43 research outputs found
'Tesco for terrorists' reconsidered : arms and conflict dynamics in Libya and in the Sahara-Sahel region
No full textHow does arms availability affect armed conflict? What implications does increased arms availability have for the organisation of armed groups involved in war against the state? This article explores these questions by looking into the civil war in Libya and the subsequent proliferation of weapons in the broader Sahel/North Africa region. Its argument is based on secondary sources : online databases, international organisations reports and news media. First, we examine the question of firearms in Libya in order to understand how changing conditions of weapons availability affected the formation of armed groups during different phases of war hostilities (February-October 2011). We highlight that, as weapons became more readily available to fighters in the field during this period, a process of fragmentation occurred, hindering efforts to build mechanisms that would allow control of the direction of the revolutionary armed movement. Next, as security continued to be a primary challenge in the new Libya, we consider the way in which unaccountable firearms and light weapons have affected the post-war landscape in the period from October 2011 to the end of 2013. Finally, we put the regional and international dimensions under scrutiny, and consider how the proliferation of weapons to nearby insurgencies and armed groups has raised major concern among Libya's neighbours. Short of establishing any causal relationship Italic stricto sensu , we underscore the ways in which weapons from Libya have rekindled or altered local conflicts, creating permissive conditions for new tactical options, and accelerating splintering processes within armed movements in the Sahara-Sahel region
Post-colonial practices continue to structure European security assistance
No full textEUROPP – European Politics and PolicyEuropean states provide security assistance to a variety of partners across the world. Drawing on a new study, Simone Tholens and Chiara Ruffa argue that much of this assistance continues to be structured by post-colonial practices rather than pragmatism
The Private Security Industry in the Post-War Balkans: a blank in Security Sector Reform Strategies
No full textSecurity Assistance in a Post-interventionist Era: The Impact on Limited Statehood in Lebanon and Tunisia
No full textPost-interventionist security assistance is premised on non-normative security understandings and flexible arrangements between external and local actors. In hybrid political regimes or areas of limited statehood, these forms of assistance, while strengthening specific aspects of a country’s security context, reinforce some domestic actors vis-à-vis others thanks to processes of selective borrowing by local political elites. This paper demonstrates how such processes contribute to the proliferation of hybrid elements in the country’s security sector. In two contrasting case studies, we illustrate how security assistance packages in Lebanon and Tunisia have diluted emerging democratic reforms, producing more coercive manifestation of state power
Another Nakba: Weapons Availability and the Transformation of the Palestinian National Struggle, 1987-2007
No full textViolent clashes of June 2007 saw Hamas ousting Fatah from the Gaza Strip, thereby making patent the existence of a deep politico-military split within the Palestinian national movement. This article sheds light on the present face of the conflict in the Palestinian territories by adopting a historical-analytical perspective that emphasizes the role played by the availability of small arms and light weapons, as one of the many structural factors that underlie the transformation of the Palestinian struggle. Aware of the essentially contestable and reductionist nature of this endeavor, the authors examine the way in which the weapons acquisition process has changed in the time period from the beginning of the first Intifada in 1987 to the Gaza take-over by Hamas, 20 years later. In doing this, they extend the applicability of existing theories about the correspondence between access to weapons and the changing nature of insurgency, so to better understand a complex case where a national struggle has been spiralling into internecine violence and splintering, in what we may call another Palestinian Nakba
Resisting Europe : practices of contestation in the Mediterranean Middle East
No full textResisting Europe conceptualizes the foreign policies of Europe—defined as the European Union and its member states—toward the states in its immediate southern "neighborhood" as semi-imperial attempts to turn these states into Europe's southern buffer zone, or borderlands. In these hybrid spaces, different types of rules and practices coexist and overlap, and negotiations over meaning and implementation take place. This book examines the diverse modalities by which states in the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa (MENA) reject, resist, challenge, modify, or entirely change European policies and preferences and provides rich empirical evidence of these contestation practices in the fields of migration and border control, banking and finance, democracy promotion, and telecommunications. It addresses the complex question of when and how MENA states capitalize on their leverage and interdependence in their relationships with Europe and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of Europe–Middle East relations, while engaging with broader debates on power and interdependence, order, and contestation in international relations. While a contribution on the practices of resistance and contestation of MENA states vis-à-vis European policies and preferences in this geopolitically significant region was overdue, this volume leads the way for subsequent studies that seek to overcome the constraints of exceptionalism so characteristic of research of the Middle East, Europe/the European Union, and certainly of their relationship.Funded by the European Research Council (ERC) within the 7th Framework Programme, the BORDERLANDS project is hosted at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, and directed by Professor Raffaella A. Del Sarto.Introduction; Resisting Europe: Practices of Contestation in the Mediterranean Middle East, Raffaella A. Del Sarto and Simone Tholens; Part I: Conceptualizing a Contested Relationship; Petits arrangements avec l’Empire: Reflections on Imperial Power at its Fringes, Magali Gravier; Creating Order in the MENA Neighborhood: The Enlargement of the European International Society and Its Contestation, Yannis Stivachtis; Part II: Contestation in Practice; Domesticating Egypt, Domesticated by Egypt? Cooperation and Contestation in EU-Promoted Banking Supervision Reform, Roberto Roccu; Leapfrogging the EU: Telecommunications Regulation in Morocco, Véronique Wavre and Tina Freyburg; The European Union and Turkey: Negotiating the Management of Europe’s Extended External Borders, Asli Okyay; Leverage and Contestation in Refugee Governance: Lebanon and Europe in the Context of Mass Displacement, Tamirace Fakhoury; Contesting Europe’s Policies of Migration Control: The Case of Morocco and Tunisia, Mohamed Limam and Raffaella A. Del Sarto; From “Imperial Overreach” to “Blowback”: The EU, the Mediterranean Borderlands and the Syrian Crisis, Raymond Hinnebusch;Conclusions: The Power to Contest in Europe-Middle East Relations, Raffaella A. Del Sarto and Simone Tholen
Border management in an era of 'statebuilding lite' : security assistance manifested in Lebanon's hybrid sovereignty
No full textPublished: 01 July 2017This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.International border management strategies have become the favoured practice to counter global threats, notably terrorism, migration flows and ‘weak states’. This article shows how border security assistance is translated and has political consequences in contexts where sovereignty is contested. It first offers a new conceptualization of contemporary security assistance as a form of ‘statebuilding lite’. These practices are void of comprehensive strategies for broader security governance, and are decentralized, pragmatic and ad hoc. The modus operandi is one whereby each donor develops its own niche, and directly supports specific agencies in the target state. Secondly, the article demonstrates how these tendencies play out in the one of the most important contemporary cases. Assistance to Lebanon since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war is particularly revealing, since Lebanon has received large numbers of Syrian refugees crossing its borders; witnessed rekindling of sectarian violence; and harbours Hezbollah, whose military operations in support of the Assad regime in Damascus draws Lebanon directly into the Syrian conflict. The ensuing situation, where vast amounts of security assistance reach Lebanon's many security agencies in complex ways, can best be described as a security assistance ‘bonanza’. In a micro-study of how the Lebanese Army, police, intelligence and customs agencies have engaged with an EU border management project, the article analyses how discourses of ‘integration’ have encountered the hybrid Lebanese context. It asserts that in the absence of a domestic political strategy, the state reverts back to basic modes of security-driven governance, aided by the readily available security assistance by actors with primarily strategic priorities. Drawing on the case of Lebanon allows us to fundamentally re-think how contemporary security assistance is practiced, and permits conceptualizations of global–local security linkages in a post-national world
Winning the post-war: norm localisation and small arms control in Kosovo and Cambodia
No full textThis article asks how domestic elites contest and localise global norms in contentious post-war
contexts. Engaging with critical norm research, it develops a ‘two-step localisation’ framework in
order to explain how seemingly technical security governance programmes depend on active
congruence making with constitutive state-society narratives – both by international practitioners and
domestic elites. The first step consists of the adaptation that practitioners working in the field make
in order to tune their message to local contexts, and the second step constitutes the locally driven
processes of contestation through narrative construction. The article thus brings in deeply political
negotiations over state-society narratives in order to unpack how local agents contest and reframe
global norms. Applying the two-step localisation framework to a comparative case study of Small
Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) Control programmes in Kosovo and Cambodia, the article
illustrates how the relationship between arms and state-society narratives is key to understanding the
outcome of security governance processes
An EU-south Mediterranean energy community : the right policy for the right region?
No full textThe European Commission has spelled out its policy ambition for EU energy cooperation with the southern neighbourhood with plans for the establishment of an ‘Energy Community’. Its communications make clear that an Energy Community should be based on regulatory convergence with the EU acquis communautaire, much in the same vein as the existing institution carrying the same name; the Energy Community with Southeast Europe. It is puzzling that the Commission insists on repackaging this enlargement concept in a region with very different types of relationships vis-à-vis the EU, especially when considering the lukewarm position of key stakeholders in the field. According to them, any attempt to introduce a political integration model in this highly sensitive issue area in the politically fragmented MENA region might run the risk of hurting the incremental technical integration process that has slowly emerged over the past few years.Funded by the European Research Council (ERC) within the 7th Framework Programme, the BORDERLANDS project is hosted at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, and directed by Professor Raffaella A. Del Sarto
