essential characteristics are
identified as ‘traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and religious and national identity
and custom’.29 In these terms, society is inextricable from identity and security threats are, therefore,
anything which may endanger the ability of a given society to live “as us”.30 Identity politics is a
crucial aspect of the dynamics established between the societies of recipient countries and
23
Castles, & Miller, The Age of Migration
Choucri, N., ‘Migration and Security: Some Key Linkages’, Journal of International Affairs, 56(1), 2002
25
Weiner, ‘Security, Stability, and International Migration’
26
Tirman, ‘Introduction’
27
Buzan et al, Security
28
Wæver, O., et al, Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe, (Pinter 1993)
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
24
newcomers. However this focus obliterates other security concerns and mitigates the benefits to host
communities. Furthermore, as Leonard31 notes, by advocating an ethno-national and/or religious
understanding of identity, ‘both identity and society are in danger of being reified’. Reification is a
mechanism of exclusion. Thus in defining identity, and by implication society, and its security in this
way, discrimination based on personal or cultural characteristics may become legitimised, justified
through the necessity of ‘extraordinary means’. To securitize migration through the lens of societal
security is to heighten the potential for discrimination. Real societies are not made up of
homogeneous groups of people sharing a single identity. Identities are multiple, changeable and
personal. Equally, the theoretical separation between the state and society made here is often, in real
life, irrelevant in light of nationally constructed security concerns vis-à-vis immigration.
Nevertheless, ‘societal security’ captures an element of the human desire to ‘belong’ and if
membership of a group cannot be determined by the presence of essential characteristics, defining
oneself against ‘others’ becomes a natural alternative.
To return to a discursive approach to ‘securitization’, Ceyhan and Tsoukala identify four
axes of rhetoric employed by securitizing actors such as the media and political elites to securitize
migration issues: a socioeconomic axis, including pressures on the welfare state and unemployment;
a securitarian axis in which migration is linked to a ‘loss of control narrative’; an identitarian axis
which perceives migrants as a threat to the national identity and demographic composition of the
receiving state; and finally, a political axis whereby ‘anti-immigration, racist, and xenophobic
discourses are manipulated for gain’.32 Once again these distinctions are arbitrary because the
‘domains of insecurity’33 are interdependent. They can overlap, reinforce or compete with one
another. A notable absence from these axes of securitization rhetoric is the domain of human
security. Yet again this is indicative of the fact that migration is securitized only in terms of the
threats it is perceived to pose to the recipient nation. Humanitarian concerns are obliterated by the
securitization discourse. The basic human requirements of migrants are obscured by the need to
ensure the ‘survival’ of the state in the face of the ‘threat’ they present. In this sense, the form of
securitization discourse (distinct from the content of the rhetoric) can be seen as discriminatory,
privileging the rights and basic needs of one group at the expense of another’s.
Having rejected a purely linguistic approach to security framing, it is necessary to look at the
role of non-discursive security practises in relation to migration, and to look at how these practices
may create or reinforce discrimination towards groups of migrants. Non-discursive practices include
institutional and bureaucratic manoeuvres such as the creation and implementation of immigration
policy. Bigo sketches the parameters of this approach, extending not only the form ‘securitization’
may take but the agents who are involved in securitizing migration:
the securitization of immigration […] emerges from the correlation between some
successful speech acts of political leaders, the mobilization they create for and against
some groups of people, and the specific field of security professionals […]. It also
comes from a range of administrative practises such as population profiling, risk
assessment, statistical calculation, category creation and proactive preparation […]34
Given these practices are not inter-subjective and dependant on positive audience reception,
they are arguably all the more powerful than securitizing speech acts. The media plays a central role
in the securitization of migration by relaying information, data and political messages to the public.
The press are uniquely placed to shape public opinion on migration, to shift immigration up or
down the continuum of unease thereby increasing the potential occurrence of discriminatory acts.
Furthermore, by representing immigration as a threat to security and public opinion, the media have
the capacity to generate societal pressures to which political elites may respond with policy
developments.
The growth of non-discursive, or managerial/bureaucratic, securitization practices is
indicative that the presentation of migration has become normalised. Following this, securitization
31
Leonard, S., ‘Studying Migration as a Security Issue’, Paper presented at the SGIR International Relations
Conference, 2004
32
Ceyhan, & Tsoukala, ‘The Securitization of Migration in Western Societies’
33
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity
34
Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’
32
can shift from reinforcing the concept through speech to dealing with it through action.
Consequently, application of ‘extraordinary measures’ also becomes normalised. The Copenhagen
School frame this as the move between ad hoc securitization and institutionalised securitization.
What it implies for our analysis is that as the securitization of migration has become the hegemonic
discourse, discursive analysis alone is insufficient. Secondly, by normalising the securitization of
migration, discrimination which may result from the application of ‘extraordinary measures’ will
also become normalised.
3.3. Outcomes of Securitization Discourse (For what ends?)
Having looked at the means by which migration has been securitized and by whom the question
remains ‘why is migration securitized?’ To answer, one must consider who gains what by making
migration a security issue. The first consideration is the relationship between discourse and power.
Discrimination is an act, the practice of prejudice; whereas, discourse is a conceptual endeavour.
The power of discourse to give rise to prejudicial acts is at the core of this paper’s problematique.
Foucault35 argues that within any society relations of power can only be ‘established, consolidated
and implemented’ through ‘the production, accumulation and functioning of a discourse’.
Therefore, ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’ is produced by discourse, which is the means through which
power can be exercised. Governmental actions, such as laws and policy, can be seen as a product of
discourse. Thus, the securitization of migration discourse has a direct influence on immigration
policy. It is not however a one-way transaction. Policy, as a non-discursive security practice, is a
contributor to and consolidator of discourse. The securitization of migration is therefore part of the
process shaping the laws and policies which then serve to reinforce it as the hegemonic discourse
relating to migration.
It is evident that a range of security actors have interests vested in the propagation and
institutionalization of a securitized migration discourse. In particular, for security professionals, the
relevance of their expertise (and therefore jobs) is dependant on the securitization discourse.
However political elites are the primary actors in the process of securitization. Two inter-related
motivating reasons are suggested: firstly, dissatisfaction with the government is deflected on to
immigrants; secondly, that the existence of the state as a polity is reinforced through the
construction of a threatening ‘other’. For politicians, both of these reasons utilize the securitization
discourse ‘to confirm their role as providers of protection and security and to mask some of their
failures’.36
It is clearly in the interests of those with political power to deflect the misgivings of the
populous onto another target and as a group migrants are visible and easy scapegoats. By casting
migrants as a threat to the social, cultural and economic stability of the nation, political elites can
accrue power and reinforce their positions. Castles and Miller37 are incisive about how this plays
out in reality, stating that ‘elites can create or harness racism’ as a ‘political resource or source of
power’. So, by framing migrants as an ‘adversary’, or an ‘other’ defined in opposition to the native,
ideals of multiculturalism and equality are undermined and social exclusion increases for the
stigmatized group.
3.4. Conclusions
The increasing normalisation of a securitized migration discourse needs to be placed within context
of globalization and growing international migration. Both of these trends have implications for the
state as a sovereign body, and the identity of those who live within its boundaries. While physical
borders between countries loose salience, senses of nationhood and feelings of nationalism gain
force, mediating the human need to ‘belong’. Although migration can be modulated as a threat to
a range of security sectors, the identitarian axis is the most problematic to conceptualise. The
Copenhagen School’s notion of ‘societal security’ falls short of being empirically useful. Migration
is seen to be securitized through a range of discursive and non-discursive practices, which are
engaged by political elites, the media and other security professionals. Security actors are primarily
motivated by the impunity to use ‘extraordinary measures’ which securitization provides. It also
35
Cited in Ibrahim, M., ‘The Securitization of Migration: A Racial Discourse’ International Migration, 43(5),
2005
36
Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’
37
Castles, & Miller, The Age of Migration
33
reinforces the sense of the ‘state’ as a unity and safeguard for the populace and deflects attention
away from governmental failures. Discourse is recognised to be a mediated form of the ‘truth’
which is both informed by and influential in the practice of power. In terms of discrimination, the
securitization of migration creates an environment in which ‘outsiders’ are portrayed in opposition
to the nation. Migrants are therefore vilified simply because of their ‘alien’ status. Once perceived
as a threat, migrants can be subject to ‘extraordinary measures’ put in place by security actors.
These measures, being based on a prejudice against a perceived difference, are often discriminatory
by nature and are justified and normalised as the security-migration nexus becomes
institutionalized.
4. Consideration
It is complex and problematic to consider the way the securitization affects the lives of migrants
because of the myriad of other factors affecting immigration policy and the reception of immigrants
in society. Nevertheless, attitudes and actions towards migrants are unquestionably influenced by the
hegemonic discourse through which they are portrayed. Discrimination, where present, is part of this
dynamic.
4.1. Identity, Migration and Discrimination
The relationship between the securitization of migration and discrimination is constructed around
notions of identity. Viewing migration through the prism of security constructs an image
highlighting who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘excluded’. Loescher captures the sense that it is the very
continuance of ‘our’ way of life and existence as a polity which appears to be at stake:
Western publics are concerned that mass migration will threaten communal identity and
culture by directly altering the ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic composition of
the population and the integrity of their countries.38
This sense of identity is related to an imagined community - the state - and is based on the
assumption that the outsiders are different from ‘us’. It also relies on the idea that sovereign borders
demarcate boundaries of culture and loyalty and creates homogeneity and a solidarity based on an
abstraction of ‘common’ values and norms. Of course, such generalisations do not reflect the
multicultural make up of most Western societies today. Collective identity is subjective and can be
defined either in terms of the common characteristics shared by a group, or, by what we are not. It is
through (predominantly) utilizing this latter, negative, definition of identity that the securitization of
migration discourse overcomes the problem of diversity in society and plurality of identity. It can
also lead to the ‘racialization or ethnicization’ of social relations39 through which migrant
communities can become marginalized.
In relation to security discourse, communal identity is generally framed as ‘nation identity’.
The notions of unity and community, which are encoded in this ‘identity’, are internalized as part of
the security discourse. They then serve to affirm the validity of security practices designed to ensure
the continuation of this community. Therefore, it can be asserted that the securitization of migration
in part constructs the ‘identity’ which migrants are deemed to threaten. This may be facilitated by
anxiety about the unfamiliar, but should not be ascribed to a natural tendency to xenophobia or
generalised racism. Rather, the identity paradigm which emphasises the otherness of migrants is, in
part, a product of the securitization of migration. Thus, if one considers ‘securitization’ an agent
driven by modulation of an issue, the securitizing actor must be implicated in any discriminatory
outcomes produced as a consequence of this discourse.
The concept of a collective identity is complex: defining oneself in opposition to an external
‘other’ does not offer a stable or coherent identity on which to base belonging or security. It is also
highly subjective; various groups will judge differently what constitutes ‘threat’ and other factors
38
Loescher, G., ‘International security and population movements’ in Cohen, R. (ed.) The Cambridge Survey
of World Migration, (Cambridge University Press 1995)
39
Castles, S., & Davidson, A., Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging,
(Palgrave 2000)
34
beyond cultural or ethnic otherness will influence this decision. Stivachtis40 notes for example that
the dynamic between immigrant community and host community is influenced by the way in which
immigrants deal with host community as well as the ‘welcome’ offered to immigrants by the host
country. Weiner asserts that the ethnic, cultural and religious affinity of immigrants plays a
significant role in a state’s perception of threat from, and consequent willingness to accept, any
particular group of migrants.
In a similar vein, Ibrahim has argued that the ‘securitization of migration […] is racism’s
most modern form’.41 This assertion is based on the concept of ‘New Racism’42 which combines
more traditional notions of biological superiority with the now familiar notion that cultural
difference leads to social breakdown.43 Racism from this perspective is then ‘a form of
discrimination based on the reification of race and the essentailization of racial difference’.44 The
categorical divisions which are produced from this are perceived to be ‘real’ rather than socially
constructed and can result in discrimination. Ibrahim’s assertion that the securitization of migration
is a racist discourse is undermined by its emphasis it places on ‘exclusion based on cultural
difference’,45 conflating cultural groupings with racial categories. The framing of migrants as
security threats does indeed produce discriminatory behaviours, a consequence of the prejudicial
attitudes formed by defining otherness as a threat. This is not however racial in focus; otherness
does not demand unifying ethnic characteristics, simply not being ‘similar’ enough is sufficient.
Social context provides the parameters of ‘similarity’. Although it is acknowledged that races make
a significant contribution to this sense of difference, making it the central concern of the discourse
elides the frightening flexibility and subjectivity of constructing threats from ‘otherness’.
According to the International Organisation for Migration, the UNHCR and the International
Labour Office46 migrants are ‘highly vulnerable to racism, xenophobia and discrimination’. This is
not due to a natural tendency for hostility to ‘outsiders’ but on the construction of them as threats by
a dominant securitized migration discourse. Once positioned in a ‘risk category’ migrants become
exposed to discrimination because populations are willing to set aside the liberal principals that
normally dictate policy to ensure their ‘survival’. This justifies the use of ‘extraordinary measures’
which may be discriminatory, and also encourages other manifestations of hostility towards
foreigners. In both forms discrimination is generally played down or denied by states, who, while
being bound by the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial
Discrimination ‘are not prohibited from applying distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences
between citizens and non-citizens.’ Consequently, the sad situation is that the UN can state:
there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to show that violations of human rights of
migrants, refugees and other non-nationals are so generalised, widespread and
commonplace that they are a defining feature of international migration today.47
Thereby justifying the opinion that the nation-state system constructs cultural security in a way
which is often at odds with human security.48
4.2. The Securitization of Migration: A Threat to Civil liberties and Universal Human Rights
Discrimination towards migrants can take many forms, from determining which persons may or
may not enter a country to more subtle elements of exclusion such as access to services and social
ostracism. Non-citizen migrants may be subject to measures not applicable to citizens thereby
40
Stivatchis, Y., ‘International Migration and the Politics of Identity and Security’, Journal of Humanities and
Social Studies, 2(1), 2008
41
Ibrahim, ‘The Securitization of Migration’
42
Barker, M., The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the tribe, (Junction Books 1981)
43
Ibrahim, ‘The Securitization of Migration’
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
46
United Nations, ‘International Migration, Racism, Discrimination and Xenophobia’, Discussion paper
prepared by the International Labour Office, the International Organization for Migration, and the Office of the
UN High Commission for Human Rights, 2001
47
Ibid.
48
Friedman, J., & Randeria, S., Worlds on the Move: Globalization, Migration and Cultural Security, (IB
Tauris 2004)
35
making them vulnerable to the curtailment of civil liberties. Refugees and those seeking asylum are
particularly at risk.
The ‘right to seek asylum’ is a universal human right enshrined in Article 14 of the 1948
Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Those fleeing persecution, violence or human rights
abuses can claim asylum in another country. There is no right to receive asylum however, and it is
granted at the discretion of the recipient nation. Consequently, the victims of the ever more limited
admissions policies of developed nations have first and foremost been those seeking asylum.
Asylum is a large issue; there were an estimated 10 million refugees in 2006.49 For receiving nations
there are significant political, economic and social implications which consolidate the securitization
of what should be a humanitarian obligation. Since such concerns are also the product of the
securitization of migration it becomes a self-reinforcing discourse. Governments have on one hand
formally opposed discrimination and promoted multiculturalism, while on the other they have
pursued increasingly restrictive asylum policies which have fuelled racism and hostility towards
refugees. Guild incisively describes the structural tension created by viewing asylum as an issue of
national security rather than one of human security:
The field of insecurity in a vision of security which is territorially bound relates to the
breaching of the border’s security. Those whose plight as protection seekers gives them
the right to breach such security are dangerous by definition50
Asylum is therefore seen as the weak link in a security-oriented national migration policy,
providing a route by which those wishing to promote or engage in political violence may access the
West. The fact that the majority of contemporary asylum claims in Europe are Muslims 51 has
compounded fears of this connection between terrorism and asylum. Guild argues52 that the
emphasis of the terrorism-asylum linkage has been used to try and exclude protection seekers from
any sort of status or even a determination of their status on the basis that they are, or are linked with,
terrorists. In reality evidence of such links are scarce. As evidenced by the 7/7 bombings in
London, radicalized natives are as likely to pose a risk to security as immigrants. Despite this,
asylum is now highly securitized, justifying the rejection, removal of status or confinement or many
legitimately on the move for the sake of their personal security.
The role of the media in shaping immigration cannot be underestimated, for it is through the
mass media that the messages of securitizing actors are channelled to the public. And it is through
the press that the public most readily engage with immigration discourse and receive knowledge
about migration. As a consequence, it is not surprising that the negative portrayal of asylum seekers
and refugees in the press has had discernable impact on their everyday lives. An investigation into
this phenomenon by the NGO Article1953 determined that media coverage was overwhelmingly
hostile and biased against immigrants. It cites the use of ‘inaccurate and provocative’ language to
describe asylum seekers including pejorative labels; the misleading use of or exaggeration of
statistics (often unsourced) relating to asylum seekers; and the domination of the stereotype of
‘threatening young male’ in reports and images. Asylum seekers are reported to feel ‘alienated,
ashamed and sometimes threatened’ as a result of this prejudiced depiction of them by the media.
As migrants have little opportunity to influence their representation it is inevitable that the any
sense of the diversity of refugees is obscured in this discourse.
5. Conclusions
Following the Cold War enemies of the state became diffuse and deterritorialized. Security had to
evolve and be reformulated in a way that could include non-state security referents and diverse forms
of threats. The Copenhagen School’s Theory of Securitization considers security to be a process by
49
International Organization for Migration, Facts and Figures, from www.iom.int
Guild, E., ‘International terrorism and EU immigration, asylum and borders policy: The unexpected victims
of 11 September 2001’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 8, 2003
51
Bralo, Z. & Morrison, J., ‘Immigrants, Refugees and Racism: Europeans and the Denial’, in Guild, E. & van
Selms (eds.), International Migration and Security: Opportunities and Challenges, (Routledge 2005)
52
Guild, ‘International terrorism and EU immigration, asylum and borders policy’
53
Article 19, What’s the Story? Results from research into media coverage of refugees and asylum seekers in
the UK, 2003
36
50
which an issue comes to be perceived as harmful or a potential risk. This process is constructed by
‘securitizing acts’ by securitizing actors and institutionalised by the locking in of security
procedures. Securitization is therefore the product of an agent, whose motivations and power
position are instrumental to a proper understanding of the process. By securitizing an issue, actors
gain legitimate privilege to use measures beyond the realm of normal politics. It is therefore a
valuable and powerful tool for political elites to enhance their control over a polity. The process of
securitization is not innately discriminatory. It is derived from a more equitable and ‘people-centred’
concept of security. However, power hierarchies within political systems are replicated by this agent
driven process, thereby placing the security concerns of the most powerful over and above the
security concerns of others. In this way securitized discourse can produce discriminatory outcomes.
The securitization of migration is now the hegemonic discourse relating to migration within
Western developed nations. This is the result of the activities of governments, the media and a range
of security professionals. As a discourse it has become pervasive and all the more powerful for
being so; it is self-reinforcing. Accepted by the populace at large the modulation of migrants as an
economic, social, cultural and national threat goes largely unquestioned. The securitized migration
discourse is an important factor in the formulation of attitudes, government policies, bureaucracy
and other mechanisms of authority. Identity politics are a central component of the process by
which migration has been securitized. As globalisation has blurred identities and dissolved the
efficacy and significance of sovereign borders, societies have had to define themselves in new ways.
Lacking clear notions of who ‘we’ are, definitions of the modern community are largely based on
what we are not. Migrants are presented as the ‘other’, the enemy both within and without, which
society can form a sense of identity in opposition to. The securitization of migration therefore
creates a dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, which while not being racially based, is
discriminatory to all non-citizens particularly those lacking cultural or ethnic affinity with the host
nation. Political actors have chosen to securitize migration in order to consolidate the position of the
state in the international system, to encourage loyalty to the polity and to provide an enemy and
scapegoat on which saddle disaffection more normally directed towards government.
Discrimination is a direct product of the politics of exclusion created by securitizing actors in
relation to migration. Having constructed threats based on prejudicial reification of groups and
produced policy to ensure the security of those within the dominant group discrimination occurs
because societies are willing to sacrifice their liberal or social norms in which diversity, equality
and inclusion are prized when they perceive their existence to be threatened.
It is therefore concluded that the securitization of migration currently produces
discrimination in many different forms in the societies and systems where the discourse has become
normalised. Discrimination is not seen, however, as an inevitable product of the securitization of
migration. In many ways the securitization of migration is justified; it involves international,
economic, social, cultural, environmental and human security, not to mention national security.
However, the security interests of political elites and other security actors determined to reinforce
the existing national and international structural hierarchies must be replaced by a securitization of
migration which is humanitarianly oriented and addresses true security needs of people, migrants
and citizens alike. Viewing migration through a more equitable security lens would direct policy
towards a more transparent capacity based approach to admissions, tailoring immigration to
promote social inclusion the development of sustained programmes to integrate those who are
admitted. It would also break the dangerous cycle in which we currently exist, whereby the
securitization and consequent marginalization of sections of society creates resentment and
perpetuates increasing insecurity.
37
The limits of empire: Western strategic failure in sub-Saharan Africa
Daniel O’Sullivan, M.Sc. International Security and Global Governance
This paper revolves around the question of whether or not the burgeoning Chinese political and
economic interpenetration of sub-Saharan Africa presents a security risk to Western interests. It will
argue that Western liberalism is in fact an imperial project that is challenged by this development the ongoing ascendancy of a so-called ‘Beijing Consensus’ across the region presents a real threat to
the continued hegemony of what is commonly referred to as the ‘Washington Consensus’, a set of
interlocking political and economic norms or practices that actively reinforce a position of global
dominance for ‘the West’. I also seek to demonstrate that the basis of this security threat to
‘Western’ interests is not so much caused as exposed by China in Africa, and that the precise mode
of imperialism that is used to expand the frontiers of Western dominance contains in itself the root of
its own strategic failure when confronted with an alternative mode of politico-economic expansion.
The Great Chinese Takeout
China is playing an increasingly influential role on the continent of Africa and there is
concern that the Chinese intend to aid and abet African dictators, gain a stranglehold on
precious African natural resources, and undo much of the progress that has been made on
democracy and governance in the last 15 years in African nations.
Christopher Smith, House Africa Subcommittee Chairman, US Congress1
They built the Alphonse Massamba Stadium for us, the foreign ministry, the television
company’s headquarters. Now they are building a dam in Imboulou. They have redone the
entire water system of Brazzaville. They built us an airport. They are going to build the
Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville highway. They are constructing apartment buildings for us.
They are going to build an amusement park on the river. All of it has been decided.
Settled! It’s win-win! Too bad for you in the West, but the Chinese are fantastic.
Claude Alphonse N’Silou, minister for construction and housing in Congo-Brazzaville2
In a very short space of time China has become, as one commentator describes, ‘the most aggressive
investor-nation in Africa’.3 specifically in the sub-Saharan area. Chinese interest is specifically
focused on sourcing the natural resources required to feed its booming economy, with commodities
such as bauxite, oil, timber, iron ore, copper, cobalt, manganese and ferrochrome coming from a
spread of countries including Sudan, Angola, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC) and Gabon.4 Behar notes that this phenomenon ‘even has a name on the ground
in the sub-Sahara: the Great Chinese Takeout’.5
China’s preferred method of securing these supplies is through direct government-togovernment deals, under which in return for the extractive rights over key natural resources, African
governments receive massive Chinese investment in their domestic infrastructure - such as dams,
airports, bridges, power plants, pipelines, roads, railways, hospitals, schools. These are invariably
constructed by state-owned Chinese companies and funded on a non-market rate, concessional or
grant basis with a key feature of this financial aid being that it comes on a ‘no strings attached’ basis,
without any of the political conditionalities tied to ‘Western’ assistance.
1
Quoted in US State Department Press Release ‘China No Threat to United States in Africa, U.S. Official Says
- Ranneberger tells Congress of areas of cooperation’ 28 July 2005
2
Quoted in Michel, S., ‘When China met Africa’ Foreign Policy, May/June 2008
3
Behar, R., ‘China invades Africa’ Fast Company, No.126, June 2008
4
See Bance, N., ‘Under Chinese Economic Influence’ Petroleum Review 15 August 2008; Chan-Fishel, M., &
Lawson, R., ‘Bankrolling the “Going Out” Strategy: China’s Financing of African Aid and Trade and
Implications for African Debt and Development’, in Kitissou, M., (ed.), Africa in China’s Global Strategy
(Adonis & Abbey 2007)
5
Behar, ‘China invades Africa’,
38
In turn, this increasing political and economic interpenetration by China of sub-Saharan
Africa is seen in many circles as a threat to supposed ‘Western’ interests. This perceived threat
comes in several forms. One of the most obvious is simply competition to Western business in terms
of securing what commercial opportunities there are in sub-Saharan Africa – the Chinese are seen as
muscling Western companies out of contention when it comes to bidding on resource development
projects, invariably helped by the cut-price financing Chinese state banks offer in tandem for the host
government’s share of costs.
Another is simply that of inter-state competition for natural resources, with a slew of authors
writing of China leading a resource-driven ‘new scramble for Africa’ between states in the context of
what Matthew Parris characterises ‘as a resource-starved industrialised world in the 21st Century’.6
Behar writes: ‘It’s scramble time… I visited four African countries central to China’s overall
strategy: Mozambique (a key source of timber for China), Zambia (copper), Congo (a wide range of
minerals), and Equatorial Guinea (oil). What I found is that while flat-footed Western governments
largely watch from the sidelines, cash-flush Chinese firms – many with state-directed financing – are
cutting deals at a dizzying pace, securing supplies of oil, copper, timber, natural gas, zinc, cobalt,
iron, you name it.’7 This scramble is commonly conceived of as a zero-sum game – if China gains a
‘stranglehold’ on commodities, to use Congressman Smith’s term, by extension they are denied to
others. Or as George Nicholls, head of African corporate intelligence agency Pasco Risk, is quoted
by Behar: ‘By the time the Americans come to the party, the Chinese will have taken it. That’s the
risk the West runs.’8
Beyond this, the official Chinese diplomatic policy of ‘non-interference’ in the internal
affairs of other countries, which it uses to justify the lack of conditionality on its financing to African
states9, is seen as threatening ongoing Western efforts to foster through conditionality attached to
financial support an ‘improvement’ in democratic and transparent governance across the continent,
curbing regimes the West sees as autocratic. Chinese backing with money and materiel for regimes
in Zimbabwe, Angola and Sudan accused of human rights abuses is often cited10.
Redefining the challenge
So far so good – we have the broad outlines of ongoing Chinese political and economic
interpenetration of sub-Saharan Africa and also the lineaments of what Alden describes as the
‘discourse of fear’11 that has emerged in ‘the West’ in response to these developments. Michel
quotes some African officials as saying that they still favour Western companies, but utilise the
prospect of Chinese competition as leverage to extract better deal terms.12 Holslag reckons that
China’s drive for ‘control-over-the-well’, i.e. ownership of actual resource extraction rights, has in
fact been a failure and that for most of its natural resource supplies it is still reliant on middlemen13,
while Copson goes as far as asserting that ‘it is probably true that the United States could ignore
China’s rise in Africa without suffering irreparable harm to vital interests’.14 Meanwhile, Alden
asserts that China has in fact been converging with Western opinion on the need to pressure ‘pariah
states’ such as Sudan on their human rights record.15
My concern is to encompass all alleged risks – regardless of whether construed within a
realist or constructivist framework, or as real or imagined - within a single threat which is of a higher
order precisely because by definition it can contain these individual, particular risks within it. This is
that Chinese activity in Africa marks a resurgence in the doctrine of ‘mercantilism’. Classical
mercantilism believed that economic activity should be harnessed to increase the power of the state,
6
Parris, M., ‘Prepare for the new scramble for Africa’ The Times 19 April 2008
Behar, ‘China invades Africa’,
8
Ibid.
9
Thompson, D., ‘China’s Emerging Interests in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges for Africa and the
United States’, in Kitissou, (ed.), Africa in China’s Global Strategy
10
See ibid.; Kitissou, M., ‘Globalization and Fragmentation: The New Era of Africa-China Cooperation’ in
Kitissou, (ed.), Africa in China’s Global Strategy
11
Alden, C., China in Africa (Zed Books 2007)
12
Michel, ‘When China met Africa’
13
Holslag, J., ‘China’s New Mercantilism in Central Africa’ African and Asian Studies, 5(2), 2006
14
Copson, R., ‘US Response to China’s Rise in Africa: Policy and Policy Options’, in Kitissou, (ed.), Africa in
China’s Global Strategy
15
Alden, China in Africa
39
7
and that therefore the aim of economic activity should be to generate a positive balance of trade
because this was the best way to maintain a surplus of the bullion, precious specie such as gold and
silver, required to outfit and pay the armies of the day. Mercantilists believed state regulation and
interference in the economy was necessary to prioritise these aims 16. For them, ‘statecraft involved
the marshalling of the resources of the whole national territory to the purposes of power in foreign
affairs’.17 Crucially, mercantilism also held that from time to time the imperatives of political power
take precedence over profit.
The contention is that China is now practising mercantilism itself. Or rather a form of ‘neomercantilism’ in which the natural resources key to the functioning of a 21st century industrial
economy have replaced gold and silver as the object of maximisation and the prize of the zero-sum
game.
Redefining the ‘West’
Viewed from this perspective, a whole new terrain of risk opens up. Not only is China’s mercantilist
model of engagement undermining Western interests in particular respects as outlined above, but it is
also challenging at a systemic level the whole ‘international liberalist’ market-based ideology that
characterises Western economic relations. Historically, it was ‘liberalism’ of this order which
eclipsed mercantilism across much of the globe, based on the thinking founding of fathers of
‘classical’ liberalism such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Such men believed that wealth was
not a zero-sum competition for specie, but that instead it should be measured by ‘the exchangeable
value of the whole annual produce of its industry’18. Free markets driven by the price mechanism
offer the optimum way to ensure the maximisation of this sort of wealth, as they offer the maximum
possible division in labour, while state intervention in the market is inefficient and prevents maximal
allocation of resources through the price mechanism.
China obviously challenges the conclusion that such ‘liberalism’ is ‘empirically
progressive’19 – that is, that it has been proven historically to be the most worthwhile system for
building national wealth. Rather than prioritise private business interests in economic decisionmaking, China instead prefers to direct capital through state-owned entities.20 As the Center for
Strategic & International Studies notes: ‘For Beijing, such an approach plays to its strengths. Its
Africa policy is not complicated by private domestic constituencies and interest groups, allowing for
quicker and more decisive action. China’s largest economic and business activities in Africa are
dominated by state-owned and/or state influenced companies, giving official Beijing another leg up
in political and economic competition in Africa.’ 21
Certainly it is within this context, of refusal to abide by the liberal market price mechanism
preferred by the West, that some critics of Chinese policy situate the threat to Western interests. As
US senator Richard d’Amato has complained: ‘The Chinese treat energy reserves as assets in the
same way a 19th century mercantilist nation-state would. Its goal is to acquire and keep energy
reserves around the world and secure delivery to China above and beyond any market considerations.
To do this it is willing to pay above marketplace premium prices in order to gain exclusive control
over oil and gas. China believes it can only achieve energy security through direct control of
reserves. This hoarding approach directly conflicts with the efforts of the US and other countries in
the International Energy Agency to develop fungible, transparent and efficient oil and gas markets’. 22
China is seeking to escape the market method of resource allocation - not just challenging opposing
players within a system of accumulation guided by market-derived price, it is rather seeking to
overturn the whole rules of the game.
16
Economides, S., & Wilson, P., The Economic Factor in International Relations, (IB Tauris & Co 2001)
Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation, (Beacon Press 1957)
18
Smith, A., ‘Of Restraints Upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of Such Goods as can Be Produced
at Home’, (1997 [1937]), in Crane, G., & Awami, A., (eds.) The Theoretical Evolutions of International
Political Economy, (Oxford University Press 1997)
19
Crane, G., & Awami, A., ‘Theories of International Political Economy’ in Crane, & Awami (eds.), The
Theoretical Evolutions of International Political Economy
20
Holslag, ‘China’s New Mercantilism in Central Africa’
21
Gill, B., et al China’s Expanding Role in Africa: Implications for the United States (Center for Strategic and
International Studies 2007)
22
USCC Statement of Hon. Richard D’Amato, Chairman U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission 2003, (2005)
40
17
What is the gravity of this threat? Is it simply a defiance of otherwise widely-shared norms,
the ‘transnational liberalism’ described as ‘the economic doctrine of free trade, open markets and
capitalist enterprise presided over by a cooperative trilateral alliance between the US, Japan and the
EC [EU]’?23 This gives rise to the question, what exactly does it mean to refer to shared ‘Western’
interests in Africa, rather than conceiving of each of these political units as a ‘power’ with distinct
interests in their own right?
An explicit politico-military alignment between these states also underpinned the so-called
‘Pax Americana’, which Makki describes as ‘an interlocking system of alliances’ such as NATO and
the US-Japan Security Pact.24 Together these instruments underpinned the US-led front of ‘Western’,
non-communist states which faced off against a Soviet-dominated bloc of ‘Eastern’, communist
states through the Cold War. This front is essentially synonymous with the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD), such that O’Tuathail & Luke define the
US/NATO/OECD grouping as a single ‘ideologically-defined and superpower-policed’ bloc which
‘claimed jurisdiction over the West’s property’ as it faced the opposing Soviet-led bloc.25 Foregoing
geographical exactitude, then, this is what we commonly mean by ‘the West’, and it is a concept that
has easily survived the end of the Cold War. Anthony Lake, security advisor to the US government
during the post-Cold War 1990s, replaced the strategy of ‘containment’ directed against the newlydefunct Soviet Union with a strategy of ‘enlargement’ which focused on strengthening the G7
specifically as the ‘community of major market democracies’, enlarging its reach around the globe
and also countering states which could somehow be defined as ‘anti-Western’.26
There is another way of looking at ‘the West’ however – as an empire ruled by the most
powerful state in the world today, the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski is a notable defender of
American primacy, its status as ‘the first and the only truly global power’, and feels no compunction
whatsoever in characterising American power as ‘imperial’ and its allies as ‘vassals and tributaries’.
Brzezinski uses this phrase to refer to a whole swathe of the globe outside the US including Canada,
Western Europe, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all of
which he labels baldly as being under ‘US geopolitical preponderance’27. The claim that
contemporary American power is in some sense ‘imperial’ is if anything over-determined by the
wealth of opinion that this is indeed the case, by now from both the political left and right – Marxist
critics such as Harvey 28 to liberal apologists for US empire of varying shades of militancy such as
Boot and Ignatieff29 all feel use of the term is justified to describe the current vectors of American
‘hard’ military and ‘soft’ political/cultural power (to use Nye’s distinction30) spread across the globe.
The US as an imperial power
What does it mean to name something an ‘empire’? As Colas tells us, the term comes from the Latin
imperium, meaning ‘command’, ‘authority’, ‘rulership’ or ‘power’31 – but we must unpick exactly
what it means to call the US an empire rather than any other kind of state. Surveying historical
instances of polities commonly agreed to merit the term empire, Colas derives three key dimensions
of imperial rule, namely: political expansion in terms of absorbing initially exterior territories and
peoples into a single, larger ‘socio-economic entity’; the hierarchical rule over this acquired
‘periphery’ from the metropolitan centre of the ‘motherland’; and the imposition and maintenance of
order across such a ‘vast and disparate polity’ through a combination of consent and coercion, in
which the emphasis is often on the latter.32
How does the US measure up as an empire with regard to the description above? In relation
to the last two points of hierarchical rule over the imperial periphery and maintaining order through
23
O’Tuathail, G., & Luke, T., ‘Present at the (Dis)Integration: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization in
the New Wor(l)d Order’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84(3), 1994
24
Makki, F., ‘The Empire of Capital and the Remaking of Centre-Periphery Relations’, Third World Quarterly,
25(1), 2004
25
O’Tuathail, & Luke, ‘Present at the (Dis)Integration’
26
Ibid.
27
Brzezinski, Z., The Grand Chessboard (Basic Books 1997)
28
Harvey, D., The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press 2003)
29
Quoted in Ferguson, N., Colossus: The Rise of Fall of American Empire (Penguin 2005)
30
Nye, J., ‘Limits of American Power’, Political Science Quarterly, 117(4), 2002
31
Colas, A., Empire (Polity Press 2007)
32
Ibid.
41
coercion or consent it is clear that the foundation of the Pax Americana relied on successful violent
coercion more than fifty years ago, with the occupation of the defeated Axis powers of Germany and
Japan at the end of the Second World War paving the way for US dominance over these areas.
Moreover, American leadership, its place at the top of this hierarchy, was not confined to
military matters, the strategic protection projected by the 450 military bases it maintained in 36
countries by 1955.33 The Pax Americana was not just a military system but an economic system as
well, a ‘new international economy’ in which America was the ‘pivot’.34 According to Kennedy this
was nothing less than ‘the creation of a new world order beneficial to the needs of western capitalism
and, of course, to the most flourishing of the western capitalist states’ premised on ‘free
convertibility of currencies and open competition’.35 Yet as Darwin notes of the resulting economic
boom in post-WW2 international trade: ‘Above all, perhaps, it was the American dollar, convertible
into gold, which supplied the universally accepted reserve currency on which trade expansion
depended… No country that relied on a trading currency could risk Washington’s displeasure, lest in
moments of strain the support of the dollar might be withheld’.36
Today, this system remains in place, despite the end of the Cold War that was the apparent
justification for the Pax Americana. If anything, America’s relative military and economic
predominance has increased. What Johnson describes as America’s ‘empire of military bases’37 has
only expanded into the space left by its defeated enemy, ‘the huge Eurasian territory between the
Balkans and Pakistan, formerly off-limits as the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union’.38 Darwin
concludes: ‘It is pointless to debate whether America should be seen as an imperial power: the case
has already been made. After 1990 it became the only world empire. A state with the means to
intervene forcibly in almost any part of the world, with such a massive advantage in military power
over any possible rival, and with an advanced economy more than twice the size of its nearest
competitor was such an empire de facto.’39
As Colas sums up current American predominance: ‘the USA spends more on defence than
the next twenty-four states put together; it patrols all major seaways with its five active fleets, has
extended further its international complex of military bases into the Middle East, Central Asia and
East and Central Europe, and dominates global surveillance networks. It has furthermore activated
this lethal force abroad on at least a dozen occasions since 1991, ranging from the first Gulf War and
the Balkan conflicts to the more recent interventions in the greater Middle East. The USA continues
to produce 30 per cent of the world’s economic output, while the US dollar remains the dominant
currency of global exchange. What word other than “empire” could possibly convey the scale and
scope of dominance attached to such an inventory of power?’ 40
The nature of imperial expansion
Yet in compiling this checklist of the attributes of US empire, we might ask what is the nature of the
expansion that Colas also identifies as lying at the core of imperialism? For it is a curiosity of
American primacy that, unlike previous empires in world history, it supposedly respects the national
sovereignty of other states – as Gowan says, ‘In historical perspective, the distinctive feature of
American expansion, in contrast to the west European juridical empires of the first half of the
twentieth century, has been the attempt to use the international system of sovereign states as a
mechanism of American global domination’41.
In contrasting the shape of US power with those of ‘juridical’ empires, Gowan
acknowledges that the US does not proclaim itself an empire in terms of officially absorbing under
its direct, sovereign control the states that it expands into or over. Here is that well-worn trope, that
America instead built an empire ‘by invitation’ in a famous phrase coined by Geir Lundestad, or by
33
Darwin, J., After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 (Penguin 2008)
Ibid.
35
Kennedy, P., The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, (Fontana Press 1989)
36
Ibid.
37
Johnson, C., The Sorrows of Empire, (Verso 2006), 6
38
Ibid.
39
Darwin, After Tamerlane
40
Colas, Empire
41
Gowan, P., The Global Gamble, (Verso 1999)
42
34
consent according to Todd.42 As Darwin says: ‘This colossal imperium was on an unprecedented
scale. No previous world power has entrenched itself at both ends of Eurasia, or had the power to do
so. What made it possible was partly the eagerness with which America’s friendship was sought and
its leadership welcomed’.43
Indeed, this is often cited as evidence that the US is not in fact an imperial power at all Ferguson quotes one American commentator to typify this standpoint: ‘Real imperial power…
means a direct monopoly control over the organization and use of armed might. It means direct
control over the administration of justice and the definition thereof. It means control over what is
bought and sold, the terms of trade and the permission to trade… Let us stop talking of an American
empire, for there is and there will be no such thing’.44 And Ferguson also quotes another, common
objection, that the Pax Americana is therefore not only juridically distinct from but also
motivationally removed from previous forms of empire: ‘not an imperial state with a predatory
intent…[it was] more concerned with enhancing regional stability and security and protecting
international trade than enlarging its power at the expense of others’.45 May we still then call it an
empire?
The empire of civil society
Prior to capitalism, surplus extraction was the direct concern of the state, mediated through such
societal structures as serfdom – as such, ‘formal political inequality was basic to social reproduction.
Not so with capitalism. Under capitalism the formal subordination in production which accomplishes
the extraction of the surplus is not exercised through the state. Formal political inequality is therefore
not inscribed in the relations of production… under capitalist relations of production the direct
extraction of a surplus is accomplished through “non-political” relations associated with new forms
of social power’.46
This situation arises because unique to capitalism is the commodification of labour-power
itself as a market: ‘Where this occurs, the market ceases to be simply a set of voluntary exchange
relations which circulate only a small fraction of the social surplus. It becomes a compulsory
association, which subordinates all its members to the impersonal rule of value… the crucial point
here is simply this: because incorporation into this association through the labour contract takes the
form of a relation of exchange between legal equals, the process of surplus extraction is reconstituted
as a private activity of civil society’.47
The reproduction across the globe of this particular conception of state sovereignty allows
private capital to exercise its power to accumulate to the fullest extent. As Rosenberg explains: ‘For
under this new arrangement, while relations of citizenship and jurisdiction define state borders, any
aspects of social life which are mediated by relations of exchange in principle no longer receive a
political definition (though they are still overseen by the state in various ways) and hence may
extend across these borders. And if political functions which used to be in state hands are now
assigned to a private political sphere fronted by a set of exchange relations, then these political
functions will travel. This is indeed what has occurred. It is now possible, in a way that would have
been unthinkable under feudalism, to command and exploit productive labour (and natural resources)
located under the jurisdiction of another state. This is because capitalist relations of surplus
extraction are organized through a contract of exchange which is defined as “non-political”… these
functions can be regarded as “non-political” only on the assumption that politics has been redefined
to restrict it to general communal functions.’ 48 Yet it would be a mistake to think that this expansion
of capital is any the less imperialist because of its officially ‘non-political’ nature.
The spatio-temporal fix
42
Todd, E., After the Empire: The Breakdown of American Order (Constable 2004)
Darwin, After Tamerlane,
44
Philip Zelikow, quoted in Ferguson, Colossus, 8
45
Ibid
46
Rosenberg, J., The Empire of Civil Society, (Verso 1994)
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid.
43
43
Capitalism itself has its own unavoidably imperial imperative. This is driven by what Harvey
describes as ‘a chronic tendency within capitalism… to produce crises of overaccumulation’.49 These
occur when surpluses of capital appear with no apparent means of sufficiently profitable deployment,
in which case the effect is ‘to devalue and in some cases even destroy the surpluses of capital’. 50
Against this problem, the displacement and expansion of capital into a new territory – in both spatial
and temporal terms, the latter meaning a lengthening of the time in which the capital is anticipated to
generate a return - offers a remedy: ‘Since it is the lack of profitable opportunities that lies at the
heart of the difficulty, the key economic (as opposed to social and political) problem lies with
capital. If devaluation is to be avoided, then profitable ways must be found to absorb the capital
surpluses. Geographical expansion and spatial reorganization provide one such option. But this
option cannot be divorced from temporal shifts in which surplus capital gets displaced into long-term
projects that take many years to return their value to circulation through the productive activity they
support. Since geographical expansion often entails investment in long-lived physical and social
infrastructures (in transport and communications networks and education and research for example),
the production and reconfiguration of space relations provides one potent way to stave off, if not
resolve, the tendency toward crisis formation under capitalism.’51 Harvey calls this solution of
capital expansion into new territory a ‘spatial fix (more accurately a spatio-temporal fix)’52 and
emphasises that ‘The capitalistic (as opposed to territorial) logic of imperialism has, I argue, to be
understood against this background of seeking out ‘spatio-temporal fixes’ to the capital surplus
problem’.53
Quoting Harvey again: ‘the “territorial” and the “capitalist” logics of power are rather
different from each other. To begin with, the motivations and interests of agents differ. The capitalist
holding money capital will wish to put it wherever profits can be had, and typically seeks to
accumulate more capital. Politicians and statesmen typically seek outcomes that sustain or augment
the power of their own state vis-as-vis other states… The capitalist operates in continuous space and
time, whereas the politician operates in a territorialized space and, at least in democracies, in a
temporality dictated by an electoral cycle. On the other hand, capitalist firms come and go, shift
locations, merge, or go out of business, but states are long-lived entities, cannot migrate, and are,
except under exceptional circumstances of geographical conquest, confined within fixed territorial
boundaries.’54
The state steps back in
So the state as an instrument of coercive territorial control can be crucial in capitalist expansion, but
not necessarily a particular state – capital is stateless in that it is happy to reproduce itself wherever a
prevailing territorial power chooses to bolster a coercive framework conducive to the interests of
capital accumulation and reproduction.
It is not just a case of capital requiring the state, but also of the state seeking to maximise the
success of locally-based capitals. At what point does the boundary-less accumulation of capital
become identified by a particular state with the aggrandisement of its own power, as emanating from
a particular political, territorial boundary? Harvey locates this moment in what he calls ‘regionality’
– as he says, the ‘molecular processes’ of capital accumulation produce despite themselves relatively
stable configurations exhibiting ‘a certain degree of structured coherence to production, distribution,
exchange, and consumption, at least for a time’, and that this coherence ‘usually extends well beyond
pure economic exchanges, fundamental though these may be, for it typically encompasses attitudes,
cultural values, beliefs, and even religious and political affiliations among both capitalists and those
they employ’.55 This regionality itself is ‘a certain informal, porous but nevertheless identifiable
territorial logic of power’ that ‘necessarily and unavoidably arises out of the molecular processes of
capital accumulation in space and time… interregional competition and specialization in and among
49
Harvey, The New Imperialism
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
50
44
these regional communities consequently becomes a fundamental feature of how capitalism works’. 56
And as they therefore inevitably have an interest in territorial as well as purely capitalist logics of
power, through history successful regional agglomerations of capital have tended ‘to play a very
influential, if not determining, role in how the nation as a whole was governed’. 57
The empire at large
Confirming our thesis that this empire of capital is nevertheless focused around the United States as
its central region, clearly it is the US that has supported this logic of imperialism through its own
territorial power as a nation state. It is well-documented that it was the US that pushed for the mass
decolonisation after the Second World War which formally instituted a globe composed of sovereign
states, the conditions most favourable to the global extension of capitalism. As Harvey says: ‘Within
the “free world” the US sought to construct an open international order for trade and economic
development and rapid capital accumulation along capitalistic lines. This required the dismantling of
the former nation state-based empires. Decolonization required state formation and self government
across the globe.’)58. According to Rosenberg, “…Historically, the US fought communism and antiWestern radical nationalism and supported the emergence of sovereign independence, irrespective of
whether it took a democratic social form. In other words, it promoted the separating out of private
and public spheres at the international level.’59
So here finally is the paradox of America’s ‘informal’ empire answered – the expansion it
favours is not of the explicit territorial type which Zelikow asserts must characterise an empire, but
rather the expansion of private capital, in promotion of which it has reshaped the globe into a
‘sovereign’ states-system and sought to maintain this dispensation against challengers such as the
Soviet Union.
As the US is not an empire that relies on explicit territorial unification, how else can it
propagate the spread of market relations and the concomitant segregation of private ‘economic’ and
public ‘political’ power through the world? As the NSS says itself, it will work not just through
unilateral diplomacy on the part of the US60 but also through ‘strengthening international financial
institutions’, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) which, as the NSS
notes itself, the US was historically instrumental in creating.61 And these two institutions are really
the great ‘force multiplier’ for the US in spreading the global empire of capital.
The Washington Consensus as force multiplier
The IMF and World Bank are nominally multilateral, international financial institutions (IFIs)
created as part of the original Bretton Woods system to smooth imbalances between the countries
participating in the fixed exchange rate system. Nevertheless, the US found a new use for these two
institutions, seen by many simply as tools of the US Treasury – Johnson notes that ‘both the fund and
the bank are located… in Washington DC, and their voting rules ensure that they can do nothing
without the approval of the secretary of the Treasury’.62 Brzezinski simply notes that ‘one must
consider as part of the American system the global web of specialized organisations, especially the
“international” financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be
said to represent “global” interests, and their constituency may be construed as the world. In reality,
however, they are heavily American-dominated.’63
Starting in the 1980s, and with a rapid acceleration in the 1990s as the alternative model of
socialist development was discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prescripts of the
Washington Consensus have been forced on countries deemed to be in financial crisis in Latin
America, Eastern Europe and Africa. With regard to its stated goal of strengthening the economies of
the target countries, this programme is widely viewed as a failure. However, when viewed – as it is
by authors such as Harvey or Gowan – as a means of widening accumulative possibilities for private
56
Ibid.
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society
60
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America 2006
61
Ibid.
62
Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire
63
Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard
45
57
capital, and finance capital based in the US in particular, its record is solid. Harvey and Gowan both
see the internationally-accepted and overarching power of the IMF and World Bank as an
indispensable tool of the shared interests of the US government and US-based private capital in
opening up new territories of accumulation and forced devaluation.
But it is not just Marxist critics such as Harvey and Gowan who see the Washington
Consensus and the IMF/WB as operating to favour the interests of private capital, and in particular
US finance capital. Liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz writes of the IMF serving the needs of global
finance capital, and Wall Street particularly, rather than the cause of global economic stability, and
notes that IMF strictures imposed on countries in the midst of debt crises invariably protect the
interests of financial capital rather than the country in question, enabling western lenders and
speculators to get their money out at the expense of the local economy.64
The emerging Beijing Consensus
Now we can discern the true nature of the challenge that China’s rise in Africa poses to Western
interests. The developmental model it extends undermines the prescriptions of liberalism as espoused
by the US/IMF/WB and enforced through conditionality attached to Western aid – as Copson
complains: ‘There is, after all, a “Washington Consensus” on the requirements for sustainable
development in Africa, and though modified and corrected over the years, it still includes such key
elements as increased transparency, improved governance and growth of the private sector. The
conditions the west has placed on its aid to Africa are intended to further progress in these areas and
their effectiveness is undermined by China’s “no strings attached” approach to aid and loans.’ 65
There seems to be no doubt then that the Chinese engagement with Africa presents a serious
challenge to the interests of the US-sponsored empire of capital. However, if we wish to divine
precisely how this strategic threat has arisen, we must also ask the question, why has it found the
space in which to do so in the first place? In other words, at the end of the Cold War the US enjoyed
unchallenged hegemony in Africa, as noted at the time by the African political scientist Claude Ake,
who moreover professed himself unconcerned by the prospect.66 Why in the interim had the US not
already tied up its perceived African interests in its own web of infrastructure investments and trade
agreements before China even emerged as a serious competitor on the continent?
The Washington Consensus on safari
One obvious reason for this strategic failure is that from the start of the 1990s, i.e. from the point at
which the Soviet empire ceased to be an active competitor for geopolitical influence in the subSaharan countries, the West adopted a stance in its dealings with African governments under which
the capitalist logic of imperialism was allowed free rein. At a state-to-state level, the US government
turned its back on providing serious financial aid itself for African nations, and instead advocated a
policy that Clough described at the time as ‘cynical disengagement’ – cynical because, as he relates,
under the guise of concern about human rights, the US abruptly terminated funding for a host of nondemocratic African governments it had previously backed with extensive financial and military aid
as bulwarks against Soviet expansion, but which it now saw as geopolitically irrelevant.67
Failures on the part of the private capital mobilised in the Western model of imperialism to
actually deliver what it has promised on the ground have been repeated across sub-Saharan Africa.
Where there have been attempts to implement liberal market structures to support private sector
infrastructure investment, they have simply not produced the results claimed for them by their
proponents. Following on from a long line of writers chronicling negative outcomes from marketoriented SAP assistance in Africa initiated since the late 1980s,68 from the 1990s onwards serious
64
Stiglitz, J., Globalization and Its Discontents (Penguin 2002)
Copson, ‘US Response to China’s Rise in Africa’,
66
Henry, N., ‘From Angola to Ethiopia, End of Cold War Transforms Africa’ The Washington Post, 31 May
1991
67
Clough, M. ‘The United States and Africa: The Policy of Cynical Disengagement’ Current History 91(565),
1992
68
See Riddell, JB., ‘Things Fall Apart Again: Structural Adjustment Programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa’, The
Journal of Modern African Studies, 30(1), 1992; Gibbon, P., ‘The World Bank and African Poverty, 1973-91’,
The Journal of Modern African Studies, 30(2), 1992; Schatz, S., ‘Structural Adjustment in Africa: A Failing
Grade So Far’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 30(4), 1994; Kaiser, P., ‘Structural Adjustment and the
Fragile Nation: The Demise of Social Unity in Tanzania’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 34(2), 1998
46
65
criticisms have also been made of privatisation and deregulation programmes carried out in
previously state-owned sectors such as power, mining, water or transport facilities in countries such
as Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea, Lesotho, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania.69
The problems range from corruption attending the privatisation process through inordinate
delays in Western private companies moving ahead with the projects they have agreed to take on,
social and political unrest as incoming private owners lay off employees and seek to raise utility
tariffs to improve profitability, failures on the part of the private sector owners to make the promised
infrastructure upgrade investments supposedly justifying the privatisation, failures to achieve the
promised improvements in service quality and efficiency and simple failure to attract any serious
private sector interest in investing in sectors which host African governments deem essential but
which Western private sector players see minimal profitability in.
Conclusion
In the wake of these multiple shortcomings, the private sector-oriented approach of the IFIs has been
criticised as patently informed by doctrinaire presumptions rather than an appreciation of the local
conditions that need to be acknowledged in Africa. As Helen Tarnoy, previously a director-general
for American power company AES and involved in a clutch of African power privatisations, is
quoted with regard to the all-important power sector specifically: ‘the fundamental problem is one of
an imposed ideology: privatisation at all costs, and “unbundling” of utilities in the (probably
misguided) belief that this brings efficiency… Although the public sector is often mismanaged and
under-funded, the private sector generally cannot raise sufficient funds to effect the massive
investments that are needed all over Africa to improve the power supply. Debt is also going to be
limited, and private sector debt, priced to take into account African risk, is not cheap either… The
few privatisations hitherto have been based on the premise that the government contributes the assets
“in kind” (usually in a lamentable state of disrepair), while the investor contributes cash (usually not
very much) and a commitment to fund future development. This makes future development far more
costly than it need be, and inevitably leads to confrontation: the government accuses the investor of
not investing, the investor responds that the government has not raised tariffs/carried out promised
sector reforms to permit it to invest, the government (especially when facing an election) counters
that it cannot raise tariffs/antagonise the unions when the quality of service is so poor. Stalemate.’70
Where privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation have gone ahead under the aegis of the
IFIs in sub-Saharan Africa, they have clearly exposed for African observers the predatory nature of
the capitalist logic of imperialism. As Campbell writes: ‘there is about US$200 billion drained from
Africa every year associated with structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and the World
Bank… FDI has resulted in draining resources out of Africa. This has included remittances of
profits, debt repayments, loss of capital on account of structural adjustment programmes,
privatisation of public assets, patent and copyright fees, management and consultancy fees,
biopiracy, and so on.’71 Campbell also highlights the ‘disarticulation’ between the financial sector
and the productive sector in many African economies as a result of speculative capital inflows of the
kind enabled by liberalisation, highlighting in particular the case of Zimbabwe where the ‘real’
economy has contracted under the strain of inflation running at 1000 per cent but the stock exchange
has nevertheless been yielding the highest profit rate in Africa.72 This draws attention to the
distinction made by Harvey between ‘fictitious’ money capital created in hope of a future return
from speculation versus the production of ‘real values’ by spending capital into physically
productive assets.73
Why has the private empire of capital, ‘the West’, failed in Africa? The root cause is the
constant quest for ‘profitability’ as defined in capital accumulative terms, which as noted above both
69
See Appiah-Kubi, K., ‘State-Owned Enterprises and Privatisation in Ghana’, The Journal of Modern African
Studies, 39(2), 2001; Rizzo, M., ‘Power Without Responsibility: The World Bank and Mozambican Cashew
Nuts’, Review of African Political Economy, 27(83) 2000; Ogunbiyi, C., ‘Development – West Africa limbers
up’, Power Economics, 4 March 2005
70
Quoted in Ogunbiyi, ‘Development – West Africa limbers up’
71
Campbell, H., ‘China in Africa: challenging US global hegemony’ in Manji, F., & Marks, S., (eds.) African
Perspectives on China in Africa (Fahamu 2007)
72
Ibid
73
Harvey, The New Imperialism
47
prevents investment in many forms of infrastructure required in Africa and, when such investment
does go ahead, underlines for local onlookers the nature of the intervention as far as motivation. This
is exposed particularly when contrasted against a Chinese intervention accompanied by loud
espousals of inter-governmental solidarity, the investment in question being loss-leading rather than
a source of profitability. Through these mechanisms the Chinese state-owned enterprises are gaining
the upper hand in fixed capital investment and the rights over both associated accumulation and,
more importantly for Chinese strategic concerns, actual physical offtake from natural resources
projects. As state-directed capitals they are operating according to the logic which Viner long ago
identified, the sacrifice of immediate profitability to the perceived interests of the state. The
Washington Consensus, on the other hand, will brook no alternative to the profitability of private
capitals and their priority of profitable accumulation through spatio-temporal fixes. As such by its
very nature it contains the cause of its failure – its contrasting with the Chinese alternative, the
Beijing Consensus, results in an easy choice for African elites. As Behar quotes the oil minister of
Equatorial Guinea: “If you were in our shoes – a developing country, with not a lot of funds – and
the Chinese come and will do for 3 what it costs 10 from others, what would you do? The Chinese
listen better, and they understand that sometimes you need to make sacrifices for a future gain.
They’ll do a hydroelectric plant at half the price, and, in return, they’ll get future projects. With US
companies we feel more squeezed and squeezed. They just take the oil and do nothing else. Of
course they are losing ground to the Chinese. The World Bank and the IMF also come. “No, we
don’t need you,” the president says all the time.’74
China’s ascendancy may also be calling time on that most enduring aspect of American
primacy, seigniorage. As Campbell notes, ‘Chinese planners foresee an era where African minerals
and genetic resources will be more worthwhile than US Treasury bills…China is seeking to diversify
its holdings away from the dollar’.75 The days when America could get whatever it wanted simply by
printing dollars into a world dominated by the Washington Consensus are drawing to a close.
74
75
Behar, ‘China invades Africa’
Campbell, ‘China in Africa’
48
The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Transformation Agenda: Influential Advocates,
Flawed Assumptions
Charles Brown, M.Sc. International Security and Global Governance
1. Introduction
Since the end of the Cold War influential forces within the American defence establishment have
attempted to reform the US military through a process that has come to be known as
‘transformation’. A blueprint for change released in 1996 by the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
entitled Joint Vision 2010, described the goal of a specific agenda for reform; to create a “joint force
- persuasive in peace, decisive in war, pre-eminent in any form of conflict”.1 Key advocates of this
‘transformation’ agenda claim that Operations Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Iraqi Freedom
are examples of ‘transformed’ military forces in action.2 There is evidently something intrinsically
flawed with the assumptions upon which this ‘transformation’ agenda is based as the world’s preeminent power is fighting two bloody conflicts for which it is ill-prepared.
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the key reasons for the disconnection between
the aims of the ‘transformation’ agenda – military superiority in any contingency - and the reality of
the current US (and coalition) position in Iraq and Afghanistan – trapped in a complex, violent
insurgency. It will be argued that the primary reason for this disjuncture is that Operations Enduring
Freedom and Iraqi Freedom were planned in accordance with key principles of the ‘transformation’
agenda that were based on a set of flawed assumptions about the role of military power, known as
the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’.
The initial question that arises is – how could the pre-eminent global military power attempt
to reform its military and plan two wars based on a flawed set of assumptions? The answer – a wellconnected, influential, authoritative section within the Department of Defense encouraged a set of
ideas and concepts to emerge through the generation of an ‘open debate’ about the future of
American military forces, while steering that debate through sufficiently well-placed advocates; this
debate and these advocates encouraged a process of military reform that came to be known as
‘transformation’.
2. ‘Transformation’: Origins, Advocates, Concepts and Continuity
Soviet theorists in the 1980s assumed that American advancements in information technologies
could potentially, radically alter the principles of warfare; a ‘Military Technical Revolution’ was
taking place. A group of strategists at the Department of Defense, tasked with analysing the writings
of the Soviet theorists concluded that the they were correct; however, it was not just technology that
was radically changing warfare but the underlying doctrinal and organisational principles that were
also in flux.
The display of novel American technologies during the Gulf War of 1990 encouraged a wider
debate about the future of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The demonstration of the threat
‘rogue states’ could pose, combined with the need for economic prudence following reductions in
defence spending posed serious challenges; however, a distinct group of academics, military
practitioners and policy-makers proposed that the Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA, as it
became known, promised solutions to the challenges of the new era.
2.1 From the Soviet MTR to an American RMA
Prior to the Soviet collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the US military had been engaged in an
expensive arms race and had acquired a military which possessed immense amounts of
technologically advanced weaponry. Following the Soviet retreat the US armed forces were left far
more advanced militarily than any other nation and although it was assumed that they would not
encounter any direct peer-competitor for decades to come, the Gulf War of 1990-1991 encouraged
the view that enhancing technological superiority should provide the focus for future American
military planning.
1
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010, 1996
See Rumsfeld, D., ‘Transforming the Military’, Foreign Affairs, 82(20), 2002; Boot, M., ‘The New American
Way of War’, Foreign Affairs, 82(41), 2003
49
2
The extensive use of computers, satellite-based communications systems, stealth
technologies, precision-guided munitions and other technologically ‘heavy’ weapons during the Gulf
War greatly contributed to an idea emerging in the early 1990s that a revolution in military affairs
was underway.3 The idea that such a revolution was in progress was not entirely new; it had been
first expressed by former-chief of the Soviet General Staff Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov who claimed
that improvements in information technologies during the 1970s had the potential to radically change
the nature of warfare. He referred to a ‘military technical revolution’ (MTR) whereby technological
breakthroughs would soon offer conventional weapons a level of precision and effectiveness in battle
approaching that afforded by tactical nuclear weapons, and could therefore, potentially demarcate
epochal change in military history. In short, argued Ogarkov, new technologies would ‘make it
possible to conduct military operations with the use of conventional means of qualitatively new and
incomparably more destructive forms than before...’ 4
2.1.1 Andrew Marshall and the ONA
The MTR concept was borrowed and expanded by Western analysts, particularly in the United
States, to become known as the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA). The most important
promoter of the RMA in America has been Andrew W. Marshall, who was brought onto the National
Security Council Staff in 1972 and tasked with creating the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) in
1973, and appointed its director by President Nixon.5
During the mid to late-1970s the ONA had begun to closely analyse the writings and other
actions undertaken by the Soviet military, which suggested that they believed a period of major
change in warfare had begun.6 At that time it was the United States that had instigated this supposed
‘revolution’ with its advanced development of information technologies; however it was the Soviet
military theorists that were “intellectualising about it, and speculating on the longer-term
consequences of the technical and other changes that the American military had initiated”.7 It was
concluded that the Soviets appeared very concerned about these developments and that it would be
thus useful for the US to amplify those concerns by further investment in the ‘reconnaissance-strike
complexes’ (as the Soviets called them) that were fundamental to their vision of how future warfare
would be transformed.8
Although the Soviet threat receded during the early 1990s, the RMA ideas that had been
developed to play on the fears of Soviet military theorists were re-invigorated for the post-Cold War
era. Perhaps most crucially, in 1992, Andrew Marshall’s then-protégé at the ONA, Andrew
Krepinevich, authored the widely-read The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary
Assessment which, according to Maddrell, with the 1993 study Some Thoughts on Military
Revolutions established ‘transformation’ and the RMA as part of the defence vocabulary.9
The following passages borrow heavily from a 2002 re-release of the aforementioned 1992
study. The reason to examine certain sections at length is to emphasise the extent to which the
discourse on ‘transformation’ and RMA have been shaped by the ideas of the ONA, Marshall and his
‘students’. Importantly, these excerpts demonstrate that what began as a deliberate strategy of taking
advantage of the fears of Soviet military thinkers, became the guiding framework for the
transformation of Western military forces for the 1990s and would lead to the flawed assumptions
underpinning the plans on which Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom were undertaken.
Writing in the Foreword to the revised edition, Marshall provides insights into the process by
which the RMA discourse developed during the dying days of the Soviet Union.
3
Latham, A., ‘Reimagining Warfare: the “Revolution in Military Affairs”’, in Snyder, C. (ed.), Contemporary
Security and Strategy, (Palgrave Macmillan 1999)
4
Ogarkov, N., ‘The defense of Socialism: experience of history and the present day’, Krasnaya Zvezda, 9 May
1984, cited in Petersen, P., ‘The Modernization of the Soviet Armed Forces’, NATO’s 16 Nations, 31(4), July
1984
5
Maddrell, D., Quiet Transformation: The Role of the Office of Net Assessment, (National Defense University
2003)
6
Marshall, A., ‘Foreword’, in Krepinevich, A., Military Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,
(Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 2002)
7
Ibid.
8
Lehman, N., ‘Dreaming About War’, The New Yorker, 16 July 2001
9
Maddrell, Quiet Transformation
50
So it was in late 1990 or perhaps early 1991, shortly after Andrew Krepinevich had joined
the office, that I asked him to undertake an assessment to decide still more clearly if we
really believed that the Soviet theorists were correct in their belief that technological
developments would lead to major changes in warfare. I believed that if we were in such a
period, then senior Defense officials would be faced with new, important strategic
management issues. The purpose of the assessment, then, was to clarify and highlight
what we thought were the most important of these strategic management issues.
This assessment … dealt with speculation about the future, and the potential impact of
technology and new operational concepts on warfare … Rather than drawing upon a small
group or single individual, many panels were formed to discuss the various issues. This
process was consciously chosen in the hope that it would produce a shared language and
vocabulary for discussing the character of the changes in warfare that might take place in
the future.
The effort yielded what seemed to be a consensus that we were in a period of major
change; in short, that the Russian theorists were right.10
Similarly, the importance of the following excerpts from the body of the 1992 assessment by
Krepinevich will become apparent as this paper develops. Within these three paragraphs alone are
contained terms and phrases that would form the basis for the central tenets of RMA thinking and
would later be developed as the key concepts for force transformation.
They assert that this revolution's first stage will see far greater reliance placed on rapidly
acquiring, processing, and moving surveillance and targeting information… thereby
increasing the value of space-based systems, unmanned systems, and automated detection
and engagement.
These operations would be conducted by a reconnaissance-strike complex comprised
principally, if not solely, of aircraft and missile systems supported by a network of space
systems that would provide reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA)
support.
This network of networks (command and control, data acquisition, fusion, and
dissemination, and weapon systems) can, theoretically, engage a wide array of critical
targets at extended ranges with a high degree of accuracy and lethality.
Thus they see operations becoming increasingly joint in nature… Some recent Soviet and
Russian military writings are emphasizing so-called aero-space, or strike, operations.
These operations would be conducted by a reconnaissance-strike complex comprised
principally, if not solely, of aircraft and missile systems supported by a network of space
systems that would provide reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA)
support.11
As RMA ideas diffused into popular military parlance the ONA continued largely ‘behind the
scenes’ sponsoring or participating in countless other studies, assessments and futuristic war games,
and their position as one of the very few agencies able to analyse advanced, complex simulation
data, established Marshall and ONA, and eventually, many associated with them as “virtually
unchallengeable experts”.12
2.2 RMA: From concepts to policy proposals
By the mid-1990s RMA ideas and concepts began to spread beyond the ‘classified’ confines of the
ONA to be taken up by a wider body of defence intellectuals and policy-makers, as Andrew Marshall
10
Marshall, ‘Foreword’
Krepinevich, Military Technical Revolution
12
Maddrell, Quiet Transformation
11
51
helped to convince key figures within the American defence establishment of the need for the
transformation of the American military according to the central tenets of the RMA. 13 Two such
individuals, according to Ricks, were William Perry and Admiral William Owens who became,
respectively, Secretary for Defence and Vice Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff.14 Perry was said
to be widely respected within the DoD and hence a vital asset in promoting the RMA; while Owens
was able to promote the RMA within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, crucial as ‘jointness’ (the co-ordinated
use of a variety of weapons systems from across the military services) is central to the RMA.
Importantly, Owens held a position on the Joint Requirement Oversight Council and was therefore
able to ensure that the equipment developed for and procured by US armed forces reflected the
priorities of the RMA.15
2.2.1 Admiral William Owens and the ‘System-of-systems’
An example that clearly demonstrates the acceptance and promotion of RMA concepts among key
defence establishment figures by the mid-1990s is the publication of the influential work by Owens,
in 1996, entitled The Emerging US System-of-Systems.16
Owens begins by suggesting that three simultaneous revolutions are propelling the US
military toward fundamental change. The first is the implosion of the Soviet Union, the end of the
Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole military superpower. Secondly, a
related revolution can be discerned; the reallocation of resources from defence to domestic programs
which began roughly during mid-1980s and accelerated with the demise of the Soviet Union. The
third, argues Owens, is the RMA, where developments in “electronic and computational
technologies, the things which give military forces their fighting capability are changing, and these
changes point toward a qualitative jump in our ability to use military force effectively”.17
The results of this emerging RMA, according to Owens, fall into three general categories;
•
•
•
Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) – which involves sensor and reporting
technologies associated with intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as
well as the new means by which we are able to keep track of what our own forces are doing.
Command, control, communications, computer applications, and intelligence processing
(C4I) - the realm in which we convert the sensor awareness to dominant understanding of a
battle space and convert that understanding to missions and assignments designed to alter,
control, and dominate that battle space.
Precision force - a broad concept, in which the knowledge and orders generated from the
first two areas are translated into action and results.18
The end result; therefore is the creation of a ‘system-of-system’; where, by merging increasing
capability to gather real-time, all-weather information continuously with increasing capacity to
process and make sense of this voluminous data” forces can build “dominant battle space
knowledge” (DBK). This new system-of-systems capability, combined with joint doctrine designed
to take full advantage of these new fighting capabilities, is at the heart of the RMA. It emphasizes a
joint perspective, because the system-of-systems depends ultimately on contributions from all the
military services.
This ‘system-of-systems’ is almost identical to the ‘network-of-networks’ concept
mentioned by the Cold War era Soviet writers (and referred to by Krepinevich) and the constitutive
components (C4ISR, precision force and DBK) very closely resemble the ‘reconnaissance-strike
complex’ mentioned by the ONA analyst. Therefore continuity emerges between the earlier Soviet
hypotheses (that were developed by the ONA, expanded upon and repackaged as the RMA) and the
new conceptual frameworks for ‘transformation’ in the mid-1990s.
13
Ricks, T., ‘Warning Shot: How Wars Are Fought Will Change Radically, Pentagon Planners Say’, Wall
Street Journal, 15 July 1994
14
Gongora, T., & Riekhoff, H., Toward a Revolution in Military Affairs?: Defense and Security at the Dawn of
the Twenty-first Century (Greenwood Publishing Group 2000)
15
Ibid.
16
Owens, W., ‘The Emerging U.S. System-of-Systems’, Strategic Forum, 63 (Institute for National Strategic
Studies 1996)
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
52
2.2.2 Joint Vision 2010
From 1996 a number of changes begin to occur; the concepts of ‘system-of-systems’ and DBK, that
underpin the RMA become known, respectively, as ‘network-centric warfare’ and ‘information
superiority’ and the RMA is re-released as ‘transformation’. A number of papers, speeches and
official documents throughout the mid-to-late 1990s illuminate the transition.
Perhaps mostly importantly, the publication of Joint Vision 2010 (JV2010) in 1996 marks
the first official document addressing the central tenets of the RMA. JV2010 establishes “the
conceptual template for how we will channel the vitality of our people and leverage technological
opportunities to achieve new levels of effectiveness in joint warfighting”, and calls for ‘Full
Spectrum Dominance’ as the key characteristic for the Armed Forces in the 21st Century.19 Full
Spectrum Dominance is the end state to strive for, according to JV2010, in which US armed forces
establish complete superiority in the air, on land, at sea and in space
Reminiscent of the RSTA (reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition) concept
propounded by Soviet theorists, then developed as DBK (dominant battlespace knowledge) and
advocated by the aforementioned influential American figures, is ‘information superiority’, “the
capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting
or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.”20 Information superiority underpins the affective
application of the above mentioned four operational concepts, according to JV2010, by relying on a
“system-of-systems” that ensures constant, seamless interaction between all aspects of the fighting
services while denying opponents a similar ability. One can, therefore, clearly begin see a distinct
degree of continuity of ideas and concepts from the Soviet theorists and the ONA analysts who
expanded their ideas, right through to influential advocacy in the mid-1990s and the emergence of
official acceptance.
2.3 Official Acceptance
Acceptance of the RMA gained ground with the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and National
Defense Panel report, ‘Transforming Defense’, both of which appeared in 1997. The QDR
acknowledged Information Superiority as the central focus of military transformation, adding:
the ongoing transformation of our military capabilities - the so-called Revolution in
Military Affairs (RMA) - centres on developing the improved information and
command and control capabilities needed to significantly enhance joint operations.21
The National Defense Panel accepted that a revolution was underway and urged that
‘transformation’ should be pursued to stay abreast of changes in the conduct of warfare. The
following excerpt emphasises both the growing acceptance of the RMA but again, the similarity in
terms and expressions to the earlier RMA descriptions.
We are on the cusp of a military revolution stimulated by rapid advances in
information and information-related technologies. This implies a growing potential
to detect, identify, and track far greater numbers of targets over a larger area for a
longer time than ever before, and to provide this information much more quickly and
effectively than heretofore possible.22
The annual report of the Secretary of Defense in 1997 moved from positing a ‘so-called’ to
an ‘emerging RMA’.23 By 1998, however, ‘transformation’ was central to the annual report,
declaring that DoD “has embarked on a transformation strategy to meet the challenges of the 21st
century”; further,
19
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010
Ibid.
21
Office of the Secretary of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review, 1997
22
National Defense Panel, Transforming Defense, 1997
23
Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to the President and the Congress, 1997
53
20
The Department’s willingness to embrace the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)
— to harness technology to ultimately bring about fundamental conceptual and
organizational change—is critical at this stage of the transformation strategy.24
The Pentagon now officially embraced RMA principles, which were presented as being critical to
defence strategy.
2.4 Approval and Institutionalisation under the Bush Administration
It is evident therefore that the concept of the RMA and of ‘transformation’ gradually increased in
influence throughout the 1990s as the authority of powerful bodies such as the ONA and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, war-gamed, studied, lobbied, published and generally ‘educated’ the wider defence
establishment on the approach to military reform they considered most appropriate. This is not to say
that there was widespread acceptance of such ideas throughout this period. In fact in 1997, Secretary
of Defense William Cohen attempted to have the ONA exiled from its influential position within the
OSD.25 However, following overwhelming protests from Andrew Marshall’s colleagues and
members of the press Cohen withdrew his attempt at limiting the influence of the ONA.26
Marshall’s influence expanded from 2000 onwards with the election of an administration
wholly accepting of the RMA-based ‘transformation’ agenda. In a speech delivered at The Citadel
(The Military College of South Carolina) in the run up to the 2000 presidential elections, George W.
Bush laid out a plan for military ‘transformation’. These reforms would provide an opportunity to
“extend the current peace into the far realm of the future”, offering “a chance to project America’s
peaceful influence, not just across the world, but across the years.”27 The George W. Bush
administration, therefore, pledged to embrace the RMA and its ‘system-of-systems’ concepts.
Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's Secretary of Defense, had held the job before under President Ford. He had
stayed active in defence affairs ever since, especially as chairman of two influential commissions on
ballistic missile defence and space policy, where he had cultivated close links with Andrew
Marshall. In short, he too was an ardent RMA advocate.
Upon entering office, Rumsfeld was to conduct a comprehensive review of US military
forces by convening a number of high-level, low-profile study groups, with an eye to educating,
rather than discussing with, senior officers and members of the defence community about the RMAbased ‘transformation’ agenda.
The outcome of these reviews is essentially embodied in the Quadrennial Defense Review
report, 2001, which offers six critical operational goals to focus DoD’s transformation efforts:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Protecting critical bases of operations (U.S. homeland, forces abroad, allies, and friends) and
building defences against weapons of mass destruction;
Projecting and sustaining U.S. forces in distant anti-access or area-denial environments and
defeating anti-access and area denial threats;
Enhancing the capability and survivability of space systems and supporting infrastructure;
Denying enemies sanctuary by providing persistent surveillance, tracking, and rapid
engagement with high-volume precision strike, through a combination of complementary air
and ground capabilities, against critical mobile and fixed targets at various ranges and in all
weather and terrains;
Leveraging information technology and innovative concepts to develop an interoperable,
joint C4ISR architecture and capability that includes an ability to create a joint operational
picture;
Assuring information systems in the face of attack and conducting effective information
operations.28
2.4.1 Network-centric warfare
Network centric warfare (NCW) can trace its immediate origins to Owens’ introduction of the
‘system-of-systems’ concept. Owens described a host of emerging technologies that when utilised
24
Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to the President and the Congress, 1998
Silverstein, K., & Burton-Rose, D., Private Warriors, (Verso 2001); Lehman, ‘Dreaming About War’
26
Ibid.
27
Bush, GW., ‘A Period of Consequences’, Speech at The Citadel, South Carolina, 23 September 1999
28
Office of the Secretary of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review, 2001
54
25
would alter doctrinal and organisational approaches to warfighting by creating DBK or ‘situational
awareness’. These innovations would allow for precision munitions to be utilised and adversaries
engaged from afar. JV2010 also contained aspects of the network-centric approach, especially its
focus on achieving Full Spectrum Dominance through information superiority.
As a distinct concept, however, network-centric warfare first appeared publicly in a 1998
article by Cebrowski and Gartska.29 The concepts were later covered in greater detail by Gartska,
Alberts and Stein, 2000, who derived a new theory of warfare from a series of case studies on how
the corporate sector was using information and communication technologies to improve ‘situation
analysis’, accurately control inventory and production, as well as monitor customer relations.30
The tenets of network-centric warfare according to Garstka are:
•
•
•
•
A robustly networked force improves information sharing.
Information sharing and collaboration enhance the quality of information and shared
situational awareness.
Shared situational awareness enables self-synchronisation.
These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness.
Therefore, according to Garstka, there is a strong correlation between information sharing,
improved situational awareness and increased combat power. By maintaining superiority in the
‘information domain’ (the realm where information lives, is created, manipulated and shared) a
commander can garner a self-perpetuating advantage in warfare.31
One can see a distinct continuity of thought, or at least rhetoric, with minor amendments, from
the original Soviet writings on a ‘military technical revolution’ whereby a reconnaissance strike
complex emerges through a ‘network of networks’, which sees streams of data channelled from
sensors to shooters allowing targets to be located and engaged with greater efficiency. These ideas
were expanded by an obscure, influential group within the DoD, lead by Andrew Marshall, whom
claimed a revolution in military affairs was therefore underway. This RMA dispersed into scholarly
debate and policy-making as demonstrated by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Owens.
Owens discussed a ‘system-of-systems’, linking command, control, communications, computing,
intelligence and reconnaissance technologies to provide ‘dominant battle-space knowledge’. DBK
was vital in establishing what JV2010 referred to as full spectrum dominance – the establishment of
superiority in air, on land, at sea and in space. The development of Network-Centric Warfare built
upon these concepts arguing for the utilisation of a ‘system-of-systems’ in order to share
information, establish enhanced situational awareness and therefore a superior ability to strike an
opponent with precision.
The concepts progressed continuously from Soviet theory to form the basis of the Bush
administration’s approach to military reform and subsequently underpinned the planning for
Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. At the time of the attacks, in September 2001, on
New York and Washington the Bush administration’s comprehensive review had not been
completed, in fact the administration had only been in power for slightly longer than six months.
However, the attacks provided the opportunity for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to request
emergency funding from Congress and speed up the reform agenda, thus allowing the
experimentation of ‘transformed’ warfare on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Following the major combat phases of both operations, internal security rapidly deteriorated. The
inability to address the irregular warfare and insurgency that emerged is directly related to the RMAbased ‘transformation’ principles upon which the planning for both wars was based. We have seen
how the concepts underpinning ‘transformation’ were able to remain relatively unchanged from the
futuristic hypotheses of Soviet theorists to their implementation decades later. Therefore the
‘transformation’ agenda, which greatly influenced the basis for the planning of two wars, was rooted
in concepts and principles designed for an outmoded generation of warfare.
3. Theoretical Perspectives on the RMA
29
Cebrowski, A., & Gartska, J., Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future, (Naval Institute Proceedings
1998)
30
Gartska, J., Network-Centric Warfare: An Overview of an Emerging Theory (Joint Staff Directorate for C4
Systems 2000)
31
Ibid.
55
Taking advantage of the ‘mandate for action’ created by the attacks on New York and Washington
D.C on September 11, 2001, the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom. It took three months
from the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan until the signing of the Bonn Accord in December
2001, which established an interim government lead by Hamid Karzai. Fifteen months later the US,
aided by a ‘coalition of the willing’, invaded Iraq and three weeks later the Iraqi capital fell.
Although the precise means varied in each case, both used the tools, tactics and strategies that had
been developed through RMA-based transformation; an initial round of heavy bombing, in order to
achieve ‘rapid dominance’ whereby the adversary is hopefully ‘shocked and awed’ by the ferocity of
the firepower, followed up by the minimal use of ground forces (in the case of Afghanistan, roughly
200 Special Operations Forces and 100 CIA paramilitaries supporting the North Alliance) to
eliminate any remaining regime security elements.
However, in both Iraq and Afghanistan a complex mixture of insurgents have managed to
challenge the dominance of the RMA-based coalition forces. US military forces for all their
‘transformational’ doctrines and technologies are failing to achieve the goals set out in JV2010 - to
be “persuasive in peace, decisive in war, pre-eminent in any form of conflict”.32 How did it come
about that the RMA-based transformation agenda has failed to prepare the most powerful,
technologically advanced military on earth for the reality of conflict?
The very notion of an RMA is contentious. Some authors point to the fact much of the
technology and weapons systems ascribed to the contemporary RMA were in development long
before the Gulf War, the oft-cited period whereby the RMA came of age. Primarily, today’s
weaponry represent ‘baroque’ versions of military technologies utilised in a bygone era and preeminent during the Second World War.33 Much of today’s ‘state of the art’ weaponry are merely the
latest instalment of a product with an extensive history of linear ‘trend innovation’ which Kaldor
describes as “perpetual improvements to weapons that fall within established traditions of the armed
services and the armourers”.34 Further, much of what is described in the core ‘transformation’ texts
illustrates the future and not the present of warfare.
In short the RMA is a flawed construct on which to base military ‘transformation’ as
revolutions in military affairs are not very common; the purported RMA currently underway will be
adjusted to by an American culture adept at adapting to technological change; and because the
‘transformational’ concepts describe a type of war that is still a long way off in the future and the
supposedly ‘revolutionary’ weapons systems in operation today are ‘baroque’ versions of weapons
from another generation of warfare.
The largest group of analysts dealing with the RMA concept focuses on rapidly-changing
technical capabilities as the defining feature.35 One of the points of contention among members of
this group has been the lack of a single definition of the constituent elements of the RMA and
disagreement over the importance of new doctrine and organisations in implementing the revolution.
For Krepinevich, an RMA;
(O)ccurs when the application of new technologies into a significant number of
military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational
adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict. It
does so by producing a dramatic increase, often an order of magnitude or greater, in
the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces. 36
Owens ‘system-of-systems’ epitomises this approach to the RMA, whereby a complex of
advanced C4ISR technologies combine to provide ‘dominant battlespace knowledge’ or enhanced
‘situational awareness’.37 The ‘system-of-systems’ is a direct adaptation of the Soviet ‘network-ofnetworks’ theory and central to the transformation agenda. These theories are based on the belief in a
number of inter-connected developments in lethality, visibility and agility.38
32
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010
Kaldor, M., The Baroque Arsenal, (Hill and Wang 1981)
34
Ibid.
35
Galdi, T., Revolution in Military Affairs? Competing Concepts, Organizational Responses, Outstanding
Issues, (Congressional Research Service Report for Congress 1995)
36
Ibid.
37
Owens, ‘The Emerging U.S. System of Systems’
38
Latham, ‘Reimagining Warfare’
56
33
Lethality refers to the ability to kill more by firing less, or to increase the probability of
‘single-shot kill ratios’.39 In past eras of fighting, improvements in capability were actualised by
increasing the number of weapons fired, the rate at which they were fired and the destructive power
of the ordinance.40 Once the limit of destructiveness was reached with the advent of nuclear
weapons, a move toward establishing greater accuracy in weaponry was made culminating in the
importance of precision in RMA concepts.
The doctrine of precision became accepted in certain circles and can be defined as;
The ability to locate high-value, time-sensitive fixed and mobile targets; to destroy
them with a high degree of confidence; and to accomplish this within operationally
and strategically significant time lines while minimising collateral damage, friendly
fire casualties and enemy counter-strikes.41
Accuracy has always been important in battle; however it has now taken precedence in
weapons development. In past generations of warfare, destructive capability was the primary
determinant of the course of weapons development while the pursuit of accuracy was of secondary
concern. In the contemporary era, accuracy takes precedence over volume of firepower. The pursuit
of greater precision also reduces the ‘logistical’ tail in war thus allowing smaller, more agile
organisational concepts to emerge.
Greatly enabling these advances in lethality are advances in visibility; the ability to literally
see or at least ‘view’ the battlefield. Throughout history, the ‘fog of war’ and the restraints of the
human eye have hampered the ability of commanders to fully comprehend developments on the
battlefield. During WW2 the deployment of radar and aerial photography allowed progress to be
made in clearing the fog. Today, accurate and detailed real-time information enables commanders to
have continuous ‘wide-area surveillance’ and target acquisition capabilities, unimaginable
previously.
Improved agility relates to the enhanced ability to analyse and process information and act on
it in a timely fashion. Mid 19th century, the invention of telegraph and the railroad allowed
information and troops to be transported and relocated faster encouraging greater strategic
advantage. Today it is not so much mobility that has improved but the ability to process and
disseminate information – thus allowing faster and more decisive reactions on the battlefield.42
The combined outcome of improvements in lethality, visibility and agility is that the tempo
of combat operations has been greatly enhanced as the “speed of the ‘identify, decide, act’ cycle has
been greatly increased”.43 It is the combination of these technologies into a number of systems that
encourages Krepinevich’s assertion of an RMA and, encourages Owens to posit that such advances
are working toward dispelling the age old ‘fog of war’.44 This belief in has lead to a dangerous
misunderstanding about the ability of the RMA to fundamentally alter the nature of warfare.
3.1 Dispelling the Fog of War?
Perhaps the greatest flaw in the thinking of ‘transformers’ and RMA advocates is their belief in the
ability of technological improvements in warfighting to make irrelevant - the ‘fog of war’ – the role
of chance and uncertainty - a central, defining principle of warfare. RMA proponents believe that the
‘system-of-systems’ can all but remove the role of chance, uncertainty and the ‘fog of war’ – what
Carl von Clausewitz refers to as friction. Separating the perfect execution of ones carefully thoughtout plans in warfare from the actual conduct of the war are the unknown, uncertain obstacles that
appear throughout the duration of the conflict. The role of the terrain, weather, the morale of troops
and the time of day (just to name a few of an infinite number of examples) can all hinder the
execution of ones plans, thus creating a kind of ‘friction’ in war.
39
Shukman, Tomorrow’s War: The Threat of High-technology Weapons, (Harcourt 1996)
Latham, ‘Reimagining Warfare’
41
McKitrick, J., et al, ‘The Revolution in Military Affairs’, in Battlefield of the Future 1995
(www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/battle/bftoc.html)
42
Latham, ‘Reimagining Warfare’
43
Dunn, R., From Gettysburg to the Gulf and Beyond: Coping with Revolutionary Changes in Land Warfare
(McNair Papers, no. 13, Institute for National Strategic Studies 1992)
44
Owens, W., Lifting the Fog of War, (Ferrar, Straus and Giroux 2000)
57
40
Friction is thus an ever-present part of war as the number of unknown factors subject to
chance makes the execution of even the most well rehearsed operation impossible to reproduce in
reality. However, many ‘transformation’ supporters instead ground their theories in the expectation
of certainty, believing that war can be controlled, ordered, and regulated. Often explicit in their
discussion is the ability not only to see the enemy everywhere, all the time, but to actually anticipate
and predict enemy behaviour. Full ‘situational awareness’ and dominant battlespace knowledge will
(according to transformational thinking), largely, if not completely, dissipate the fog and friction of
war.
Referring to the high technology, especially the C4ISR capabilities, deployed in Iraq, one
RMA supporter has claimed that it has been possible to “cut through the fog of war”.45 One only
needs to read the front cover of Owens’ book, Lifting the Fog of War to draw conclusions as to the
opinions of this leading advocate of ‘transformation’. As Kagan pointed out, the essence of this
vision is the simple reduction of warfare to a targeting drill.46 In this schema, wars and campaigns
appear as lists of targets to be located, attacked, and destroyed. This ‘technicist’ view reflects the
experiences and intellectual predispositions of many transformation advocates who come from air
and naval backgrounds. It promises to use new technology to make everything ‘serviceable’. But this
means it also promises to abolish uncertainty, to make war transparent and to eliminate the very
quality that defines war.
Hence the opening phases of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were completed swiftly while
the adversary presented targets to be located and hit with precision guided weaponry. Woodward
describes a meeting conducted by the principal members of the American national security apparatus
during the opening stages of the war in Afghanistan, where Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
“continued to insist that there were just not enough targets”. However, this technological ‘state-ofthe-art’ approach failed to capture bin Laden and several years later, reports are continuously stating
a growth in the activity of insurgents. Similarly, in Iraq, the use of PGM were negated by Saddam by
dispersing and concealing forces within urban populations, thus forcing US forces to engage in
protracted ground fighting for which they were ill prepared.47 Also, the reliance on airpower “no
matter how awesome, cannot police newly liberated countries or build democratic governments”.48
Thus preparing for such warfare has largely failed to achieve the principle aim of transformation – to
be ‘persuasive in peace, decisive in war, pre-eminent in any form of conflict’.
In short the orthodox approach to understanding the RMA demonstrates that it is a an
inappropriate construct on which to base military reform as it attempts to deny the central premise of
war, that it is a phenomenon subject to the whims of unseen obstacles, chance, uncertainty and
friction.
3.2 Misunderstood Trends
Those in the orthodox school may also point to a number of social and political changes brought
about by the end of the Cold War which encourage the view that rapid, momentous transformation
can occur, thus radically affecting the conduct of warfare.
The belief that improvements in information technology were leading to radical changes in
warfare originated in the 1970s. At the same time that an information revolution was underway,
another influential phenomenon was occurring; the shift to smaller, more flexible and professional
armies. A smaller, more highly educated, professional fighting force would operate the technology of
the future. There would therefore be less of a reliance on ‘mass armies’ and a shift toward ‘precision
warfare’. RMA forces would contain relatively low levels of personnel, as the delivery of munitions
would be achieved via technologically advanced airborne weapon systems and would not expose
human beings involved with them to the threat of death to any great degree.49 Such developments
naturally favoured the US as it would allow it to overcome the post-Vietnam, political constraints on
using ground forces.
The improved ability to strike virtually any target at any location when combined with greater
mobility and lethality implied the need for a much smaller tactical footprint and fewer ground forces.
In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, then-army Chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki estimated that
45
Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’
Kagan, F., ‘War and Aftermath’, Policy Review, August 2003
47
Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’
48
Ibid.
49
Hirst, P., War and Power in the 21st Century, (Polity 2001)
58
46
several hundred thousand troops would be required to occupy the country. Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz called this figure “wildly off the mark”.50 Wanting to “build on the lessons
of Afghanistan” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wanted to send a much smaller contingent of
soldiers than a number of senior military officers warned would be necessary.51 The initial plan put
forward by General Tommy Franks, senior command of CENTCOM, (Central Command for forces
in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa) was heavily readjusted to the point
where it was more in sequence with Rumsfeld’s transformational agenda. Such examples highlight
the extent to which the DoD placed faith in a streamlined version of military transformation, even if
it meant challenging the advice of the most experienced members of the armed forces.
4. Conclusion
This paper has endeavoured to demonstrate how a certain set of principles – ‘transformation’ - based
upon highly flawed assumptions – RMA - could gain prominence and implementation within the US
defence establishment for over a decade, finally culminating in becoming the basis for the execution
of two wars.
It has been shown that what began as a Soviet theorist’s future vision for war, was seized
upon and expanded by American strategists and revived for the post-Cold War world by a distinct set
of advocates. From the ONA, within the Pentagon, to a number of influential military officials and
the agencies they represented, to the wholesale acceptance of the ‘transformation’ agenda by the
Bush administration.
The original assumptions of the Soviet theorists were examined and the evolution of RMA
and transformational concepts mapped for the period between the end of the Cold War and the wars
on Afghanistan and Iraq. What emerged was an illumination of they way in which well placed
advocates can achieve a great deal, even if touting substantially flawed policies.
Upon examining the RMA, in it’s entirety, a number of issues emerged. Firstly, the
excessive emphasis on technology, such as the ‘system-of-systems’ concepts have led to a dangerous
belief that central strategic principles, common to all war can be bypassed. The supposed ability of
advanced C4ISR technologies to cut through the ‘fog of war’ has led to an overemphasis on
machinery at the expense of losing the ability to understand the human element in war.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq came about as a result of a belief in a transformation
program, itself originating from outmoded-wishful thinking. Outmoded as the central concept, RMA,
originates in the era of Cold War confrontation and are designed for swift conventional operations,
with minimal ground forces against large industrial armies. ‘Wishful-thinking’ – because of a belief
that technology could radically rewrite the fundamental principles of warfare. Or as Schnaubelt
argues, “the result of planning to fight the war we envisioned, with RMA capabilities we hoped for
instead of the enemy and conditions we would actually face”. 52
Luckily, there are some promising signs that a shift in perception is occurring as a reaction to
the flawed ‘transformational’ assumptions. The violent, sophisticated and effective insurgency
movements in Afghanistan and Iraq (as well as in other parts of the globe) has seen a rise in the
prominence of counter-insurgency (COIN) discourse within the strategic and national security
academic and policy communities. Numerous articles have been circulated across the media, books
written and online communities created in an attempt to stimulate an open debate about this new
COIN movement. The web-based Small Wars Journal, an open online community, supports the
exchange of information among practitioners, academics, and students of COIN, in order to advance
knowledge and capabilities in the field, as well as allowing the general public to monitor
developments. This diffusion of COIN ideas is altering the public’s understanding of the changing
nature of warfare, and crucially is encouraging policy-makers to support a relatively less established
counter-insurgency movement rather than blindly following the powerful RMA-industrial, academic
and policy complex. The release of a new Marine Corps Counter-insurgency Field Manual highlights
the extent to which, COIN advocates are beginning to transform organisational, doctrinal and
operational norms within the military.
Perhaps the most recent events encouraging a belief that the RMA and ‘transformation’
movements are becoming increasingly sidelined and a more appropriate approach to military
50
Schmitt, E., ‘Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size’, New York Times, 28 February
2003
51
Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’
52
Schnaubelt, C., ‘Whither the RMA?’, Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly, 37(3), 2007
59
development (COIN) is being implemented, is the appointment, in April 2008, of General David
Petraeus to the head of US CENTCOM (Central Command, co-ordinating body for US troops from
Kazakhstan through the Middle East to the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa.) General Petraeus
was the author of the new COIN Field Manual and a strong advocate of new strategic direction for
security operations in Irag and Afghanistan that centres on understanding the ‘human dimension’ in
conflict, and employing programs that seek to protect the population from the influence of
insurgents, rather than myopic focus on targeting and servicing the enemy. The ‘surge’ strategy in
Iraq, which provides an example of the practical implementation of these new COIN doctrines and
principles, has seen previously volatile regions largely pacified and administrative control handed
back to local parties.
More needs to be done however. National defense departments and intergovernmental
defense bodies need to develop improved inter-departmental capabilities for planning and executing
counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations. The real RMA will not be purely military – it will be
founded on the efforts of strategic thinkers capable of understanding and integrating all aspects of
national power to counter the threat from terrorism, complex insurgency and the non-conventional,
asymmetric threats that the ‘transformation’ program has thus far failed to address. This new RMA
will not be developed until the US develops an effective system of interagency strategy and
operations with the ability to exercise all elements of national power – diplomatic, economic, law
enforcement, information and military – in order to tackle the diverse array of threats that are
beginning to materialise.
60
The freedom to run, fight and die: a study of civil liberties in Afghanistan during the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
Ferelith Gaze, M.Sc. Global Politics
1. Introduction
The desperate nature of state failure routinely brings gross and widespread human rights violations.
Averting these is as important as correcting the international insecurity which also accompanies
failure. Necessarily, attention has been focused on alleviating immediate suffering and it is
consequently rare for civil liberties to be considered during times of state failure. Yet the freedoms
permissible in any state are a key indication of the state-society relationship as well as the relative
strength of each. So in order to understand the character of any resurgent state, we need to be
mindful of the ways in which a state and its society negotiate their relationship and develop their
particular balance of liberties and restrictions. In short, we need to investigate the feasibility of civil
liberties being enacted during state failure, and the dynamics thereof: this is the question that the
study here begins to redress.
However, fundamental to this analytical oversight is the current difficulty of conceptualising
the feasibility of civil liberties within a failed state. Civil liberties are popularly regarded as society’s
defence against undue government interference, while a failed state lacks a functional government to
provide security and public goods.1 When the two are juxtaposed, does the logic of their definitions
imply total freedom, because the state cannot interfere in citizens’ lives, or absent freedom, because
the state cannot protect them? It is clear that freedom will be neither total nor absent in such a
situation, and yet a valid answer is elusive. Thus the twin objectives here are to establish more
meaningful characterisations for these concepts and then to apply them within a case study and as
such establish the feasibility of civil liberties within a failed state. The case study will be that of
Afghanistan, although assessing the reverberations of any civil liberties exercised during a period of
failure into latter day reconstruction is beyond the scope of this study.
Afghanistan has succeeded in territorial coherence even while being politically and socially
divided, but between 1992 and 2001 was considered to have been a collapsed, and then a failed,
state. Its importance to Western states since the middle of the eighteenth century – as a rentier state
in the British Empire, then as a buffer state for the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and next as a failed
state and thus a security issue for the international community – means that information is more
plentiful than exists for areas which do not bear such imperial history.
Nevertheless, evidence contemporaneous with the period of state failure is limited, with
many countries closing their embassies shortly after the Soviets ended their occupation in 1989.
However, concerns for international security and human rights meant that Afghanistan was not
entirely forgotten and organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
continued to produce reports. Additionally, there has been a burgeoning online culture since 2005
when access to the internet, and interest in it, seems to have increased, and while the statements of
those who produce blogs and podcasts, and who take part in forums, cannot be taken as
representative – economics, gender and literacy in particular deny a substantial demographic from
having an online presence and such avenues can be used to spread misinformation – they do provide
valuable accounts of the political experience of living within a failed state.
2. Conceptual disjunctures
Freedom and the state need to be re-problematised within a post-colonial context. The vagaries of
category need to be reassessed. Above all, the institutional, and consequently productive, powers of
abstraction need to be questioned. the application of Westernised freedoms in a foreign context
denotes a relationship of power, a dynamic wherein one actor makes use of, or creates value from,
another. Ideas about liberty and the state have been bedrocks of Western political philosophy since
the seventeenth century, although their origins, meaning, application, negotiation and enactment
1
Haubrich, D., ‘September 11, anti-terror laws and civil liberties: Britain, France and Germany compared’,
Government and Opposition, (38)1, January 2003
61
remain essentially contested.2 Moreover, despite the specificity of their modern Western context and
evolution, liberty and the state have been applied beyond their sphere as if they were inalienable
human conditions. In many ways, states have been ‘grafted onto the raw material of society’ in postcolonial countries, with organic institutions ‘seen as irrelevant and defective, as obstacles to
“modernity”, and as infinitely malleable from the top’.3 Where such assignments have not replicated
the Western model, they are deemed to be failed states.4 Yet, as Roxanne Lynn Doty highlights, the
state is ‘a project whose results – while extremely powerful and indeed often fearsome – are always
somewhat contingent and significantly are always results that may not be successfully effected,
hence the opening for resistance in various forms’.5 Acknowledging this makes it possible that the
Western model is unlikely to be reproduced as expected beyond its historical context, and is to draw
attention to a cultural sleight of hand where departures are called failures, which in turn further
entrenches a denial of grassroots dynamism. To give the state, and yet to withhold civil liberties, is to
presume structure and deny agency.
The state of negotiations
A useful entry point into the complicated evolution and conception of the state is the Weberian form.
Therein, the institutional characteristics of ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ and house the key functions
of representation, security and welfare provision which prevent realisation of Hobbesian mayhem.6
Representation is essentially the contract between society and the state as outlined by Hobbes. The
agreement ‘of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial’ and in order to shore up that covenant, a
common power is necessary, created when people ‘confer all their power and strength upon one man,
or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will’.7
Thus society gives up its power and allows the state the symbolic and material right of representation
to guarantee security and welfare, and in doing so, tolerates the significant financial and social costs
of regulation.8 By acknowledging this, Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause’s contention that ‘the
modern state, since it emerged out of the ashes of the medieval order, has always been a work in
progress’ can be better understood: states and societies continually re-negotiate the construction of
their identities and relationships, their purpose and their potential.9
That re-negotiation takes place to a great extent through the exercise of civil liberties, as will
be shown later. First, we need to understand how civil liberties are currently understood and the
problems this presents. The assumed meaning of civil liberties derives from Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke. For Hobbes, liberty was the absence of interference, being ‘taken away only by external
impediments’.10 Similarly for Locke, writing at the time of the Glorious Revolution, it was a ‘natural
possession’ lent to the sovereign on specific terms.11 Why have these particular formulations, aligned
as they are with the problems and interests of their time, enjoyed such longevity rather than being
found sui generis?12 As Conor Gearty points out, the idea that people give up some freedom on
specific terms would have sounded ‘far-fetched’ even to their contemporaries.
To explain the relevance of civil liberties beyond Britain – but not to defend the presupposed
definition – we need to look again at the timing of Hobbes and Locke. The contemporaneous 1648
2
Doty, R., ‘Review: Shapiro, Michael J; Alker, Hayward (eds.), Challenging boundaries – global flows,
territorial identities’, The American Political Science Review, 91(2), June 1997
3
Wunsch, J., ‘Refounding the African state and local self-governance: the neglected foundation’, The Journal
of Modern African Studies, 38(3) September 2000
4
Ibid.
5
Doty, ‘Review’
6
Weber, M., ‘The state and coercion’, in Rosen, M., & Wolff, J., (eds.), Political Thought (Oxford University
Press 1999); Milliken, J., & Krause, K., ‘State failure, state collapse, and state reconstruction: concepts, lessons
and strategies’, Development and Change, 33(5), 2002
7
Hobbes, T., ‘Creating Leviathan’, in Rosen & Wolff (eds.), Political Thought
8
Clapham, C., ‘The challenge to the state in a globalized world’, Development and Change, 33(5) 2002
9
Milliken & Krause, ‘State failure, state collapse, and state reconstruction’
10
Hobbes quoted in Skinner, Q., ‘States and the freedom of citizens’, in Skinner, Q. & Stråth, B., (eds.), States
and citizens (Cambridge University Press 2003)
11
Gearty, C., Civil liberties (Oxford University Press 2007)
12
Skinner, ‘States and the freedom of citizens’
62
Peace of Westphalia was a confirmation and stabilisation of what was already known: that a state
system had been established in Europe and the intention was to preserve it in perpetuity.13 Given that
states were ‘the most compelling engines of coercion’, it followed that their interference should be
resisted and liberty defended for the sake of self-determination.14 Hence ideas about liberty
developed by counterpoising them with the reach of the state. Significant attention was paid to these
ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw the development of a distinct school of
thought that ‘made much of the unwritten British constitution’s commitment to negative liberty, the
freedom to do that which no law prevents’.15 This was concurrent with the dogmatic application of
the state through European imperial expansion.16 The global incorporation of the state was such that
the national dynamics which went towards negotiating citizens’ liberties passed without great
comment. Both the state and civil liberties have been applied beyond their originating sphere, and the
historical residues of their intellectual development have been exported with little revision.
The myth of the failed state and the ambiguity of civil liberties
This internally-coherent Western framework for the state, and the liberties permissible within, has
been transmitted throughout the world even, as Robert Rotberg allows, to ‘ex-colonial territories
[which] became, faut de mieux, nation-states’. He goes on to assert that he takes ‘the nation-state,
whether appropriately or inappropriately so designated, as a given’.17 It may be narratively necessary
to maintain such a stance, yet Rotberg’s conviction in this leaves the subject dependent on Westerncentric theories and enables him to term certain states as failed. His analysis concentrates on
categories and characteristics: there are degrees of failure ranging from weak to failing, from failed
to collapsed, wherein states suffer enduring violence, inharmonious communities, nominal control
over borders and general lawlessness. In sum, failed states do not deliver positive political goods and
are riven by violence.18
As such, there is an undue focus on the causes and consequences of state failure, rather its
dynamics. In construing notions of failure, an intellectual schism occurs in an effort to remain within
the theoretical framework of the successful state. That is, as Pinar Bilgin and David Morton
appreciate, success and failure tend to be ‘simplistically reduced to an empirically observable
capacity to manipulate (usually) coercive resources resulting in an anti-democratic overtone of
control and subordination’.19 This gives little scope for the vital potential of state-society negotiation
and no possibility of historicising post-colonial ‘failed’ states. A state may indeed have been
unsuccessful in its remit, its infrastructure malfunctioning and crumbling, but this should not obscure
the existence of its developing socio-political dynamics and pretend that recovery lies in returning to
a presumed originating normality.
Reversing this analytical trend is important because state failure and collapse create a misery
that goes beyond Hobbes’ state of nature. It is far more socially complex, catastrophically violent
and internationally influenced than he could have envisioned. As Zartman points out, ‘state collapse
is conceptually significant because it shows the necessary imbrications of the two components’ – that
is, state and society – with ‘the degeneration of one necessarily entailing the debilitation of the other
... the normal politics of demands and responses atrophies’.20 To deny the experience of living within
a failed state is to attempt a re-grafting of the state, and to place citizens in a kind of stasis, awaiting
rescue. We need to look for what is present within these states, not focus on what is putatively
absent.
13
Milliken & Krause, ‘State failure, state collapse, and state reconstruction’
Handlin, O., & Handlin, M., The dimensions of liberty (Harvard University Press 1961)
15
Gearty, Civil liberties
16
Skinner, ‘States and the freedom of citizens’
17
, Rotberg, R., ‘The failure and collapse of nation-states – breakdown, prevention, and repair’, in Rotberg, R.,
(ed.) When states fail: causes and consequences (Princeton University Press 2004)
18
Rotberg, R., ‘The new nature of nation-state failure’, The Washington Quarterly, 25(3), 2002; Rotberg, ‘The
failure and collapse of nation-states’
19
Bilgin, P., & Morton, A., ‘Historicising representations of “failed states”: beyond the cold-war annexation of
the social sciences?’, Third World Quarterly, 23(1), 2002
20
Zartman, W., Collapsed states: the disintegration and restoration of legitimate authority (Lynne Rienner
1994)
14
63
Therefore, we need to follow Bilgin and Morton in ‘opening analysis up to the different
processes of state formation and historical circumstances constitutive of various post-colonial states,
thereby considering different forms of state rather than obscuring diverse trajectories of state
formation’.21 Doing so unravels the limitations of embedded statism. Once this begins, the theoretical
contestation of the state, and of failed states, can begin again.
It is because the role of citizens is seemingly absent from much of the literature on failed
states that the exercise of civil liberties must be brought into the analysis. However, there are two
problems within the civil liberties tradition which need to be confronted: it has been engulfed by
human rights literature and atheoreticism. The result is that civil liberties are likely to be overlooked
or misconceived.
The principle that protection of human rights is a condition of sovereignty, and as a factor to
be promoted in the reconstruction of failed states, is a recent and important advance with many good
intentions and successful results.22 Indeed, certain civil liberties, most commonly freedom of
expression, are taken as included within the human rights remit. However, human rights are not a
substitute for civil liberties and presenting them as such creates an overly legalistic attitude which
usurps the ‘notion of active citizenship, ... alienating the governed and diluting the richness of the
relationship between government and people to little more than plaintiff versus defendant’.23 As
Gearty observes, civil liberties need to be constantly re-constructed: ‘[t]here is no alternative to
politics, and one of the chief advantages of the idea of civil liberties ... is that, unlike the
misleadingly absolute language of human rights, it makes this crystal clear’.24
Meanwhile, atheoreticism has left an incompatibility in the understood definitions of failed
states and civil liberties. If the basic definition of a person’s freedom to express themselves without
government interference is retained, in a failed state, where the government is severely weakened,
logic implies that civil liberties would be absolute as whatever government exists will not be able to
interfere with them. Yet equally, the argument could as easily be followed that without rule of law,
there are no boundaries to be observed and brute force will decide what freedoms are possible, and
civil liberties are null. If a strong state can infringe civil liberties, does it follow that a weak state
unfetters them, or rather that it prevents their conception entirely? The juxtaposition of failed states
and civil liberties breaks them apart as their necessary relationship cannot bear the tension of four
centuries of Western philosophy being incongruous in the post-colonial context.
Hence the meaning of civil liberties needs to be revisited. Starting with the conception of
civil liberties as ‘the freedom to do what has not been proscribed’ inhibits an understanding of the
vibrancy created through their exercise – if civil libertarians were solely concerned to extract the
government from as much of daily life as possible, they would be permanently regressive and set
against governmental developments. Moreover, it is necessary to expand and develop the meaning of
civil liberties beyond negative liberties: while the umbrella meaning is negative (freedom from
government interference), they are in fact often positive liberties (freedom of speech, movement and
person). This allows them to move beyond a purely instrumental role and creates them, in Gearty’s
terminology, as productive forces, political freedoms and necessary constituents of social
citizenship.25 They are civil liberties because ‘they are those of our freedoms which are necessarily
tied up with our engagement with persons outside ourselves’. 26
However, there is one aspect of Gearty’s understanding which needs to be modified here: he
insists that civil liberties are a sign of democracy.27 Although being able to change one’s government
is a political freedom, confining it to the powers of formal democracy denies the likelihood of violent
change and undervalues the variety of authority structures which do not rely upon a centralised
state.28 Hence the understanding of civil liberties here will be based upon Gearty’s political freedoms
21
Bilgin & Morton, ‘Historicising representations of “failed states”’
Clapham, ‘The challenge to the state in a globalized world’
23
Tomkins, A., ‘Introduction: on being sceptical about human rights’, in Campbell, T., Ewing, K., & Tomkins,
A. (eds), Sceptical essays on human rights (Oxford University Press 2001)
24
Gearty, Civil liberties
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Milliken & Krause, ‘State failure, state collapse, and state reconstruction’
22
64
and also upon the political constitutionalism outlined by Richard Bellamy. Therein, ‘citizens
continually renegotiate the dimensions of politics in order mutually to determine the rules and
institutional processes governing their collective life’ and so avoid oppression.29 Civil liberties are
centred around social and community relations, where freedom is defended through ‘participation in
framing the collective arrangements and public goods’.30 This recognises the dispersal of authority,
that in the West would be held by the state, through disparate networks and ultimately, the feasibility
of their exercise within a failed state is enabled.
The negotiation of the Afghan state
Using a broad definition of civil liberties – civic participation in framing collective arrangements –
leaves open the question of whether there is a divide between the governors and the governed, allows
for cultural variations in concern for liberty, and re-affirms the negotiated nature of any kind of
hegemony. To operationalise this, the delineating points in the development of a state – Afghanistan
– need to be identified so that the space and possibility for civil liberties can be understood. The
formation of the Afghan state can be divided into three guiding periods, each transition being marked
by a crisis of the state: firstly, from the mid-eighteenth century to 1929 when a tribal confederacy
developed in the region and coalesced into an internationally-recognised state; secondly, from 1929
until 1978 with the rule of the Musahiban family following a period of resurgent tribal power until
Prime Minister Daoud’s coup; and thirdly, from 1978 until 2001, the period being characterised by
ongoing destabilisation of the state through successive takeovers and foreign interventions, and
ending with the United States’ intervention and the formation of the Bonn Agreement with its
transitional government.31
Conclusion
Civil liberties, rather than being concerned with limiting government interference, should be looked
at in terms of their core sense, that is, as the means through which citizens negotiate the place of the
state within their society. Meanwhile, failed states have for too long been analysed in terms of what
they are not, whereas they should be seen as a form of state with their own set of complex, seemingly
chaotic, dynamics. Even in such a state as Afghanistan, where there is little cultural background for
individual freedom, and where civil war has trapped people in uncertainty, civil liberties are
fundamental. Examination reorients focus towards the experience of living within a failed state,
revitalising society and placing any subsequent recovery within an appropriate context.
3. Evidence
Long-term stability is only possible through the socio-political agency of a failed state’s inhabitants.
This goes beyond the actions of civil society and looks for signs of authorship amongst the whole
population and comprises attempts to define the balance and relationship between the ruled and the
rulers. Such action is feasible both because authority and administrative structures fragment and
devolve rather than disappear entirely, and because the reach of the powerful during state failure is
limited in crucial ways that create space for personal assertions of freedom. 32 Yet those spaces, and
the patterns and possibility of socio-political actions within a failed state, are neglected research
areas. To begin rectifying this, the civil liberties present in Afghanistan immediately after (from
2001 until 2008) and before (from 1978 to 1992) the period of state failure will be examined. This
will help to establish the context for the culture, nature and exercise of civil liberties between 1992
and 2001.
2001 to 2008
29
Bellamy, R., ‘Constitutive citizenship versus constitutional rights: republican reflections on the EU Charter
and the Human Rights Act’, in Campbell, Ewing, & Tomkins (eds.), Sceptical essays on human rights
30
Ibid.
31
Rasanayagam, A., Afghanistan: a modern history (IB Tauris 2003); Cramer, C. & Goodhand, J., ‘Try again,
fail again, fail better? War, the state, and the “post-conflict” challenge in Afghanistan’, Development and
Change, 33(5), 2002
32
World Bank and Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, Assessing subnational administration in
Afghanistan: early observations and recommendations for action (working draft), 13 March 2003
65
There is evidence of civil liberties having improved since the fall of the Taliban, with the 2001 Bonn
Agreement building upon a remarkably resilient administrative base.33 There have been regular
occasions since 2001 of people exercising their civil liberties and making a point of the difference
between their experiences now as opposed to during the time of the Taliban. In particular, the
freedoms that women can enjoy, the ability to travel, and the increased educational opportunities are
notable. For example:
Education is a woman’s right and today we have our rights. Women can go outside,
work and live freer than before. Now a woman knows that she is human and can live
like a human being. Before women were thought to be like a home appliance but now
we have our rights. (Female homemaker, 30 to 45 years, interviewed in Kabul)34
Nevertheless, the freedoms are not straightforward, with international influences creating
cultural confusions which need to be reconciled by people more used to war than peace.35 More
significantly, there are variations across the country and Hamid Karzai’s government can provide
few assurances that it is capable of protecting civil liberties, with regional tribal leaders and warlords
bristling at power being centralised away from them.36 In particular, the Taliban still have a
stronghold in the south and while schools have re-opened, deep insecurity remains:
The situation is bad all over the provinces; especially in Kandahar province as those
with guns have authority. The situation is as bad as it was before. Even though schools
for women have started and are continuing to teach, warnings have been given to the
teachers and they are threatened. If the government does not start the disarmament
process Afghanistan will suffer. (Pashtun woman, 45 to 60 years, interviewed in
Kandahar)37
The slow improvement in civil liberties is not geographically or socially uniform, and
although there is an internationally-recognised government with presumed territorial sovereignty,
this does not stop the fighting, alleviate the complexities of urban and rural poverty, or overcome the
impact of long-term breakdown of communal infrastructure.38 A fragmented society cannot engender
sound government, lacking the internal coherence to share power and resolve distributional issues.
Predictably then, in the years immediately after the fall of the Taliban, there are multiple reports of
freedoms being obscured.
1979 to 1992
The Soviet occupation, and its Cold War context, limited the possibility of monitoring what was
known to be a poor human rights situation. Nevertheless, Helsinki Watch produced a report in
December 1984 which directly tackled the existence of civil liberties under the PDPA government
and found them to be generally absent:
[Ghulam Shah Sarshar-e Shomali] was reportedly arrested in February 1982, together
with about 40 writers and artists working for Afghan Radio-Television or the Ministry
of Culture ... President Babrak Karmal dismissed the Minister of Information and
placed radio and television, the press and the cinema under the direct control of Prime
33
Ibid.
Ibid.
35
Qiam, S., Sanjar: my life and comments on Afghan current affairs, Kabul, 2004. Available from
http://sanjar.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2004-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max=2005-0101T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=18; ‘Chaos lurks in an abandoned land’, The Observer, 8 September
2002
36
Center for Systemic Peace, Polity IV Country Report 2006: Afghanistan, 2006.
37
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, A society in transition,
38
Freedom House, Comparative scores for all countries from 1973 to 2008, 2008.
34
66
Minister Sultan Ali Keshtmand ... Works that do not agree with the policies of the
Soviet-Afghan regime are not published or sold.39
The point that stands out in the Helsinki Watch report is the administrative capacity required to
sustain these assaults:
The KHAD’s Soviet-trained cadres continually arrest those suspected of opposition.
Grounds for arrest may be statements obtained from another prisoner under torture, the
report of a paid spy, or the desire to find another member of the victim’s family. Once
arrested, the victim is subjected to a system of interrogation where carefully calibrated
tortures ranging from the most sophisticated to the most brutal are administered with
almost scientific precision. Those who survive (and many do not) are transferred to
prisons where they are crowded into filthy rooms with dozens, sometimes even
hundreds, of others, some of whom have gone mad from torture and others of whom are
paid informers. After a time, the prisoner may be given a secret ‘trial’ by the
revolutionary court, in which those who try to defend themselves are silenced. Some
receive long prison sentences, while others receive the death sentence, which is then
often carried out in secret.40
There were no guarantees of safety as any relationship could implicate someone and there
was little chance of counsel or relief. Such unrelenting violence against society necessitates a
powerful state apparatus. This was confirmed when the Soviets withdrew. Human Rights Watch
noted that by mid-1990 the government was reforming the constitution to ensure civil liberties and
‘was eager to demonstrate to Asia Watch its commitment to a more open society’.41 Such assertions
had limited effect but were an important acknowledgement: when Soviet support disappeared,
without a monopoly of force and the ability to protect itself or the state, the government had to attain
social backing. Having relied upon violence and Soviet strength, the PDPA government needed to
revert to popular opinion to shore itself up.42
Civil liberties within Afghanistan
Any analysis of Afghanistan should acknowledge the limited separation of the church and the state,
the ongoing difficulties of territorial consolidation, and the variegated pressures of Islamic
nationalism and tribal allegiances. How have these presented themselves in the exercise of civil
liberties immediately before and after the Afghan state failed? The government before state failure
was imposed externally, the government after failure was mediated externally. The period of failure
was the only occasion since 1979 that Afghans had some level of self-determining input in the
development of their state, and even so, that input was depressed and manipulated by external
finance with the aim of averting regional security threats.43 Moreover, the infrastructure which
produced the democratic 1964 constitution was by 1992 severely weakened such that it could be
occupied by opportunists and seized by the physically powerful. Government has generally been
established violently and maintained through the exclusion of the populace. There has been little
historical choice over government, and today the state-society relationship is fraught and mistrustful,
with its longevity and integrity in doubt. The importance of religion is felt through its cultural mores,
and appears as an anchor to cope with the slow change of state development and the ongoing
confusion of freedoms negotiated amidst multivariate conditions.
1992 to 2001
39
Helsinki Watch and Asia Watch Report, ‘Tears, blood, and cries’: human rights in Afghanistan since the
invasion, 1979-1984, 1984
40
Ibid.; The KHAD (Khadamat-e Etela’at-e Dawlati; State Information Agency) were the Afghan secret
police.
41
Human Rights Watch, The forgotten war: human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war since the
Soviet withdrawal, 1 February 1991.
42
Glatzer, B., ‘Afghanistan – a state in upheaval’, Rural Economic Development, 13(2) 2006
43
Rasanayagam, Afghanistan
67
The majority of reports covering Afghanistan’s period of failure do not directly report the exercise of
civil liberties. It is implied that they have become irrelevant and little allowance is made for the fact
that the power vacuum will be temporary and authority structures, no matter how haphazard,
unofficial, or abusive, will develop a relationship with society. Often, the evidence is fragmentary
and it is easier to assume chaos than discern underlying patterns. Yet while civil liberties are often
absent, there still are occasions when they are clearly present, or where they have been exercised
despite deeply inauspicious circumstances, accentuating the impact of such occurrences.
Freedom of expression
Freedom of expression, hard as it is to control, appears to have been the most sensitive issue for all
factions during the period of failure. With a broken infrastructure, the information revolution was no
threat to the authorities, but television broadcasts, newspapers and radio stations were all held in
suspicion:
People associated with the former government have been targeted even when living in
refugee camps in Pakistan ... Particularly at risk of assassination inside and outside
Afghanistan are those who have dared to express their opposition to Mujahideen groups
or even to the fighting in general.44
Women, journalists, the outspoken and the impressionable were all vulnerable to fighting and
controlling factions suppressing their freedom of expression, be it in direct speech or undirected
press reports and tape recordings.
However, expression cannot be controlled completely without an extensive administrative
structure and so opportunities presented themselves whether in a private conversation, a moment of
extreme stress, or a bold declaration. It is during these times that the exercise of civil liberties cannot
accurately be described as being present or absent, but rather as being ‘mixed’. At such time, during
their enactment the negotiation of the balance of power is taking place, and the area for freedom has
not been established. Thus the consequences of exercising that freedom are likely to be severe, not
least because the majority of physical power lies with the authority. Nevertheless, there can be no
doubt that at that moment a space was created where that authority was unable, or unwilling, to
interfere and direct the collective arrangements of the situation. For example:
The Taliban continue to prohibit music, movies, and television on religious grounds. In
August 1998 television sets, videocassette recorders, videocassettes, audiocassettes, and
satellite dishes were outlawed in order to enforce the prohibition. However, televisions
reportedly are widely sold, and their use generally is ignored unless reported by a
neighbour.45
Freedom of movement
Whereas other freedoms were deliberately restricted in order to limit dissent, there was less need to
do so with that of movement; violence and banditry in the course of civil warfare did that well
enough:
[Kabul’s] water supply had been cut during the war and we had to get the water from
the few taps in the streets which were working. But we were frightened to go out. For
example, I saw a 12-year-old child who had gone to get some water. He had taken a
bucket with him, and was filling that bucket. The boy was hit by a bullet there. A
sniper decided to kill him. Only one shot was fired. The mother ran there to collect his
dead body; a second shot was fired and she was killed instantly. Their corpses were left
there as no one dared collect them. Some days later, we saw stray dogs at them. 46
44
Amnesty International, Afghanistan: international responsibility for human rights disaster, November 1995
US Department of State, Afghanistan, country reports on human rights practices – 1999.
46
Amnesty International, Women in Afghanistan: a human rights catastrophe, May 1995.
45
68
Few figures about the Afghan population can be taken as accurate, with the first censuses since 1979
being taken from 2002 onwards.47 However, as early as 1994, the UN Special Rapporteur was
reminded that ‘[t]he dispersal of Afghanistan’s population in this manner brings to mind the term
“migratory genocide”’.48 By 1999 it was estimated that between half and three-quarters of a million
were internally displaced.49 In all, 85 percent lived amidst fighting, 83 percent were displaced, over
half lost a family member and a quarter describe themselves as combatants.50 Thus freedom of
movement was greatly limited, but in many ways this was not contingent on state failure itself.
Indeed, it was administratively possible – though difficult – to attain travel permits or bribe officials
and security could be established by ruling groups.51 Moreover, the Taliban disarmed much of the
population and kept it under surveillance, so that women could begin to leave their houses with less
fear of rape, although beatings were still likely.52
Nevertheless, women were certainly restricted in order to prevent their social input, with
subsequent implications for men. For example, boys who could go to school lost their female
teachers, or more pertinently as AI points out, ‘[t]he repression of women symbolises not only their
vulnerability, but also the powerlessness of their male relatives to protect them’.53 There are multiple
accounts of women being abducted, or families being forced to flee because of the threat of
kidnapping, rape and looting.
During state failure, freedom of movement was impeded or necessary, rather than elective, if
people were to survive, although women were watched and controlled intently, while men were
always susceptible to being brought into the fighting.
Freedom of person
Freedom of the person was the most extensively regulated of those examined here, because of the
efforts of social control exerted, and the absolute impunity enjoyed, by the mujahideen and
Taliban.54 The infringements were in many ways arbitrary, as necessitated by the complexities of a
war where the whole of society was caught up in the fighting. As the US Department of State’s 1994
report put it, ‘motives were difficult to identify, as political motives are often entwined with family
and tribal feuds, battles over the drug trade, religious zealotry, and personal vendettas’.55
Nevertheless, certain themes in the limitations on freedom of the person can be discerned, namely
education, women and religion.
The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice patrolled the streets,
interrogating pedestrians, enforcing the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam and imposing multitudinous
rules on behaviour and conduct.56 Women were ordered to be accompanied by a male relative, not to
look at strangers, to wear Islamic dress and to avoid ‘aimless wandering’. 57 Many such rules
combined to make further freedoms impractical: the effects of the illiteracy consequent to the ban on
female education and employment were exacerbated by the prohibition of human images such that
public education and health information posters disappeared.58 Equally, the denial of education
meant that at times, people were more susceptible to believing and following the ordinances, with
47
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs Afghan perspectives on democracy
United Nations, Question of the violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms in any part of the
world, with particular reference to colonial and other dependent countries and territories [E/CN.4/1994/53],
14 February 1994
49
US Department of State, Afghanistan, country reports on human rights practices – 2000.
50
Greenberg Research, Country report – Afghanistan: ICRC worldwide consultation on the rules of war,
November 1999
51
Amnesty International, Afghanistan: political crisis and the refugees, 1 September 1993
52
Hirschkind, C., & Mahmood, S., ‘Feminism, the Taliban, and politics of counter-insurgency’,
Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2) Spring 2002
53
Amnesty International, Women in Afghanistan: pawns in men’s power struggles, November 1999
54
Amnesty International, Afghanistan: international responsibility for human rights disaster
55
US Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Afghanistan human rights
practices, 1994, February 1995.
56
US Department of State, Afghanistan, country reports on human rights practices – 1999.
57
US Department of State, Afghanistan human rights practices, 1994,
58
US Department of State, Afghanistan, country reports on human rights practices – 1999.
48
69
Taliban distortions having few intellectual counterpoints.59 Thus variegated groups experienced the
same strictures differently, and in particular, those in villages who were used to the traditional values
imposed by the Taliban suffered less social distress than their urban counterparts.60 However, there is
a clear sense of the limits of mujahideen and Taliban power, which at times showed through in
arbitrary abuses and at others through unsystematic enforcement, because the spectrum of possible
behaviours to be controlled was vast. There were variations which depended largely on location and
luck, or otherwise, upon ‘enforcement fatigue’.61 For example:
On August 6, 2000, the Taliban issued an order closing down the 25 widows’ bakeries
operated by the WFP, which provided food to the neediest citizens, including many
war widows and other female-headed households. The Taliban reversed its decision
the next day, apparently accepting the WFP’s explanation that female staff of the
bakeries were not direct hire WFP employees and therefore not subject to the July [sic]
6 order.62
The breadth of intrusions available to those with authority is widest when considering freedom of
person, and this is mirrored in the reactions of Afghan society. Such was the extent to which people’s
lives could be affected that they found both increased opportunities to defy the edicts imposed upon
them and went to greater and more extreme lengths to do so.
There are many reports of secret schools being found and destroyed, of suicides to avoid
rape, of individuals and groups shouting down their assailants.63 In short, the pressure exerted by the
mujahideen and Taliban was of such intensity that it met with an equal level of drastic resistance and
defiance. Where civil liberties were exercised, it was often in the worst of possible circumstances
and done in order to assert the right to live life as they wanted, not just life in itself.
Freedom of association
Freedom of association in many ways relies upon the first three freedoms here examined and so it is
not surprising given the curbs on those that there is limited evidence to show its possibility. NonIslamic political parties were banned, but this may have had little impact given the strongly Muslim
beliefs which run through the country. More serious was the danger of joining a party other than the
one currently in power, or being associated with the old government. After a regional takeover,
populations could be razed in order to assert the new rulers and political assassinations, and death
threats were common. Nevertheless, as with the other civil liberties seen here, repression was openly
resisted, with some degree of success despite the penalties risked. Organisations – such as the
Afghan Women’s Council – were even formed during the period of failure, this organisation
providing healthcare both on the Afghan-Pakistan border as well as in Kabul despite opposition from
mujahideen groups. Thus while political parties were heavily controlled, civil society organisations
and their demonstrations were harder to predict or restrict.
Conclusion
The source material here has been gathered mainly through reports by governmental,
intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, with limited direct input from Afghans
themselves. Nevertheless, in examining the exercise of civil liberties within Afghanistan during the
period of state failure, while bearing in mind the particular socio-political aspects that have affected
59
The Online Journal of Education, Media, and Health: Terrorism and un-clashing civilizations 2001-ad
infinitum, ‘Strangled Voices: Afghan Revolutionaries as a Model for Islamic Women’s Liberation by Farsha’,
New York University, May 2003.
60
Human Security Policy Division at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and the Canadian
Consortium on Human Security, Human security for an urban century: local challenges, global perspectives,
2007
61
US Department of State, Afghanistan, country reports on human rights practices – 2000.
62
The WFP is the World Food Program. US Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and
Labor, Afghanistan, country reports on human rights practices – 2001, 2 March 2002.
63
RAWA, ‘Reports from the land of savageries, insults and obscenities’; Amnesty International, Women in
Afghanistan: pawns in men’s power struggles
70
the development of the state infrastructure, occasions of freedom of expression, movement, person
and association can be found. Analysis of these will give light to the times and pressures when civil
liberties during state failure might be feasible.
4. Analysis
By redefining the basis for failed states, where they are not seen as departures from the Weberian
model but rather as different forms of states, and in conceptualising civil liberties not as the absence
of government interference but rather as political freedoms which enable collective arrangements to
be made, a route into the analysis of an overlooked set of socio-political dynamics has been cleared.
Testing these directing concepts against the case study of Afghanistan enables an understanding of
the conditions of agency and structure which developed during its period of collapse and failure.
State failure is inherently insecure. This may be axiomatic, but it is crucial as it has the
potential to render every case sui generis. Additionally, not only is reliable and representative
information difficult to gather for any failed state, but the vulnerability of the infrastructure to
external assaults means that unpredictability and individuality are givens. Indeed, Afghanistan did
not emerge from failure in due course: the US deposing of the Taliban in 2001 for their support of
Al-Qaeda is central to explaining the current Karzai government and the fundamental shift in the
influences to which the country was open. Hence consistent patterns in the dynamics of state failure
should not be expected, but instead, it is sensible to arrive at appropriate modes of in situ
interrogation. In short, this study allows us to arrive not at answers, but at meaningful questions.
Despite the relative lack of reporting in Western media, conditions under the mujahideen
were arguably worse, being more brutal and arbitrary, than under the Taliban. This Western blindspot may have been driven partly by fewer security interests being threatened, but the cause may
equally have been the difficulty in establishing order within the chaos and making it comprehensible
to an outside audience. By looking at the social experience of life under the mujahideen groups, it
becomes clear that they were driven by immediate military needs, suppressing all communications,
gearing resources towards tactical support, and citing all citizens as potential dissidents warranting
extreme punishment. Thus, while there were some religiously-inspired ordinances, their effect
appears more often to have been practical, such as the looting of schools in 1992 where books were
sold and furniture burnt for heating.64
The Taliban meanwhile, were a more coherent group and rule-based in providence, even if
that did not filter consistently through their ranks. They had greater administrative capacity, directing
resources into enforcement of social control, primarily through the Ministry for the Promotion of
Virtue and Suppression of Vice. The relative stability they brought and the greater clarity of
intention, despite the brutality of its meting out, engendered a different social reaction and altered the
balance of resistance and compliance.
Structural conditions in a failed state
To move forward in the analysis and correct these paradoxes, a better method of looking at the
structural conditions of failure, and how this affects the dynamics of state-society relations, is
necessary. To this end, Arjun Appadurai’s response to the overwhelming complexity of globalisation
is pertinent. He described global cultural dimensions in terms of five scapes: ethno-, media-, techno-,
finance- and ideo-scapes. The use of this suffix, drawn from ‘landscape’, showed the fluidity and
irregularity of the dimensions, indicating:
... that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of
vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the
historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors ... who both
experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these
landscapes offer.65
64
Amnesty International, Afghanistan: political crisis and the refugees, 1 September 1993
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization (University of Minnesota Press
1996)
65
71
The intricacies offered by Appadurai and his method of comprehension open a vital entry point into
the internal dynamics of a failed state. The collapse of the state-society relationship and the
infrastructure which sustained it are replaced by local and regional authorities and communities with
unpredictable, unstable and tacitly defined conventions. Within those relationships, ‘liberty-scapes’
might be found.
Looking first at a functional state, its liberty-scape is represented in Figure 1. This is a
snapshot of the relationship between a society and its state, rather than a timeline. At any given
moment, the state will have a certain amount of power over society in a particular sphere of activity,
and equally, society will have a given power over self-determination. That power – the freedom to
act and to create a relationship with the other party – is the liberty-scape.
To take the UK as an example, and use points from the Freedom House civil liberties
checklist, Point A in Figure 1 could represent the government’s non-interference in the ‘production
and distribution of religious books and other materials and the content of sermons’.66 Meanwhile,
Point B can represent the implications of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA)
2005 for freedom of association and protest. Therein, unapproved demonstrations within half-a-mile
of Westminster are banned.67 The relative homogeneity of both state and society are assumed in this
diagram and additionally, the distance between state and society is negotiated: for example, AngloSaxon liberalism sets the two defensively against one another, whereas Nordic political economy
promotes social democracy, implying a closer relationship than experienced in the UK.68 Finally, the
liberty-scape will alter over time. Thus in Figure 2, Liberty-scape 1 represents the UK before the
2005 SOCPA Act and Liberty-scape 2 represents the UK afterwards.
Extreme violations of freedoms are of course possible within a functioning state. This is
shown in Figure 3. Here, where the state denies a society its fundamental freedom, the right to life,
the liberty-scape undercuts society and its power is removed. Conversely, where society removes the
ability of the state to act and its right to rule, that is, where a coup d’état takes place, the liberty-scape
moves beyond the state’s reach.
66
Freedom House, Freedom in the world 2006: the annual survey of political rights and civil liberties
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2006)
67
‘Arrests over Parliament demo ban’, BBC News, 1 August 2005.
68
Mann, M., ‘Globalization as violence’, New Left Review New Series, December 2001
72
These diagrams are clearly greatly simplified images, capable of depicting only slices of
complexities and ambiguities, but they are nevertheless useful tools for theorising the structural
relationships extant. Figure 4 makes this clear. The state has broken down into separate authority
groups (A1 to A4) while the national ties of society have similarly broken down to form
communities as the primary groupings (C1 to C4). Authorities and communities may overlap or be
distinct, the distance between them will vary and the longevity of the relationship will fluctuate.
Figure 4 represents the mujahideen years of Afghanistan and illustrates many aspects of the
evidence gathered. Given the inconsistent presence of mujahideen authorities and the broken
infrastructure, it could be assumed that whenever physical security was possible, there would be few
impediments to the exercise of civil liberties. Yet there are hardly any examples available of
resistance during that period – there were certainly more occasions during the time of the Taliban.
The disparity is not explained satisfactorily by the danger involved in surveying the mujahideenruled population. Rather, Figure 4 highlights the difficulty of communities in knowing what their
relationship with any particular authority was. For example, Kabul was the long-time capital of
Afghanistan, but due to its substantial capacity for opium production, Helmand became the Taliban’s
financial engine.69 The demands of civil war rapidly changed the environment and created shifting
relationships between the populace and their rulers, such that social insecurity was as great as
physical insecurity. Looking at the C2 community – the harassed Hazara tribe perhaps – it is difficult
to say under which authority they truly resided and where the opportunities might have been for
them to negotiate their liberties without coming up against overpowering physical repression.
Indeed, it was the Hazara who were massacred by the vengeful Taliban in 1997.70
69
Nojumi, N., The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan: mass mobilization, civil war, and the future of the region
(Palgrave 2002)
70
Rasanayagam, Afghanistan
73
From this point then, it is easier to see that there will be changed opportunities for exercising
civil liberties, as well as changed lengths to which people will go to attain their freedoms. Amnesty
International reported several suicides to avoid kidnapping, forced marriage and rape.71 In the
unstable conditions of state failure, where an opportunity can be found, it will be exploited. Those
with authority – principally gained from physical power – deny basic freedoms in order to maintain
their position, altering their relationship with society, changing society’s perceptions of civil
liberties, and affecting the ways in which civil liberties will be exercised. Therefore where there is an
extreme instance of denial, a similarly extreme response may be found. Suicide in such situations
presents the right to one’s own life and self-determination as the final possible point at which civil
liberties can be exercised and power resisted.
Without a fixed governing structure, power becomes arbitrary – governed by ideology rather
than law – and is enacted with impunity.72 This has three principal effects. Firstly, it changes the
space available for the exercise of civil liberties. For example, the trend towards female
emancipation at work reversed sharply with the rise of the mujahideen in 1992, and nearly all
employment opportunities were cut off.73 The availability of civil liberties can be reversed according
to the political situation, and where previously there was little pressure for change, suddenly it may
be significant. Secondly, the 1994 Human Rights Watch report is instructive: ‘[i]n Faryab Province
the local warlord’s forces reportedly directed unmarried women over age 12 to get married or face
the prospect of rape by the warlord’s gunmen’.74 This marriage ultimatum highlights the denial of,
and permission for, the exercise of civil liberties as a weapon, using physical power to determine the
socio-political negotiation of governance and enforce a particular balance of power. Thirdly, the
arbitrary exercise of power atomises society, creating individual liberty-scapes where decisions are
made on the basis of the immediate situation with little possibility of predictable outcomes. Hence
the majority of evidence concerning freedom of association under the mujahideen finds individuals
as political prisoners, while resistance comes from group actions, whereas the increased
predictability of the Taliban gave rise to daily acts of individual defiance.
Furthermore, despite relatively little variation in the mujahideen and Taliban strictures
concerning religion, education and women’s rights, there is a clear difference in social reactions to
them. This can begin to be explained by Figure 5, representing the years of Taliban ascendancy.
Here, the primary authority (A1) is clearer and more stable, which allows for greater nuance.
Different liberty-scapes occur under the same authority (for example, where C3 exists under
competing authorities), the degree of power changes for different segments of the community (as
shown by the thickness of the authority line), and there are divergences between the theory and
reality of freedom (giving the pressure for change).
71
Women in Afghanistan: pawns in men’s power struggles, November 1999
Maley, W., ‘Introduction: interpreting the Taliban’ in Maley, W. (ed.), Fundamentalism reborn: Afghanistan
and the Taliban (Hurst and Company 2001)
73
US Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Afghanistan human rights
practices, 1994, February 1995.
74
Ibid.
72
74
There appears to have been a turning point in 1998 where the pressure for change from
Afghan communities increased. It was from that year onwards that most occasions of the ‘mixed’
exercise of civil liberties – where freedoms are being negotiated with potentially negative
consequences rather than discernibly present or absent – can be found. Interestingly, it is also from
1998 that the range and zealotry of Taliban orders were most extensive and intense. Indeed, they had
greater control by then, and were more unified than the mujahideen, and so could be expected to
have better suppressed freedoms and this was arguably their intention.
Two distinctly social reasons can be found to explain, at least partially, this apparent
contradiction. Firstly, there is the contrast between the increased strictures and the Taliban’s previous
promises. In their early years, the Taliban did have a populist bent, announcing that their intention
was establishing peace, not securing power. As Neamatollah Nojumi finds, this ‘not only deactivated
many political groups in Afghanistan, it also successfully created a confusing environment among
the remaining political groups’.75 Hence their power was shored up on trust in their originating
promises, and with the imposition of far-reaching edicts the schism between expectation and reality
became a driver for increased social resistance. Secondly, there is the pressure illustrated in Figure 5
of a clearer authority inviting a greater reaction following greater repression, because of the more
predictable consequences and identifiable target. This would have worn down the Taliban’s abilities
to implement orders, giving the possibility of successful resistance and small acts of negotiation,
such as television ownership, and led to their relenting at times, as with the employment of widows.
The Taliban suffered from ‘enforcement fatigue’, partly because of their factional structure and the
autonomy this brought, but also because they strained under the extent of their reach.76 Whereas
under Soviet rule, there was a punishment for every real, attempted or presumed dissension, and
whereas mujahideen penalties were entirely capricious and inflicted by variegated forces, under the
Taliban a better judgment could be made about the opportunities available, albeit with consequences
as severe as ever.
It needs to be remembered that society did not feel the pressures uniformly: for example,
urban, educated women had lost the most freedoms, while those in the countryside had often lived
under similar rules to those the Taliban imposed and consequently felt less injury. The opportunities
perceived differed according to experience, and as highlighted by Point A in Figure 5, irrespective of
the thickness of the authority’s power, there may be a higher degree of perceived freedom in certain
social sectors. It is understandable that those in urban communities, where the Taliban strongholds
were, gave rise to the majority of occasions of resistance. What comes to matter is the punishment
and the social dangers to which someone exposes themselves should they not obey whichever
stricture is currently in place. While civil liberties are important in their own right, they are primarily
instrumental and signifiers can be stripped of their meaning. An imaginative and sensitive reading of
events therefore needs to be undertaken when analysing the uncertain and unsteady dynamics of the
failed state.77
Conclusion
Looking at the communal negotiations within fractured authority structures does not imply a
generally applicable level of feasibility for civil liberties within a failed state. However, it is possible
to assert that civil liberties are likely to be feasible, and that the extent will depend on the particular
structural conditions present and the resultant themes and pressures created. Liberty-scapes provide a
useful method of interrogating the trends found and in Afghanistan these can be characterised as: (1)
difficulty in ascertaining where authority lay and in turn assessing what opportunities for negotiation
existed, followed by increased resistance when the sense of authority became clearer; (2) a changing
space for civil liberties and altered methods and degrees of exercise; (3) the manipulation of civil
liberties to affect the balance of power with the subsequent atomisation of society; (4) the importance
of perception on the relative loss of civil liberties felt; and (5) the need to characterise civil liberties
in context and avoid presumptuous applications. From this, tentative questions can be offered to
enable indicative trends to be established in other failed states, namely: what authorities and
75
Nojumi, The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan
US Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Afghanistan, country reports on
human rights practices – 2000, 23 February 2001; Sidney Tarrow quoted in Maley, ‘Introduction’
77
Cohen, S., ‘The significance of “In the name of civil liberties”’, Law and Philosophy, 7(3), 1988-9
76
75
communities are discernible and to what degree are they overlapping and competing, to what extent
can authority be enforced, and how severe are the environmental, political and social pressures?
5. Conclusion
The proximate issue under investigation here was the conceptual difficulty of juxtaposing the
exercise of civil liberties and the existence of a failed state. The generally accepted definitions –
firstly, the public good of limited governmental interference allowing personal freedom of action,
and secondly, a state riddled with violence and non-provision of public goods – were unable to
determine the extent to which civil liberties would be feasible within a failed state. The implication
of using these definitions could equally either be that freedom was total or that freedom was absent
because in the former case there would be no state to deny the public good at hand and in the latter
there is no functional state to provide public goods.
Recognition of this implies the more practical question which describes what is
fundamentally at stake here: how is the state-society relationship negotiated within a failed state?
Recognition also demands that investigative and analytical focus is shifted away from the causes and
consequences of state failure, towards the experience of failure itself and how this can illuminate the
periods before and after the state’s disintegration. In order to begin correcting the conceptual
disjuncture identified, and explore the socio-political relationships developed during state failure, the
working question of ‘to what extent are civil liberties feasible within a failed state’ was applied to
Afghanistan between 1992 and 2001.
The first step was to move away from the Western-centric understanding of civil liberties
and failed states. Both have a functionalist sense of the state as their centring concept, but this relies
too heavily on an infrastructure and ideology that cannot be assumed as readily appropriate, possible
or existing on a global basis. Therefore, while the term ‘failed state’ was retained in order to avoid
the possibility of adding another misrepresentative phrase to the mix, it was defined as an alternative
form of state where authority structures were fractured and were continually shifting and renegotiated, where the divide between society and the state was lessened and even collapsed, and
where territorial fragmentation was likely. The core meaning of civil liberties was considered to be
the political freedoms entailed in participating in the framing of communal arrangements, entailing a
dynamic of negotiation between state and society.
These amended conceptual understandings were then applied within Afghanistan, with the
effect that a broader understanding of state-society relationships could be held and a greater array of
evidence taken into account. The focus was on freedoms of expression, movement, person and
association, these freedoms not requiring an institutional framework to support their exercise.
Whereas Western dialogue concerning civil liberties is often undertaken in principled defence of
freedoms, the grounding for the concept here is inherently practical and concentrates on the direct
impact of their exercise on the individual, society and the state.
There were many significant obstacles to research, with reports from the period in question
being affected by issues of physical security and the agendas of field researchers who would be using
a Western framework to document human rights absences rather than civil liberties presences. Thus
it was found, as expected, that on many occasions the freedoms under investigation were absent
either because of direct suppression by local authorities or because of environmental pressures which
prohibited the security, or the freedom of choice or action, that would enable their enactment.
However, it was also found that there were notable differences in the character of the exercise of
civil liberties. They were often best described as ‘mixed’, wherein the situation was deeply
inauspicious but where the pressure to act was such that any negative consequences were
momentarily denied.
The two fairly distinct sub-periods of Afghanistan’s failure relate to the ascendancy of the
mujahideen and then the Taliban. In the mujahideen period, state and society fractured into
multitudinous authorities and communities, with overlapping and rapidly shifting jurisdictions,
which created an environment of impunity and social insecurity. Under the Taliban, authority
coalesced to a greater extent and formed a de facto government. Thus, when edicts were multiple,
and repression predictable, a more knowable space was cleared giving rise to measured resistance,
wherein any perceived loss and injustice exaggerated the strength of that resistance.
76
In answer to the question of the extent to which civil liberties are feasible within Afghanistan
between 1992 and 2001: the clearer the authority and their power, or the more significant the
perceived social pressure, the greater the feasibility of people asserting their involvement in the
negotiation of communal arrangements. In answer to the question of the extent to which civil
liberties are feasible within a failed state: further questions must in each instance be raised
concerning the competition between authorities and communities, the pressures they face and the
degree of physical power that can be employed. From there, tentative conclusions can be made
wherein civil liberties are possible and probable both because their presence implies capability and
their absence creates pressure, the combination of which determines the dynamics of socio-political
state negotiation.
77
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