3rd Quarter 2017 Volume 8, No. 3

Editor’s Picks

American Visions of a Postimperial World, Getting a Grip on the So-Called “Hybrid Warfare,” A Systems Model on Corruption and Anticorruption Reform, Towards an Explanation of the Recurrence of Military Coups in Lesotho, A Feminist Normative Analysis of the Libyan Intervention

Rémy M. Mauduit

Articles

American Visions of a Postimperial World

Michael Lind

Getting a Grip on the So-Called “Hybrid Warfare”

Lt Col Jyri Raitasalo, Finnish Army, PhD

A Systems Model on Corruption and Anticorruption Reform

International, Domestic Pressure, and Government Strategies to Preserve the Status Quo

Joseph Pozsgai, PhD

Towards an Explanation of the Recurrence of Military Coups in Lesotho

Everisto Benyera, PhD

Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, International Politics, and US Foreign Policy

A Feminist Normative Analysis of the Libyan Intervention

Faith I. Okpotor, PhD

Editor’s picks

American Visions of a Postimperial World, Getting a Grip on the So-Called “Hybrid Warfare,” A Systems Model on Corruption and Anticorruption Reform, Towards an Explanation of the Recurrence of Military Coups in Lesotho, A Feminist Normative Analysis of the Libyan Intervention

The foreign policy of the contemporary United States is often portrayed as a continuation of its grand strategy during World War II and the Cold War, posits Professor Michael Lind in American Visions of a Postimperial World. According to this account, after the Cold War the United States and its First World allies sought to universalize “the liberal world order” to both the former communist Second World and the developing countries of the former Third World. The goal of American foreign policy is, or should be, the “enlargement” of the community of “market democracies,” characterized by neoliberal economic systems, civil liberties, and multiparty democracy. The thesis of this essay is that this widely-held view is mistaken. The logic of republican security led American policymakers like Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and Eisenhower not to reject the Westphalian society of states, but rather to favor a modified version of Westphalian compatible with republican liberal values. All envisioned a global community that would continue to be based on sovereign states, including nondemocratic states, not a cosmopolitan society of individuals. The post-Cold War US foreign policy consensus represented a break with the successful US approach during the two world wars and the Cold War. With its synthesis of liberalism and realism, the older American liberal internationalism provides better guidance for the challenges of today.

Professor Jyri Raitasalo states that ever since Russia’s unexpected land grab of Crimea in early 2014, Western strategic analysts, policymakers, and media outlets have been mesmerized by “hybrid warfare” and the sudden emergence of new “hybrid threats,” in Getting a Grip on the So-called “Hybrid Warfare.” Many Western analysts have become preoccupied with the proposedly new elements of warfare that are represented by the concepts such as “information warfare,” “cyber warfare,” “internet trolls,” “grey zone conflicts,” “lawfare,” “economic warfare,” and unidentified “green men.” To understand the exponential strengthening of the Western strategic discourse on hybrid warfare during the past three years, one needs to come to terms with the post-Cold War era process of redefining the Western perspective on international security. After all, Western states—and particularly states in Europe—have during the last 25 years formulated a new perspective on security that has bypassed—or even neglected —traditional state-based military threats and great power rivalries. When Russia reverted to the traditional great-power perspective on international security and in early 2014 annexed Crimea, the Western strategic community was gasping for fresh ideas to explain the surprise that the very traditional actions of Russia had caused. Ever since hybrid warfare has become the main way to conceptualise war within the West.

In A Systems Model of Corruption and Anticorruption Reform: International and Domestic Pressure, and Government Strategies to Preserve the Status Quo, Professor Joseph Pozsgai postulates that most countries across the globe, particularly in the developing world, continue showing a failure to implement anticorruption reforms in line with national and international commitments. This situation is especially disheartening when the amount of resources the international community has poured into them is considered, as well as the level of academic interest and production this issue has attracted. Thus, a core question has remained unanswered: What is holding back the fight against corruption? In this study, a theoretical model to understand the support and opposition to anticorruption reforms, and the identification of strategies available to international and domestic actors, is developed following a system approach. The model suggests that different patterns of stress on the political system, together with the availability of a variety of strategies to stimulate political support, make government actors able to resist reform even on the face of societal and international pressure.

Dr. Everisto Benyera explores the persistence of military coups in Lesotho in Towards an Explanation of the Recurrence of Military Coups in Lesotho. Using the military and the monarchy as the units of analysis, he explains Lesotho’s military coup recurrence regarding the paradoxical relationship which is cast here as one of delegitimisation, relegitimisation, and antagonism. Four questions are answered: What is the historical context of the monarch–military relations in Lesotho? What is the status of the monarch-military relationship? What accounts for the persistence of military coups in Lesotho? Finally, is the Lesotho problem a Lesotho problem?

Dr. Faith Okpotor’s article Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, International Politics, and US Foreign Policy: A Feminist Normative Analysis of the Libyan Intervention is a feminist normative assessment of US policy of humanitarian intervention as seen through the interplay with international politics in the adoption of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1973, which authorized the 2011 intervention in Libya. It provides such an assessment through a discursive analysis of UNSC Resolution 1973 and related public statements by key US officials, using critical moral ethnography. It argues that while there was a need to protect some Libyan civilians in danger, the real aim was regime change in Libya and a military humanitarian intervention paved the way to make that possible. Furthermore, the strategic nonacknowledgment of an armed opposition by the United States and its allies in drafting Resolution 1973, while simultaneously supporting said opposition in practice, and in effect taking sides in a civil conflict fosters militarism, by blurring the distinctions between war and peace, and civilian and combatant.

Rémy M. Mauduit, Editor Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

American Visions of a Postimperial World

Michael Lind*

The foreign policy of the contemporary United States is often portrayed as a continuation of its grand strategy during World War II and the Cold War. According to this account, following the Cold War, the United States and its first-world allies sought to universalize “the liberal world order” to both the former communist second world and the developing countries of the former third world. The goal of American foreign policy is, or should be, the “enlargement” of the community of “market democracies,” characterized by neoliberal economic systems, civil liberties and multiparty democracy. It is not enough, in this view, for countries to respect basic human rights and traditional international law and participate in traditional international institutions like the United Nations (UN) and international financial institutions. They must also restructure their societies until they resemble those of the Atlantic democracies. Historical progress, in the perspective of the “enlargement” school, consists of the gradual incorporation of all of humanity into the liberal world order, based on the political and social norms of the North Atlantic core.

This article will argue that this consensus version of American strategy—shared in different ways by the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, though not by the administration of George H. W. Bush—marks a radical departure from two centuries of American strategy and diplomatic practice. The world-order project of the United States from the eighteenth to the twentieth century was the replacement of a global “system of states” by a global “society of states,” to use the distinction made famous by international relations theorist Hedley Bull. Within this project, shared by the Western great powers, there was a subsidiary Anglo-American tradition of opposition to the economic closure of the world, represented by shared British and American support of the Open Door in Latin America and China. Within the Anglo-American tradition, the US’s “revolution principles” made American statesmen more sympathetic to republicanism and anti-imperialism than the British.

In favoring the reorganization of global political space on the basis of norms disseminated from an original Euro-American core, this traditional approach resembles the contemporary enlargement school, but there is a profound difference. The universal adoption of mostly procedural Westphalian statehood and legal and diplomatic norms did not require the homogenization of all societies on the planet. The reorganization of domestic societies and cultures required by Westphalian enlargement was much more limited than that implied by the contemporary American doctrine of “the liberal world order,” according to which, only “market democracies” are legitimate. To use the language of Bull and the English School of International Relations, the idea of market democracy enlargement, collapses the distinction between a society of states and a homogeneous cosmopolitan society.1 To use terms from another member of the English School, Martin Wight, the project of market democracy enlargement replaces the limited “rationalist” project of traditional American internationalism with a much more radical “revolutionary” project of universalizing the social order found in contemporary North America and Western Europe.2

The revolutionary post-Cold War project of market democracy enlargement around the core of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance has already run aground. It has provoked the resistance of China and Russia, great powers which are engaged in a de facto Cold War II with the United States and its legacy Cold War I allies. Developing countries like India, Brazil and others in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) insist on greater autonomy in their own economic policy than are allowed by the “Washington Consensus.” Hopes that the toppling of Arab autocrats—Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, and Bashar al-Assad—would lead to the emergence of liberal multiparty democracies in the Arab world have been frustrated in a horrific way. In response, the United States and its allies should abandon the triumphalist revolutionary project of “enlargement” for an updated version of its historical goal of achieving a modus vivendi among different societies within a single Westphalian society of states.

The Globalization of the Westphalian System

When the United States won its independence, the Westphalian society of states was still limited to Europe and its colonies. Three premodern empires—the Chinese, Mughal, and Ottoman—dominated much of East Asia, South Asia, and the Muslim world. Long before the United States emerged as the dominant power in the system, American presidents, diplomats, traders, and soldiers benefited from and occasionally encouraged the incorporation of these rival regional civilizations into the expanding Westphalian order.

The incorporation of non-Western societies into the expanding Westphalian society of states took different forms, depending on their level of development, or what was known patronizingly as “the standard of civilization (SOC).”3 As international law professor David Fidler explained:

The SOC solved the philosophical problem by requiring that non-Western countries become “civilized” in order to join the international society of States. To be a member of Westphalian civilization, a non-Western country had to become a State that (1) guaranteed basic rights, as understood in the West, for foreign nationals; (2) had an organized political bureaucracy with the capacity to run governmental functions and organize the country for self-defense; (3) had a Western-style domestic system of law, with courts and written codes of law, that administered justice fairly within its territory; (4) had diplomatic resources and institutions to allow the State to engage in international relations; (5) abided by international law; and (6) conformed to the customs, norms, and mores accepted in Western societies.4

Using demands for trade or the protection of sailors, merchants or missionaries as an excuse, Western great powers coerced or pressured already literate, urban, agrarian societies like China, Japan and Siam (Thailand) into adapting Westphalian diplomatic and legal institutions and accepting a new status as one of a number of equal states in the enlarged Westphalian system. More primitive, stateless societies or societies based on chiefdoms or weak kingships, like those of American and Australian and African aborigines, were defined as “barbaric” by the standard of civilization and assigned to the tutelage of one or more great powers. In between was a third category of weak but relatively competent states like the Ottoman Empire and late imperial China and the newly independent republics of Latin America, which were subject to “capitulations” in the form of “unequal treaties” dictating trade concessions and the treatment of western nationals.

In the case of China, British and French intervention in the Opium Wars crippled the regime and produced a period of disorder that ended only with Mao Tse-Tung’s communist revolution in 1949—or perhaps only later, after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Following the “opening” of Japan by the US Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853–54, and the Meiji Restoration, Japan was much more successful at preemptive westernization, modernization, and conversion of itself into a strong state in the Westphalian order. Siam likewise maintained its formal independence, unlike the nations of French Indochina, which were incorporated into the French empire.

For all its differences with the imperial monarchies of Europe, the United States also tended to approve of the expansion of the “civilized” Westphalian society of states because it enabled the spread of commerce and Christianity. With Britain, the United States sought to avoid the closure of non-Western regions under the exclusive economic and political control of a single Western great power or Japan. Both the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Open Door notes in China in 1899–1900 originated with suggestions for shared Anglo-American action by British governments. The United States protested ineffectually against the late nineteenth-century partition of Africa by the European empires, in which Britain took part reluctantly, preferring as it did the “empire of free trade.” The Open Door approach arguably represents a common Anglo-American or Dutch-Anglo-American tradition of preference for a “Grotian” world order based on commerce and international law, distinct from the Machtpolitik of continental European powers like France, Prussia/Germany, and Russia.

Republican Security Theory: Anti-Westphalian or Liberal Westphalian?

The philosophical underpinnings of mainstream American grand strategy in the twentieth century and earlier are best explained by what Daniel Deudney, an international relations and political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has called “republican security theory.”5 Republican security theory takes seriously the claim of American statesmen that a favorable world order is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of “republican liberty” at home.

President Woodrow Wilson invoked the logic of republican security when he spoke of the need to “make the world safe for democracy.” By that, he did not mean that American democracy could never be safe until every country on the planet had a democratic government (a claim made by more recent presidents, as we will see below). Instead, he made a subtler argument, linking the threat of war and high levels of military preparedness to a degree of domestic regimentation and mobilization incompatible with civil liberty and with democracy, because of the need to shift power from slow-moving legislatures to decisive executives. According to Wilson, “if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation” because of the need for defensive militarization by the United States.6 As Robert J. Art, an international relations professor at Brandeis University, has observed, “The threat of a German victory in World War I provoked Woodrow Wilson’s fear that America’s democratic system would be subverted by the huge military buildup that the United States would require to protect itself from the German hegemon.”7

Similar arguments were made by American internationalists during World War II and the Cold War. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s budget director, Lewis I. Douglas, argued against isolationism: “To retreat to the cyclone cellar here means, ultimately, to establish a totalitarian state at home.”8 In his “military-industrial complex” speech in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower also warned of defensive militarization—while blaming it chiefly, not on greedy defense contractors, but on the genuine Soviet threat: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . We recognize the imperative need for this development (emphasis added). Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”9 Like Wilson and Roosevelt, who had hoped for a great-power concert supervising a peaceful world, Eisenhower called on the Soviets to abandon their aggressive revisionist strategy and collaborate in an international system based on “a confederation. . . of equals” and “disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence.”

I would argue that the logic of republican security led American policymakers like Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower not to reject the Westphalian society of states, but rather to favor a modified version of Westphalian compatible with republican liberal values. All envisioned a global community that would continue to be based on sovereign states, not a cosmopolitan society of individuals. Far from undermining the state-centered Westphalian system, the American emphasis on human rights represented a modified version of it. Under the older rules of the Westphalian order, legitimate states were required to treat foreign ambassadors, merchants, and missionaries according to certain minimal standards. Requiring states to respect the basic rights of their own citizens was a natural extension of this approach.

Attempts to establish respect for basic human rights as a basis for state legitimacy did not require all states to conform to a single model in other respects. Significantly, FDR’s “Four Freedoms” did not include the freedom to elect a government of one’s choice. Nondemocratic regimes, as well as democracies, could allow freedom of speech, freedom from fear and freedom of worship, and achieve minimal freedom from want among their citizens, without necessarily transitioning to multiparty democracy. America’s vision of world order in the twentieth century, then, was less a departure from state-centered Westphalianism than a modification of it informed by versions of republican security theory.10

Degrees of Sovereignty

As the most powerful state in the system in the twentieth century, the United States had a growing ability to influence the norms of world order. Guided by both republican liberal idealism and opposition to imperial blocs closed to American trade and investment, the United States promoted visions of a postimperial world. In Europe, the United States supported independent statehood or autonomy within multiethnic states for nationalities which presumptively met the standard of civilization. President Wilson viewed national self-determination as the logical corollary of democracy, insisting that “no peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.” Later, in defending the League of Nations, the president emphasized that “every land belonged to the native stock that lived in it, and that nobody had the right to dictate either the form of government or the control of territory to those people who were born and bred and had their lives and happiness to make there.”

On 8 January 1918, following the US entry into World War I, President Wilson set out American war aims. His “Fourteen Points” included “a readjustment of the frontiers of Italy. . . along clearly recognizable lines of nationality” (IX); “the freest opportunity to autonomous development” for “[t]he peoples of Austria-Hungary” (X); “the relations of the several Balkan States to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality. . .” (XI); “autonomous development” for “the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule,” combined with the “secure sovereignty” of Turkey (XII). In addition, “An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations. . .” (XIII).11

President Wilson and like-minded Americans opposed the direct annexation of former Ottoman and German colonial territories into the British and French empires. Instead, these areas were to be governed as “mandates” under a single mandatory power subject to League of Nations oversight. In practice, however, they became de facto British and French colonial possessions. President Roosevelt and his aides wanted to avoid a repetition of the failure of the mandate system after World War II. At the same time, Americans understood the Atlantic Charter of 1941 to have committed the UN alliance to the goal of eventual self-determination for all nations, including those ruled by the allied British and French empires. The UN Trusteeship Council system was intended to be an improvement over the League of Nations mandate system. In practice, only a small number of colonial nations, including New Guinea, Ruanda-Urundi, and Tanganyika (united with Zanzibar to form Tanzania), achieved gradual independence in this way. In the event, the dissolution of the European colonial empires occurred in a rapid and disorganized way during the Cold War, as a result of nationalist rebellions, the exhaustion of European colonial powers and Soviet-American rivalry for legitimacy in the postcolonial Third World.

Modernization and Development in the Postcolonial World

Rapid decolonization after 1945 produced numerous postcolonial states, many of them weak and with borders that did not correspond to actual ethnic or linguistic divisions. Although the term standard of civilization fell out of practice, something like the concept remained. Influential midcentury American and European academics and other experts devoted considerable thought to helping to equip postcolonial countries with the criteria of Westphalian statehood—“modernization”—and to assist in the transition from agrarianism or pastoralism to an urban-industrial economy—“development.”

Unlike later advocates of shock therapy to produce rapid transitions to “market democracy,” theorists of modernization and development did not believe that merely holding multiparty elections, privatizing public property or reducing trade barriers would be successful, if the cultural and institutional preconditions for liberal democracy and a modern mixed economy were lacking. The United States tolerated modernizing autocracies like that of the Shah in Iran and military juntas in Latin America. The focus of US Cold War development aid programs like the Truman administration’s “Point Four” program was on basic infrastructure development and industrialization, with American state-capitalist infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority as a model.

By the 1970s, the modernization and development paradigms had lost support among American policymakers and academics.12 American economist Paul Krugman has attributed the demise of midcentury development economics to the fact that, although it was largely correct, it could not easily be modelled by the kind of mathematical economics that became predominant in the United States in the late twentieth century. According to Krugman, “[H]igh development theory rested critically on the assumption of economies of scale, but nobody knew how to put these scale economies into formal models.”13 As a result, more easily-modeled assumptions about competitive markets with many producers and no economies of scale came to inform the Washington Consensus that replaced classic development theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Under the reign of the Washington Consensus, a set of ten economic policy prescriptions that was considered the standard reform package for crisis-wracked developing countries, the emphasis in development economics shifted from infrastructure and industrialization to deregulation, privatization, and good governance.14

Still, more was involved in the demise of mid-twentieth century development theory than the rise of mathematical economics in US economics departments. In the 1950s and 1960s, American development theory was part of the New Deal liberal consensus, and along with that, consensus was attacked from left and right. On the left, a reaction against the identification of progressive modernity with large-scale industry and urbanization, associated with thinkers like E. F. Schumacher and Jane Jacobs, produced a corollary defense of peasants and small producers in developing countries whose traditional livelihoods and ways of life were threatened by state-sponsored megaprojects.15 On the right, revisionist accounts attributed economic backwardness in postcolonial countries to misguided statism and prescribed free markets as the solution.16 The increasingly popular environmentalist movement also helped to delegitimize classic development theory, by opposing icons of modernity like hydropower dams and nuclear power plants in favor of solar and wind power and substituting the ideal of “sustainability” for “modernization” or “development.”17 The discrediting of theories of gradual political and economic modernization set the stage for a radical departure from traditional American thinking about how to build a postcolonial and liberal version of the Westphalian society of states following the end of the Cold War.

“From Containment to Enlargement”

On 21 September 1993, Anthony Lake, assistant to the president for national security affairs, gave an address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, entitled “From Containment to Enlargement,” identifying US foreign policy with the goal of multiplying the number of “market democracies.”

According to Lake, the defining characteristic of the post-Cold War era was the triumph of the model of the “market democracy.” Throughout the speech, Lake linked democratization with marketization: “Both processes strengthen each other: democracy alone can produce justice, but not the material goods necessary for individuals to thrive; markets alone can expand wealth, but not that sense of justice without which civilized societies perish.”18 The radical implication was that opposing not only nondemocratic capitalist societies like Singapore but also any version of democratic socialism should be a central goal of US foreign policy.

Lake considered the following sentence so important that he italicized it:

The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement—enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.19

Despite Lake’s use of the word “must,” the enlargement doctrine was merely one of several strategies the United States might have adopted following the Cold War. The Cold War ended with the Soviet agreement to end its control over eastern Europe and to abandon its strategy of global revisionism. The dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the democratization of Russia followed great-power peace, but were not its preconditions. President George H. W. Bush had even warned against the disintegration of the USSR in his “Chicken Kiev” speech opposing Ukrainian independence from Moscow. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fragmenting of the Soviet Union in 1991, American policymakers had been willing to work with a Soviet Union that behaved as a status quo power in international relations, whether it was a “market democracy” in its internal organization or not. The same was true in the case of China, to say nothing of illiberal, autocratic allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia.

An even more radical version of the enlargement doctrine was set forth in the Second Inaugural Address of President George W. Bush:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because the bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.20

These themes have continued under the Obama administration. Although President Obama has been much more cautious in deploying force than his immediate predecessor, the Arab spring inspired a policy based on a version of what I am calling enlargement. According to the Obama administration, three Arab autocrats—Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria—had to “go” in favor of democratization and marketization. In Libya, the United States waged an undeclared war with its NATO allies Britain and France, and in Syria the United States armed and supported opponents of the Assad regime. In Egypt, after elections brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, the United States acquiesced in the coup that restored military rule under Gen Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the simultaneous enlargement of the European Union and NATO provoked a backlash by Russia and low-level proxy war in Ukraine.

Shock Therapies

In different ways, Presidents Obama and Bush have continued the post-Cold War enlargement strategy announced by the Clinton administration. Gone was the more modest vision of Wilson and FDR of a liberal Westphalian system, which by reducing security costs, would enable the evolution of democratic regimes in different countries, without imposing or requiring democracy, and permitting the coexistence of democratic and nondemocratic regimes. Gone, too, was the idea that some societies needed generations of political modernization and economic development before they could become effectively functioning democracies or capitalist economies. The old standard of civilization allowed some societies to become Westphalian without becoming wholly Western, and had distinguished “civilized” from “barbaric” or “backward” communities. In its place, the Clinton and Bush administrations promoted a vision of the world in which the distinction between developed and developing countries had been erased, and the most important dividing line was between “market democracies” and all other countries.

Shock therapy was the term given to the rapid transition of the post-Soviet economy in Russia from communism to capitalism under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1980s. But the post-Cold War American consensus required shock therapies or overnight transitions to democracy, as well as to market economics. The former dictatorships in South Korea and Taiwan, along with former military regimes in Latin America, were modern societies able to shift relatively smoothly from autocracy to electoral democracy. But it is far from clear that multiparty democracy in any meaningful sense exists in largely illiterate, agrarian societies like Afghanistan with strong ethnic and family associations and weak legal and political institutions, notwithstanding elections with international election observers. In Iraq, a multinational state, electoral hegemony by the Shia majority provoked conflict with the Kurdish and Sunni minorities.

If it was unrealistic to expect the post-Soviet economy to make a successful rapid transition to a western-style mixed economy, it was delusional to expect that result in many developing countries. Midcentury American and European theorists of modernization and development had their blind spots, but the abandonment of any working theory of stages of economic development created a vacuum which was filled by naïve ideas and fads in the 1990s and 2000s.

One fad was the idea that trade liberalization would somehow produce development in poor countries, but most global trade is among already developed societies with similar industries and similar consumers. Before they can participate in the modern global economy, people in the poorest postcolonial countries need the basics of modernity: infrastructure, reliable and cheap energy, safe and sanitary water, basic health care, not to mention the rule of law, enabled by the professionalization of civil servants and soldiers paid out of tax revenues rather than bribes and other forms of corruption.

Absent these underpinnings of a modern economy, it was naïve for many champions of globalization to hope that peasant farmers in Africa or South America could sell their products to consumers in the global North. Equally naïve was the idea that microfinance and the conversion of shanty-town dwellers into owners of their shanty-town homes could create a middle class in an economy that did not participate in lucrative global supply chains for goods, resources or services.

The New Sovereigntism and the BRICS Alternative

The post-Cold War American strategy of enlargement has produced a backlash by Security Council members China and Russia and by the governments of many developing nations. Neither contemporary China or Russia is a “market democracy” that passes muster by the exacting standards of Washington. China has been called a “Market Leninist” state—a one-party regime with an economy dominated by state-owned enterprises with a neomercantilist trade policy of export promotion in the service of its manufacturing industries. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia is what CNN’s Fareed Zakaria called an “illiberal democracy” with a mixed economy.21

While tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine and Syria, and between the United States and China over the South China Sea, have escalated to near-Cold War levels, the geopolitical rivalry has not been accompanied by a single counterrevolutionary ideology opposing America’s own “revolutionary” ideology of market democracy enlargement. Instead of agreeing on a single ideal social system, China, Russia, and major non-Western countries like India promote what has been called “sovereigntism”—a reassertion of the right of sovereign states to noninterference in their internal affairs in reaction to post-Cold War American and Western ideas like “the responsibility to protect” and the use of Western-funded nongovernmental organizations to promote “democratic revolutions” or “orange revolutions.”22

In politics, the new sovereigntism involves the rejection of the idea that nondemocratic or partly democratic regimes are inherently illegitimate. In economics, the new sovereigntism rejects American and European pressure to create a single rule-governed global economy, and defends the right of countries to deviate from free market norms if they judge such deviations to be in their interest. These ideas inform a number of new international institutions which are being created by non-Western countries as an alternative to traditional global institutions dominated by the United States, Western Europe and Japan. In the military realm, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is a de facto anti-Western military alliance whose members include China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, with Iran, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia as observer states and Turkey, Belarus, and Sri Lanka as dialogue partners.23

Then, there are new international economic institutions set up to parallel or circumvent those controlled by the United States and its European allies. One is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), created in 2015 as an initiative of China. Although the United States pressured its major allies not to join the AIIB, only Tokyo deferred to Washington; Britain, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Israel, among others, chose to take part.

The new sovereigntism is widely portrayed in US elite circles as an aggressive attack against the “liberal world order,” what the neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan calls “the world America made.”24 It is more accurate to view the new sovereigntism as being a defense of an older American liberal internationalist view of world order, which did not insist on global political and economic homogeneity and conformity, against the radically different ideology of enlargement that the United States under presidents of both parties has promoted in different ways since the election of Clinton in 1992.

Beyond Market Democracy: Reforming the Global Society of States

The post-Cold War adoption of the enlargement of market democracies by the United States as a successor strategy to containment was not inevitable. Indeed, the administration of George H. W.Bush, which presided over the end of the Cold War, demonstrated that an alternative approach to post-Cold War global order was possible.

The Bush 41 administration’s approach to foreign policy is often described as realist, but it is more accurately described as traditional liberal internationalist. The “new world order” that Bush called for in his 6 March 1991 speech to Congress was, in fact, the system of international law under a great-power concert envisioned by the architects of the League of Nations and the United Nations. The goal was peace, which would be achieved by great-power cooperation, international organization and international law, not by the revolutionary method of universalizing a single system of politics or political economy.

. . . Twice before in this century, an entire world was convulsed by war. Twice this century, out of the horrors of war hope emerged for enduring peace. Twice before, those hopes proved to be a distant dream, beyond the grasp of man.

Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war.

Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair place. . . protect the weak against the strong. . .” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights finds a home among all nations.

The Gulf War put this new world order to its first test, and, my fellow Americans, we passed that test.25

Significantly, President Bush emphasized “respect for human rights,” not democracy. “For the sake of our principles, for the sake of the Kuwaiti people, we stood our ground. . . Tonight, Kuwait is free.”26 Kuwait was free in the sense of being independent and liberated from foreign conquest. But democratizing Kuwait had not been one of the Gulf War’s aims and democratizing the world was not the goal of Bush’s “new world order.” The first President Bush’s state-centered vision of a new world order under the auspices of the great powers of the Security Council, democratic and nondemocratic alike, could hardly be more different than the second President Bush’s call for ending tyranny in the world. As in traditional American liberal internationalism, in the vision of George H. W. Bush, a peaceful world organized as a global Westphalian society of states would make democracies easier to establish and maintain, but would not necessarily make democracy the only form of government in the world. For Bush 41, as for FDR, to participate in the society of states, countries had to respect basic human rights, which did not include the right to free elections or free trade.

In the aftermath of the debacles caused by wars of regime change in the Middle East and the failure of rapid democratization and marketization in many countries in which the conditions for successful market democracy were partly or wholly absent, the United States should abandon enlargement for something like Bush 41’s vision of a “new world order.” Instead of denouncing “sovereigntists” in Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi and elsewhere as opponents of “the liberal world order,” the United States should work with other established and emerging great powers with the goal of maintaining great power peace and promoting economic development in a multipolar world.

The British writer C. S. Lewis observed: “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”27 At this point in history, for American foreign policy to go forward, it must first go back.

Notes

1. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 4th ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012).

2. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992).

3. See Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” and International Society (Leicester, England: Clarendon, 1984).

4. David P. Fidler, “The Return of the Standard of Civilization,” Chicago Journal of International Law 2, no. 1, article 9 (2001), http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cjil/vol2/iss1/9/.

5. Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). A similar interpretation can be found in Michael Lind, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006).

6. Quoted in Lind, The American Way, 79.

7. Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 182.

8. Quoted in Lind, The American Way, 105.

9. Stuart Nagel ed., Encyclopedia of Policy Studies, 2nd ed., (Urbana–Champaign, Illinois: CRC Press, 1994), 828.

10. From this, it follows that recent proposals of global recognition of a “responsibility to protect” are also compatible with the state-centered Westphalian society of states. Indeed, it can be argued that “R2P” is merely a restatement of human rights obligations already binding on states under the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Recognizing the legitimacy of this approach does not require supporting particular foreign wars or interventions carried out by countries that invoke the responsibility to protect, like the United States, Britain and France in the recent war in Libya.

11. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” 2008, http://avalon .law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp.

12. Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

13. Paul Krugman, “The Fall and Rise of Development Economics,” in Donald A. Schon and Lloyd Rodwin’s Rethinking the Development Experience (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), https://www.scribd .com/document/271289444/The-Fall-and-Rise-of-Development-Economics.

14. Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel, “Reclaiming Development from the Washington Consensus,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 27, no. 2, (Winter 2004–05, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4538924?seq=1# page_scan_tab _contents.

15. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

16. P. T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

17. The term sustainability was popularized by “Our Common Future,” the December 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development of the United Nations, also known as the Brundtland Commission.

18. Remarks of Anthony Lake, assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, “From Containment to Enlargement,” Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, Mount Holyoke, 21 September 1993, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/lakedoc.html.

19. Lake, ibid.

20. President George W. Bush (Second Inaugural Address, Washington, DC, 20 January 2005), “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460 172.

21. Neil J. Mitchell, AP Central, “Illiberal Democracy and Vladimir Putin’s Russia”, accessed 25 July 2017, https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-comparative-government-and-politics/classroom-resources/illiberal -democracy-and-vladimir-putins-russia?course=ap-comparative-government-and-politics.

22. Sean Clark and Sabrina Hoque, eds., Debating a Post-American World: What Lies Ahead, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 218.

23. Shanghai Corporation Organization website, accessed 5 March 2016, http://www.sectsco.org.

24. Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012).

25. President George H. W. Bush (“Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Cessation of the Persian Gulf Conflict,” 6 March 1991), The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid =19364.

26. New York Times, “After the War: The President; Transcript of President Bush’s Address on End of the Gulf War,” 7 March 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/07/us/after-war-president-transcript-president-bush-s -address-end-gulf-war.html?pagewanted=all.

27. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1980), 28.

*Michael Lind is the cofounder and senior fellow of New America, a US research institution with offices in Washington, DC, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. He is the former assistant to the director of the US State Department Center for Foreign Affairs and has taught courses on foreign policy and politics at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Virginia Tech. A former editor or staff writer at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic, he is a contributing editor to Politico and The National Interest and writes frequently for The New York Times. His books include The American Way of Strategy (2006) and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012).

Getting a Grip on the So-Called “Hybrid Warfare”

Lt Col Jyri Raitasalo, Finnish Army, PhD*

The outlook on international security within the Western security community, and particularly in Europe, has changed dramatically during the post-Cold War era.1 At the same time, the West has gone out-of-area, developed an expeditionary military mind-set and fought several wars of choice against third-rate military adversaries in the name of “military crisis management,” “counterinsurgency warfare,” and the “War on Terror.”

During the past 25 years, the shared Western understandings on international security have gone through a process of foundational change. Western notions of international security and military affairs have gone through a paradigm change. At the core of this change has been the belief that we have been able to overcome the Cold War era zero-sum logic to international security and adversarial relations with other great powers of the day—namely Russia and China. The West has moved away or gradually grown out from containing and deterring state-based military threats towards ever broadening notions of international security. The “new” post-Cold War-era Western security perspective included the stability of the globalizing international system and human security as perspectives through which to analyse security threats and appropriate responses to these threats.2

Now that Russia has used very traditional great-power tools in Ukraine since 2013, and also in Syria since 2015, many Western states have found themselves in need of a “new” framework—any framework—to cope with this return of the past in contemporary international politics. After all, most European states could not conceptualize military threats in Europe only three years ago. Similarly, the United States has pulled out its troops from Europe with the conviction that state-based military threats in Europe are unimaginable. Thus, during the last 25 years, most Western states have focused on committing military troops to multinational expeditionary operations with scant direct connections to Western states’ survival or national security interests. After Crimea, advocating hybrid warfare has been a way to (re)securitize the traditional great-power perspective on international security—an approach that Western states had desecuritized since the end of the Cold War as the West was redefining international security on its own terms.3

The hybrid warfare thesis is represented by the idea that Russia has invented a new approach to statecraft and military affairs after the war in Georgia. It reflects more than anything the collective Western surprise that the very traditional actions of Russia have caused. This article argues that the hybrid warfare thesis has catered to the Western need to explain and understand Russia’s actions in Ukraine as the post-Cold War-era Western conceptualisations of international security have proved to be laid on shaky foundations. Great-power rivalries, spheres-of-influence thinking, propaganda, coercion, the use of proxies, spying, and the use of military force by great powers did not become extinct with the demise of the Cold War even though many Western analysts and statesmen thought they had. Recent actions of Russia have revealed this flaw in the Western approach to post-Cold War-era international security.

The emergence and development of the hybrid warfare thesis has been politically useful—highlighting the changing nature and shortcomings of the post-Cold War-era Western perspective on international security. The analytical utility of the hybrid warfare thesis is more limited. Many of the supposedly new elements of the so-called hybrid warfare and the myriad of associated and supposedly new forms of warfare are in fact normal practices of statecraft rather than novel expressions of war. Many Western strategic analysts and statesmen have problems in dealing with these traditional tools of statecraft due to the development of Western perspective on international security during the post-Cold War era. More than anything, the rise of the hybrid warfare thesis is a collective Western attempt to domesticate the traditional threat that Russia poses today.

This article first probes the effects that the international watershed event—the end of the Cold War —had for Western states. Next, the way that Western states have redefined their perspective to international security during the past 25 years will be examined. The notion of strategic discourses is introduced as a tool to characterize the Western change away from Cold War-era deterrence and territorial defence towards ever widening notions of new threats and new requirements for the development of military capabilities. Finally, the emergence of the hybrid warfare thesis is examined in the wake of increased Russian assertiveness, particularly in and against Ukraine. This is done against the background of the redefined post-Cold War-era Western outlook to international security that had matured for more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The End of the Cold War as a Root Cause

The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a truly significant conceptual watershed event in world politics. It was a process that was celebrated all around the world, and particularly in the West, which was the “winner” of the decades-long bipolar power struggle. It was also highly celebrated within the former Soviet bloc—ranging from ex-Soviet Republics to former members of the Warsaw Pact—all of whom had been suddenly and unexpectedly freed from the shackles of oppressive Soviet rule.

At the same time, the end of the Cold War was a highly problematic process in international politics. The antagonistic bipolar logic that had prevailed within the world system for decades was gone in a matter of months or years. The logic according to which most states had executed security and defence policy for decades, and the raison d’être of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was suddenly gone, and nothing even resembling a different or an alternative logic of international politics emerged. Simply put, statesmen all around the world knew that the end of the Cold War was a positive outcome in international affairs, but none of them knew what was to follow in its suit.

From a Western perspective, the demise of the Soviet Union removed the familiar, taken-for-granted and all-pervasive existential threat that for two generations had guided state policy in practically all spheres of societal life. In an instant, Western states were left without any significant national security threat. Statesmen all around the Western world—and elsewhere—were confronted with the question: what threatens us and how do we counter that threat? As the 1991 NATO Strategic Concept noted, former enemies were turning into partners to be engaged:

Since 1989, profound political changes have taken place in Central and Eastern Europe which have radically improved the security environment in which the North Atlantic Alliance seeks to achieve its objectives. The USSR’s former satellites have fully recovered their sovereignty. The Soviet Union and its Republics are undergoing radical change. The three Baltic Republics have regained their independence. Soviet forces have left Hungary and Czechoslovakia and are due to complete their withdrawal from Poland and Germany by 1994. All the countries that were formerly adversaries of NATO have dismantled the Warsaw Pact and rejected ideological hostility to the West. They have, in varying degrees, embraced and begun to implement policies aimed at achieving pluralistic democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and a market economy. The political division of Europe that was the source of the military confrontation of the Cold War period has thus been overcome.4

The sudden desecuritization of East-West relations opened space for new interpretations of the basic logic of international politics and state security. In fact, the end of the Cold War forced states to redefine their approach to security and matters of defence. After all, states were spending millions of dollars every day on national security with tools and policies that were inherited from the past era—the era of superpower confrontation, ideological hostility, militarised state-focused security outlook, and constant fear of war breaking out. As this era was widely accepted to be over, a new logic of international security needed to be devised—quickly. Thus, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the demise of the existential threat that it had posed set a daunting task for Western statesmen. They needed to define the new rules of the post-Cold War-era international system, as well as national and alliance-wide perspectives on international security. In addition, statesmen were challenged by the rapidly evolving international events to execute these new policies, and this was no easy task. After all, this meant foundational changes in the state security apparatuses throughout the Western world—and beyond.

Western governments changed their policies on national security during the 1990s, but without a new grand plan—or a shared collective vision—about the nature of the emerging international security system and the required national steps needed in this new and emerging environment. The old system was celebrated to be over, but the new systemic logic was described in vague and even contradictory terms. Nobody really knew, then, what kind of actors or issues would constitute tangible security threats during the next year or the next decade. Attempts to come to terms with the emerging international systemic security logic started to accumulate: “A New World Order,”5 “End of History,”6 “The Clash of Civilizations,”7 a time for “an Agenda for Peace,”8 the era of “New Wars,”9 “humanitarian interventions”10 and so on. None of these—or any other—novel depictions of international security rose to the level of coherence that the bipolar superpower confrontation had enjoyed.

If there was one concrete step that was executed in all Western states at the end of the Cold War —and more broadly within the world system—it was the cutting of military expenditures and a reduction of military manpower in many armed forces. World military expenditures declined year after year (in constant US dollars) between 1989–1998.11 Even if statesmen were not sure what were the cornerstones of the post-Cold War security and defence policy, they knew that the level of military preparedness and capability that was left over from the Cold War era was on a too high level. As months and years passed, calls became louder and louder to cash in the so-called peace dividend. Old adversaries needed to be assured that the West would not take advantage of its victory in the Cold War. This led to public framing of a less conflictual world order where military threats were on a significantly lower level than before. Cooperation was emphasised at the expense of bloc politics and adversarial relationships.

The policy of engagement became the practical tool with which ex-Eastern Bloc states were tamed and brought closer to—and in many cases into—the West.12 The idea was to engage former adversaries in a process that aimed at the spread of democracy, free market economies, accentuation of human rights, and other liberal-democratic values. At the same time, the traditional state-based military perspective to security was downplayed. The enlargement of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization are prime examples of this policy of engagement in practical terms. Similarly, the many cooperative initiatives towards Russia were attempts to build a partnership, which could eventually lead to a less adversarial world in which great-power rivalries were a thing of the past.

Redefining the Rules of International Security on Western Standards

It was already noted that there has not been a coherent publicly promulgated Western vision of the post-Cold War-era international security system. Rather, the Western winners of the Cold War have redefined these rules in an incremental fashion by responding to different emerging security issues in world politics. From the 1991 Persian Gulf War to interventions in Somalia (1993) and Haiti (1994), from humanitarian missions in Rwanda and Burundi (1994) to air bombings on humanitarian grounds in Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), Western states were setting new standards for the use of military force to provide security in the post-Cold War era. This process of redefinition did not start afresh, but incrementally and slowly outgrew the preexisting Cold War-era rules of the international security game. Thus, Western states were redefining international security on their own terms—but not under the conditions of their own choosing. In the incremental process of redefining perspectives on international security, Western states’ powers were curtailed by the preexisting (Cold War-era) conceptualisations of security and the reactive mode that Western states were operating from —responding to different crises and shocks that emerged in different parts of the world.

During the last 20 some years, we have witnessed the emergence and development of a new Western framework on international security, which will be examined next through the prism of strategic discourses. The post-Cold War-era Western strategic discourses are understood to represent changes within the shared Western understanding on the systemic logic of international security and how, where, and when to use military force. In other words, shared understandings concerning international security and the use of military force are formed or “negotiated” within various—interrelated and in many cases contradictory—discourses. The cumulative effect of these discourses adds up to an implicit Western security strategy, which has never been the product of conscious strategy formulation or has not been explicitly accepted as such by Western states. As it happens, the West has ended up with a new and evolving security outlook—instead of being in the driver’s seat with deliberate and successful strategy articulation.13

The most coherent shared Western notion of the nature of the post-Cold War international system has been based on globalisation and its effects on international security. After the winding down of the superpower confrontation, globalization has progressed based on technological development—particularly in the field of information technologies—and political decisions. As the void in threat perceptions caused by the demise of the Soviet Union craved to be filled, the discourse on globalization provided one solution on how to reframe the international security logic and associated threats to international security.

As the globalization discourse puts it, we are all in this interconnected world together, and many of the threats to security are common threats to us all. Thus, a cooperative positive-sum security approach has been proposed to tackle threats to the smooth functioning of the globalizing international system. Within the discourse on globalization, threats to international security have been framed in the form of instability and unpredictability related to the day-to-day workings of the interdependent and increasingly interconnected world. Also, free access to the so-called global commons has been accentuated within the Western globalization discourse.14

Based in this positive-sum approach to global security, another Western strategic discourse has fomented and sedimented. This is the view that the nature of conflicts and wars is dramatically changing with the end of the Cold War. Instead of the superpower confrontation and the threat of state-based war, the proponents of new wars, ethnic conflicts and low-intensity conflicts have argued that warfare is moving inside the state, and that novel forms and actors of warfare are changing the international security dynamics.15 Even though the number of intrastate conflicts has significantly decreased since 1991, and the shift from interstate wars to intrastate wars already occurred directly after World War II, many policymakers and analysts have been ready to accept the war below the state level-argument^16. As such, it has fitted nicely into the globalization narrative as chaotic, and messy new wars indeed seem to jeopardize the smooth running of the delicate interconnected world order in which traditional state-level war has become almost extinct.

The discourse on new wars and other intrastate conflicts has benefitted from the widening of the concept of security that started simultaneously with the decreasing threat of a massive war in Europe à la Cold War. New sectors and referent objects of security have been included in the post-Cold War—and postmodern—Western security concept.17 In addition to the traditional state security approach, the systemic level (the entire globalizing world order) and the individual or human level (human security) have been included in the referent objects of security in a process that started in the early 1990s. With Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo and the like, large-scale humanitarian suffering was gradually securitized and militarized within the Western security community that was desperately searching for new foundations for national and international security.

Related to the widening of the security concept, another Western strategic discourse surfaced and strengthened from the early 1990s to the present due to the increased possibilities of 24/7 live media coverage and exponentially improved methods of communication during the last 20 years. The birth of social media and the ability to be online all the time further increased people’s awareness of incidents all around the world. Broadcast television, radio, newspapers, millions of internet pages, and social media services produce unprecedented exposure to world events that was unimaginable a generation ago.18 Massively increased public awareness of large-scale humanitarian suffering and crises all around the world since the early 1990s coincided with the loss of strategic foundations within the West and elsewhere.

Thus, when the West was having its post-Cold War “was nun—moment,” a door was opened for formulating and promulgating an approach to ease humanitarian suffering in out-of-area crises where large populations were involved. This happened despite the fact that the number of armed conflicts started to decline in the early 1990s.19 The emergence of the Western tradition of military crisis management was facilitated by the urgent need to formulate a rationale for the continued existence of many Western (European) armed forces—although at a lower level of manpower and expenditures. Also, the rapid expansion of the European humanitarian military agenda was enabled by the need to redefine the raison d’être of NATO. As it has been argued, during the 1990s NATO faced the choice between going out of area or going out of business.20 The maturation of the Western crisis management tradition in only five years (1991–1996) that become apparent from NATO documents is indicative of the speed and direction of the post-Cold War Western strategic problematique of no existential military threats.

In the 1991 Strategic Concept of NATO, it is noted that:

The Alliance is purely defensive in purpose: none of its weapons will ever be used except in self-defence.21

Also, in 1996 the new crisis management role of NATO was presented in a different fashion:

The new NATO has become an integral part of the emerging, broadly based, cooperative European security structure. . . .We have. . . reconfigured our forces to make them better able to carry out the new missions of crisis management, while preserving the capability for collective defence.22

The fourth strategic discourse that has heavily influenced the way Western states have conceptualised international security, and particularly how they have developed and used their armed forces, matured during the 1990s and early 2000s. It was launched within the US defence establishment after the 1991 Gulf War—as lessons learned from the first big war of the new era. The strategic discourse based on the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) promised a fundamental change in military capability and how military forces would fight in the future. Networked systems and forces, digitalization, satellite communications, precision strike capabilities, and other high-tech applications were accepted in the United States as a new “silver bullet” that would offer a sound logic according to which the American military would develop in a world that posed no existential threats or even a peer-competitor.23

In a world with unprecedented accumulation of power on one actor—the United States that seemed to enjoy the benefits of the “unipolar moment”24—and where threats to American or Western security were not military in nature, the RMA-discourse provided a strategic imperative for military transformation. Should the old state-based threat and the associated military logic someday return—the reasoning went—the transformed RMA-forces would be able to cope with any potential adversary, whether that be China, Russia, or any other actor.

The RMA thesis fit nicely within the immediate post-Cold War trend of cutting or “streamlining” Western armed forces to cash in the peace dividend and to create a nonadversarial security environment, particularly in Europe vis-à-vis Russia. Although high-tech militaries are very expensive, the military transformation that RMA offered with an exponential increase of capability meant that all-volunteer professional military forces could axe hundreds of thousands of Soldiers from their ranks and close hundreds of military bases and facilities in the United States and Europe.

Also, the shift from preparing to wage big war in Europe towards small, short and less demanding multinational out-of-area operations facilitated the strengthening of the RMA proponents’ arguments. Small, capable, high-tech forces in instant readiness with good force protection seemed to be, during the 1990s and the following decade, what was in high demand. And consequently, as the United States—and also European states—started to field these new RMA capabilities with related transformed organisations and operational concepts, a “push” to use these new forces in operations was created. Particularly, for the small European states, all-professional forces would have become a problem if they were not used. As has been argued, small states face a “use it or lose it” dilemma with professional military forces. It is difficult for small states to maintain professional militaries for the mere prestige they bring.25

When terrorists struck in the United States in 2001, the overall shared Western approach to international security and the use of military force had already undergone a significant change. State-based military threats, territorial defence, and deterrence gave way to a comprehensive approach to security and an expeditionary military mindset. As the NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow explained in January 2016, NATO’s deterrence policy should be strengthened, hinting even to the reassessment of the role of nuclear capabilities within this policy:

the security environment has changed, and so strengthening and modernizing NATO’s deterrence posture for the 21st century is, in my view, the most important challenge we must meet between now and Warsaw. . . . In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, defense spending fell and armies shrank throughout Europe. We therefore cannot replicate the deterrence posture that existed during the Cold War, even if we wanted to. The forces and the budgets necessary to maintain them are simply not there. . . . We need to be strong, we need to be clear, and we need to deter. . . And, if necessary, we will make adjustments to our broader deterrence posture across the full spectrum of Alliance capabilities.26

Building on the above mentioned changes, and stemming from a superpower mentality of military affairs—exacerbated by the traumatic and historic large-scale attacks on continental US—the George W. Bush administration responded to the threat of terrorism with a highly military approach. The post-9/11 “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) was not, however, only about defeating terrorists with military and other means. The GWOT was as much about redefining the rules on the use of military force within the international system by the United States as it was about killing the perpetrators and supporters of the 9/11 attacks.

The focus of the post-9/11 Bush administration was to use military forces, if needed, unilaterally, preventively, and anywhere in the globe where it was deemed necessary. The international norms inherited from the Cold War—state sovereignty and nonintervention—had already lost some of their charm before 9/11, at least within the Western security community. But after the launch of the GWOT, the only military superpower of the world declared—and confirmed this declaration with deeds—that the era of defensive outlook to military matters was over. As President Bush framed it:

On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. … Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. … Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.  From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.27

“The Twenty Years’ Crisis”

During the 20-plus years of the post-Cold War era, the shared Western understandings of international security and the use of military force in the international system underwent a gradually emerging cumulative change. In retrospect, it is easy to see how this changing Western perspective on international security and the use of military force has made a fundamental break with the traditional notions of national security in a hostile international system characterized by state-based military threats. Thus, with the passing of time during two decades, the incrementally advancing process of redefining Western security perspectives and associated military actions on a “case-by-case basis” has produced a new outlook on security and the use of large-scale military violence that is in many ways very different from the classical notions of strategy, great-power politics and alliance theory. As Marcin Zaborowski, the head of the Warsaw Office for the Center for European Policy Analysis, has argued:

in 1999, the alliance was embarking on its first-ever intervention in Kosovo. Ever since, NATO has thrown itself into redefining its role to expand beyond collective defense and embrace collective security. In reality, that meant that the role of defending NATO territory started to be seen as somehow archaic, and the new alliance was expected to expand its tasks to out-of-area operations aimed first and foremost at peacekeeping and peace-enforcing. Deterrence and territorial defense became uncomfortable terms in NATO headquarters associated with old-fashioned Cold-War thinking.”28

In practical terms, the Western security community has, under the lead of the United States, outgrown and departed from the notions of large-scale state-based military threats, great-power politics and associated political manoeuvring, and the defence of territory (national territory and alliance territory) as the real and primary mission of the armed forces. In addition, the significance of concepts such as containment, deterrence, and defence have eroded as Western perspective on military affairs and security have evolved into the direction of cooperative engagement and security cooperation, management of crises, as well as expeditionary operations and warfare. Frank Hoffman, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, described this well in 2009:

The 2005 National Defense Strategy was noteworthy for its expanded understanding of modern threats. Instead of the historical emphasis on conventional state-based threats, the strategy defined a broadening range of challenges including traditional, irregular, terrorist, and disruptive threats. The strategy outlined the relative probability of these threats and acknowledged America’s increased vulnerability to less conventional methods of conflict. The strategy even noted that the Department of Defense was “over invested” in the traditional mode of warfare and needed to shift resources and attention to other challengers.29

As the brief analysis of the several post-Cold War-era Western strategic discourses revealed, the transformation and expansion of the security perspective, and the activation of the military tool in the strategic toolbox of the Western states since early 1990s has not been linear or preplanned. Within the realm of international politics, states —represented by statesmen and/or small security political elites—make history, but under the preexisting conditions that limit, favour, and guide policies towards certain directions rather than others. Past actions limit the window of opportunity today. With the sudden and surprising annexation of Crimea and the start of the crisis in Eastern Ukraine, Russia brought this fact of international politics to the fore—interpreted in the West through the prism of hybrid warfare.

The Emergence of the Hybrid War Thesis

Hybrid war and hybrid warfare represent the latest manifestation of the Western need to (re)conceptualise and (re)define the post-Cold War international security logic and associated rules according to which states use military force—and other elements of statecraft—in the international system. Hybrid warfare can also be conceptualised as the latest Western strategic discourse, which is supposed to explain away the international security problems that Western states have faced during the last several years, and which have been left unexplained by the other Western strategic discourses on globalization, new wars, the RMA, expeditionary military (crisis management) operations, and the GWOT.

In a way, hybrid warfare has become the latest Western strategic buzzword, which is facilitating a deeper understanding of the apparently new elements of the chaotic and unpredictable contemporary international security arena. From this perspective, hybrid warfare is assisting in explaining away the surprise that Russia’s traditional great-power policies and actions in Ukraine since early 2014 (and in Syria since autumn 2015) have caused amongst Western statesmen and strategic analysts.

Gen Philip Breedlove, the commander of the United States European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, noted in January 2016 that for 20 years, US military decisions were guided by the effort to make Russia a partner. In General Breedlove’s words, the West has “hugged the bear”—that is, Russia—for 20 years, but after Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), Donbass (2014-) and Syria (2015-), this has to change.30 Looking back some 20 years, the efforts to redefine rules of the international security game on Western standards have now become contested by Russia.

Within the Western strategic community, the hybrid warfare thesis has been advocated to depict the new reality of contemporary warfare. The concept itself is not a totally new one. It has matured over several years, focusing first on the mixing of regular and irregular forces and tactics with terrorism and revolutionary technologies to negate the military superiority of the West in general—and the United States in particular. It is noteworthy that this maturation of the hybrid warfare thesis took place in an era when the West was overtly preoccupied with asymmetric conflicts or irregular forms of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was during these years—more than a decade—that many believed that the “old” state-based big wars were a thing of the past and that the future will be marked with wars similar to those that the United States and its NATO allies witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan.31 These wars showcased the deficiency of the high-tech RMA thesis and the ineffectiveness of the global-level militarized GWOT as a new security approach. As Mattis and Hoffman have argued,

[t]he kinds of war we will face in the future cannot be won by focusing on technology; they will be won by preparing our people for what General Charles Krulak, the former Marine commandant, used to call the Three Block War. … We are extending the concept a bit, and beginning to talk about adding a new dimension. … The Four Block War adds a new but very relevant dimension to situations like the counterinsurgency in Iraq.32

The so-called “green men” became the symbol of the Western discourse on hybrid warfare in early 2014, when Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. As the hybrid warfare narrative goes, these unidentified green men without insignias—which in fact consisted of hundreds of armed uniformed soldiers—were the reason Russia was so successful in taking Crimea. This narrative overlooks the fact that the government in Kiev—and people around the Crimean peninsula—were very well informed that these so-called green men were not Ukrainian military troops. So, even if these armed Russian special operations forces soldiers were not carrying insignias, there was plenty of evidence that they were not part of the forces that were loyal to the government of Ukraine.

Thus, the decision not to stop or counterattack these invading forces—which were clearly soldiers of organized armed forces —was not based on the notion that Ukrainian authorities did not know that Crimea was being invaded. Inaction was based on the decision by the government of Ukraine not to attack these invading forces, because (1) Ukraine had no credible functioning armed forces, which could have beaten the Russian soldiers without the whole military operation turning into a bloodshed and slaughter of the Ukrainian military, and (2) the culture of corruption had degraded the fighting capability and morale of Ukraine’s armed forces, so that Russian military could take the garrisons around Crimea without any real fighting.33

The hybrid warfare narrative suggests that the use of nonconventional “green men” and the associated obfuscation of the Ukrainian situational awareness was the reason that the takeover of Crimea was so successful. This narrative turns a blind eye to the fact that Ukraine had no real usable military capability that had any chance of success against a regional great power—namely Russia. Moreover, Russia had more than 10,000 soldiers stationed within its military bases in Crimea when the “green men” suddenly appeared on the scene. At the same time, another 150,000 Russian military troops were in close proximity of Ukraine on military exercises.34 Thus, whereas some Western statesmen and strategic analysts may for a while have been confused by the true origins of the so-called “green men,” Ukrainian authorities knew that they should have been capable of mustering military operations against these invading forces, but they did not have the required military force, which could have done the trick.

Even if the proponents of the hybrid warfare narrative could agree with the analysis above, they would point out that as Western states’ situational awareness of what was going on in the Crimea was obfuscated, they lost their possibility of acting against Russia’s invasion in a timely fashion. This line of reasoning bypasses the fact that the Western states did not have the capabilities or the willingness to commit any military force against Russia’s invasion in support of Ukraine.35 The fact is that there was almost nothing that Western states could have done to halt the Russian invasion of Crimea even if they wanted to, and they did not.

The second aspect of the Western narrative on hybrid warfare waged by Russia accentuates the strategic use of nonmilitary tools. By definition, the true essence of war is related—but not limited—to the use of large-scale high-quality violence, that is, military force. Nonetheless, to analyse war without a political context and the diverse spheres of human interactions that are connected to the military sphere resonates well within the post-Cold War Western tendency to see warfare from a simplistic, mechanistic and technocratic perspective. This Western strategic myopia has evolved from the RMA thesis and the associated possibilities of waging war (operations) with a high reliance on force protection in the many wars of choice that the West has undertaken during the last two decades.36 The technocratic Western understanding of war—looking at pursuing politically defined goals with the use of large-scale violence through the prism of high-tech capabilities and force-protection possibilities—has been challenged in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya where superior Western military capability has not translated into politically defined goals during the last 15 years.

The technocratic high-tech Western focus on war has thus maturated in the past two decades. The emergence of the concept “comprehensive approach” testifies to the problems that Western states have confronted since they have gone out-of-area with the RMA approach on the use of military force. As the Alliance Joint Doctrine (2010) notes:

From a military perspective, a comprehensive approach is founded on not only a shared situational understanding, but also recognition that sometimes non-military actors may support the military and conversely on other occasions the military’s role will be supporting those actors. . . The importance of including from the outset those elements – diplomatic, civil, and economic – that are to be enabled by military success must not be underestimated. Failure to do so will at best lose the strategic initiative; at worst, it will result in strategic failure. This is the basic premise of a comprehensive approach, which NATO applies to its operations.37

Thus, NATO member-states have jointly agreed upon the notion that purely military solutions to political problems are rarely possible. Strategic goals should be pursued with a mix of political, economic, cultural and in some cases also military means. This has been the essence of statecraft for centuries—or even millennia. Military analysts and strategic thinkers have understood war from a broad perspective for at least 2,500 years—since the days of Sun Tzu (or Sunzi). War has never been a “pure” military matter that is executed by military forces only. The formulation of the Comprehensive Approach within the European Union reflects the same understanding:

The EU’s Comprehensive Approach (CA) envisages the concerted use of the wide array of policies, tools and instruments at the disposal of the EU, spanning the diplomatic, security, defence, financial, trade, development cooperation and humanitarian aid fields.38

The above-mentioned definitions of the Comprehensive Approach both within the EU and NATO reflect the fact that for years Western strategic thinkers and statesmen have been painfully aware that military operations in and by themselves are not enough to produce favourable international security outcomes. Nor are purely military operations enough for the attainment on national interests in most cases. Based on the analytical similarities between the concepts of hybrid warfare and the Comprehensive Approach, it could be argued that the Comprehensive Approach has in fact been a Western hybrid warfare technique for example in Afghanistan, where military momentum and rising troop levels have not guaranteed “victory.” And as the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has argued:

… how to deal with hybrid warfare? Hybrid is the dark reflection of our comprehensive approach. We use a combination of military and non-military means to stabilize countries. Others use it to destabilize them.39

The third argument in favour of the hybrid warfare thesis has revolved around Russia’s information warfare and its use of government controlled media houses and internet trolls (or troll armies) to change public perceptions of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. This strategic level information warfare—partly using internet trolls and partly other modern means to lie and to distort and modify the truth—has supposedly improved Russia’s possibilities at reaching its goals in Ukraine and more broadly within the international system. Through the “weaponization of information,” Russia has arguably successfully obfuscated what was going on in Crimea in March 2014 and what is currently happening in eastern Ukraine.

What the proponents of this information warfare argument often seem to neglect, however, is the fact that since the invasion of Crimea in early 2014, Russia has become a pariah state targeted with political and economic sanctions. Its proxy war in Eastern Ukraine has not gone unnoticed and the associated narrative about its noninvolvement does not resonate among Western strategic decision makers. Statesmen do not make decisions with information collected from internet discussion forums or from adversaries’ officials’ public statements. It is extremely difficult—with even the best of narratives —to create a long-standing “alternative reality” or shared understanding, which departs from preexisting conceptualisations and shared understandings, and which is contradictory to the “facts on the ground.”

It is true that today anyone can get his or her message out in some form—whether it is through conventional media sources or social media. However, it is a different thing to say that it would be easy to change preexisting narratives or to create new ones. Narratives influence how people conceptualize reality. Moreover, narratives constitute identities. Narratives are not only stories that can be made up by anyone. They are deep-seated cultural constructs through which people infer meaning about the social world. Thus, narratives are resistant to change. Changing narratives implies changes to the way people see the world and how they identify themselves. Narratives have a strong bias on status quo over change.40

When it comes to the use—or nonuse—of information, Russia was successful in its annexation of Crimea on the basis that it did not a priori reveal its intentions or methods for executing the land-grab. Russia thus departed from the post-Cold War Western method of publicly arguing in favour of and “selling” an upcoming military operation. However, it should be noted that even with this successful obfuscation of the situational awareness of Ukraine’s government and Western states for some hours or maybe even days, the possibilities of Ukraine’s armed forces to resist the Russian invasion were practically nonexistent. The difference in military capability between Russia and Ukraine was —and still is —so staggering.

The fourth aspect of the hybrid warfare thesis revolves around another strategic hype concept, that of cyber warfare. For many years—at least since the 2007 Estonian Bronze Warrior episode—cyber threats and cyber warfare have been proposed to fundamentally change the nature of warfare. Resonating with the logic of the RMA discourse in the 1990s and during the next decade, cyber warfare advocates and cyber threat prophets have moved to securitize the cyberspace. Waging war in cyberspace offered a way to conceptualize new vulnerabilities in Western societies and new asymmetric means of warfare that could threaten us, despite the fact that none of these cyber warfare elements had ever materialized on the “battlefield.”

So far, the things that we have witnessed have been related to denial of service attacks, infiltration of social media and e-mail accounts as well as other similar low-yield small-level incidents. Most of the reported cyber “warfare’” episodes have been criminal acts directed against individuals or enterprises. Concerning real cyber war incidents—with tangible national security effects—Libicki has argued based on his analysis on the war in Ukraine that one of the surprising features has been the lack of cyber war almost completely.

For the last twenty years, with the advent of serious thinking about “cyber war,” most analysts—and even the more skeptical thinkers—have been convinced that all future kinetic wars between modern countries would have a clear cyber component. However, the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict is challenging this widely held notion. . . . The most notable thing about the war in Ukraine, however, is the near-complete absence of any perceptible cyber war.41

The absence of cyber warfare in the hard core of security and defence issues so far does not mean that cyber threats are irrelevant to states at the strategic level. Needless to say, our ever increasing dependence and reliance on networked information and services make managing the cyber domain critical. Thus, it is noteworthy that so far the threats and possibilities of cyber warfare have been inflated and are closer to science-fiction than real life.

Hybrid Warfare is Warfare—Plain and Simple

In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Russia was not able to challenge or influence the Western process of redefining the post-Cold War era international security architecture and the new rules of the international security game. Thus, during the last 25 years, many Western statesmen and security analysts have become accustomed to the situation where no one (not even Russia or China) disrupts the principles of Western security and defence policy. At the same time, the very concept of war has undergone a gradually emerging change. Instead of “war proper,” we have witnessed numerous “campaigns,” “crisis management operations,” “humanitarian missions in the spirit of R2P,” and other instances of the “use of military force.”42

Russia has brought back a traditional great-power outlook to the use of military force—war —and the associated concepts of spheres of influence, near-abroad, zero-sum game, and multipolarity. Western analysts and statesmen have had difficulties in recognising and dealing with these traditional notions and actions with the analytical tools at their disposal. Managing common threats in a globalising world with multinational expeditionary operations is an altogether different approach than great-power rivalries, deterrence (with conventional and nuclear weapons) and spheres of influence in pursuit of the national interest.

Russia is not acting or arguing according to the globalization-based positive-sum approach to relations between states. Its approach towards Ukraine and the West has been based on status, prestige and influence. The Western narrative on hybrid warfare has thus served the purpose of formulating a “new” framework or a language, which makes Russia’s strategic behaviour understandable and intelligible —from a Western point of view—and which is able to explain the strategic surprise that Russia’s approach and actions have caused within the Western security community.

As András Rácz, an EU foreign and security policy expert, has argued, the tipping point of the hybrid warfare discourse coincided with NATO adopting the expression during the summer of 2014. Since then, NATO has had an important role in reproducing the hybrid warfare discourse. It has been within the institutional contours of NATO that the birth and strengthening of the hybrid warfare thesis has been facilitated.43

In a way, the discourse on hybrid warfare is bringing back or highlighting some of the vocabulary of the traditional and narrow conception of security, which Russia has advocated. Russia’s actions and associated political rhetoric accentuate great-power privileges, state-level security, and state-based military threats. This is an approach that has been repudiated since the early 1990s in Western strategic discourse and public narratives on the logic of the globalizing international security system and the rationales for using military force within this system. During the last 25 years, Western militaries have engaged former adversaries, brought stability to the globalizing world order, done good on several continents and managed crises “out there.” In addition to being just a way to confront the emerging post-Cold War era security environment, deemphasising or forgetting state-based “war proper” has been a politically motivated and expedient way to redefine the post-Cold War era international security architecture on Western standards.

Hybrid warfare can be conceptualised as a bridge between the post-Cold War-era Western approach to international security with active use of military force within the international system and the more traditional great-power approach to international relations, which we have witnessed in Ukraine. This bridge facilitates the “resurrection” of state-based military threats within the Western strategic calculus, but in a way that is consistent with the broad array of thoughts on international security, which have matured and sedimented during the post-Cold War era.

Hybrid warfare thus represents the (re)securitization of the traditional great-power logic within shared Western understandings of international security—after 25 years of desecuritization of the very same logic, which has formed the essence of the post-Cold War-era security and defence policy up to the beginning of the crisis over Ukraine.44

To conclude, hybrid warfare is a politically useful concept. Crying “hybrid warfare,” easily gets one’s security-related argument heard. Furthermore, within the Western strategic community the discourse on hybrid warfare has become so abused that through this concept many actors find it easy to forward their academic or political position. But when one tries to operationalize hybrid warfare on the military strategic, operational or tactical levels, one quickly realizes that the very broad and unanalytical concept has less to offer—either to academic practitioners or practice-oriented national security professionals. Going below the political or grand strategic level, one needs to break up the grand concept of hybrid warfare into “smaller” and more precise concepts that are very familiar from previous decades and centuries: coercion, extortion, bribery, lying, proxy wars, psychological manipulation, propaganda, and others that have been the essence of statecraft over several millennia.

Notes

1. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, “A Framework for the Study of Security Communities,” in eds. Adler and Barnett’s Security Communities (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29–65.

2. Jyri Raitasalo and Joonas Sipilä, “Reconstructing War after the Cold War,” Contemporary Strategy 23, no. 3, 239–261, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01495930490479033.

3. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security—A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998).

4. The alliance’s new strategic concept agreed by the heads of state and government participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council, 7–8 November 1991,” http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_23847 .htm.

5. President George H. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” 29 January 1991, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19253.

6. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16, (Summer 1989), 3–18, https://ps321.community.uaf.edu/files/2012/10/Fukuyama-End-of-history-article.pdf.

7. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

8. “An Agenda for Peace—Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping,” Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992, A/47/277-S/24111, 17 June 1992, http://www.un-documents.net/a47-277.htm.

9. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars —Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

10. Thomas Weiss and Cindy Collins, Humanitarian Challenges and Intervention (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

11. “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2014,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Fact Sheet, 2014. http://books.sipri.org/files/FS/SIPRIFS1504.pdf.

12. For more information, see National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, The White House, (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1994), http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/research/nss.pdf.

13. For more information, see Iver B. Neumann, “Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3: 627–651, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi /abs/10.1177/03058298020310031201?journalCode=mila.

14. Barry R. Posen, “Command of the Commons—The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003), 5–46, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/016228803322427965?journalCode=isec.

15. Kaldor, New and Old Wars.

16. Lotta Themnér and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1946–2011,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 4.

17. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security—A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998).

18. Warren Strobel, “The CNN Effect—How Much Influence Does the 24-hour News Network Really Have on Foreign Policy?,” American Journalism Review (May 1996), http://ajrarchive.org/Article.asp?id=3572.

19. Human Security Report 2009/2010, Human Security Report Project, 2 December 2010, http://www .hsrgroup.org/human-security-reports/20092010/text.aspx.

20. Anna Wieslander, “NATO, the U.S. and Baltic Sea Security,” 4, UI paper no. 3, 2016, The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, https://www.ui.se/globalassets/butiken/ui-paper/2016/nato-the-u.s.-and-the-baltic-sea -security---aw.pdf.

21. The alliance’s new strategic concept agreed by the heads of state and government participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council, 7–8 November 1991,” http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_23847 .htm.

22. “Final Communiqué—Ministerial Meeting of North Atlantic Council, Berlin, Germany, 3 June 1996,” NATO Press Communiqué M-NAC-1(96)63, http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1996/p96-063e.htm.

23. Jyri Raitasalo, Constructing War and Military Power after the Cold War—The Role of the United States in the Shared Western Understandings of War and Military Power in the Post-Cold War era, (Helsinki, Finland: National Defence College, 2005), 1–328.

24. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1, 23–33.

25. Jyri Raitasalo, “Moving Beyond the ‘Western Expeditionary Frenzy,’” Comparative Strategy 33, no. 4, 372–388.

26. Alexander Vershbow, “21st Century Deterrence,” Remarks by NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow, The Snow Meeting in Trakai, Lithuania, 15 January 2016, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions _127099.htm.

27. President George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” United States Capitol, Washington, DC, The Washington Post, 20 September 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp -srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html.

28. Marcin Zaborowski, “Poland: The Challenges of Middle Power Diplomacy,” in Frontline Allies: War and Change in Central Europe, US–Central Europe Strategic Assessment Group Report, November 2015, 25–31. https://www.icds.ee/fileadmin/media/icds.ee/failid/SAG_Report.pdf.

29. Frank Hoffman, “Hybrid Warfare and Challenges,” Joint Forces Quarterly, Issue 52, (January 2009), 34–39.

30. “EUCOM Commander Seeks New Approach to Russia,” DOD News. http://www.defense.gov/News -Article-View/Article/639951/eucom-commander-seeks-new-approach-to-russia.

31. Hoffman, “Hybrid Warfare and Challenges,” 34–39.

32. James Mattis and Frank Hoffman, “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” Proceedings Magazine 132, no. 11.

33. For more information, see “International Security and Estonia,” Estonian Information Board, 2016, 20–21, http://www.teabeamet.ee/pdf/2016-en.pdf.

34. “Russia Orders Military Drill, Stoking Tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, 26 Feb 2014, https://www.wsj .com/articles/ukraine-disbands-berkut-antiriot-police-unit-1393400795.

35. Wieslander, “NATO, the U.S.,” 11.

36. Raitasalo, “Moving Beyond.’”

37. “AJP-01(D) ALLIED JOINT DOCTRINE”, December 2010, 2–13, http://www.fit4russland.com/images /NATO-Kriegsplan_Allied_joint_doctrine_2010.pdf.

38. “European Union Military Committee Chairman’s E-newsletter,” Issue 23, January 2016, 1.

39. Jens Stoltenberg, “Keynote Speech by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the Opening of the NATO Transformation Seminar 25 Mar 2015,” http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_118435.htm.

40. Jyri Raitasalo, “Western Societies Shouldn’t Buy Into the Russia Hype,” The National Interest, 4 September 2017, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/western-societies-shouldnt-buy-the-russia-hype-20089.

41. Martin Libicki, “The Cyber War that Wasn’t,” Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression against Ukraine, ed., Kenneth Geers (Tallinn: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2015): 49–50, https://ccdcoe.org/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdf/CyberWarinPerspective_Libicki_05.pdf.

42. For more information, see Henning-A. Frantzen, “‘Proper War’ and ‘War In Reality’—The Changing Concept of War,” IFS Info 6/02, (Oslo: Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, 2002).

43. Andreás Rácz, “Russia’s Hybrid War in Ukraine—Breaking the Enemy’s Ability to Resist,” Finnish Institute of International Affairs Report 32, 40–42, http://www.fiia.fi/assets/publications/FIIAReport43.pdf.

44. For more information, see Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, Security—A New Framework for Analysis.

*Lieutenant Colonel Raitasalo is a senior staff officer at the Finnish Ministry of Defence Planning Unit (strategic planning). He holds the title of docent of strategy and security policy at the Finnish National Defence University. Lieutenant Colonel Raitasalo served as the commanding officer of the Helsinki Air Defence Regiment (Armoured Brigade), head lecturer of strategy at the Finnish National Defence University, aide-de-camp to the chief of defence, and staff officer (strategic planning) in the Finnish Defence Command. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences. Dr. Raitasalo published several academic monographs and articles, focusing mainly on the post-Cold War-era Western security and defence policy and the changing character of war.

The opinions and arguments expressed in this article are the author’s own, and they do not reflect the view of any governmental agency.

A Systems Model on Corruption and Anticorruption Reform

International, Domestic Pressure, and Government Strategies to Preserve the Status Quo

Joseph Pozsgai, PhD*

Corruption is perhaps the biggest political and economic challenge of the twenty-first century. It stands at the core of, or closely by to, endemic poverty, political instability, organized crime, international terrorism, civic disaffection, economic decline, and a number of other issues damaging the quality of government and the quality of life of billions of people around the globe. Long gone is the time when it could be swept away as an issue solely affecting poor and underdeveloped nations, or when it was proposed to be functional to certain types of bureaucracies affected by pervasive red tape. Now it is finally recognized for what it is—the cancer of society.

Despite the evils its name now conjures, however, public efforts to curb corruption have largely missed the target, and more often than not they have ended up demonstrating a gross level of incompetence, or plain and sheer disinterest. Seemingly contradictorily, the crude political reality of the fight against corruption has gone on during the past 20 years hand-in-hand with the stark evolution of anticorruption scholarly production.

During this period of time, the anticorruption reform (ACR) subfield has seen its consecration in the emergence of an international anticorruption regime, which is, in turn, the public manifestation of a great body of work produced regarding policy advice and related elements. These, however, seem to have produced limited impact compared to the progress of studies focusing on the consequences of corruption properly speaking. Most contemporary reports on anticorruption interventions undertaken by national governments and international donors paint a bleak picture of the success level of the often-applauded technical progress made: “despite extensive resources being channeled into the fight against corruption, there are very few success stories to tell when it comes to the actual implementation of anti-corruption reforms.”1

The objective of the present study is to address, from a theoretical perspective, the political challenges inherent to ACR and the real politics that stand in the way of actual reform. The analytic model suggested here shows that national governments have at their disposal a number of strategies to protect the status quo during different scenarios of anticorruption stress. As a result, the model describes a dynamic that sheds light on the reasons behind the current levels of implementation of national and international anticorruption initiatives.

The Problem with Anticorruption Reform

Traditionally speaking, the literature on anticorruption has been dominated by a normative approach based on the principal-agent model.2 Succinctly put, this model sees corruption as a consequence of the limited information and actions available to leaders to control the behavior of public officials, thus resulting in abuses of the public trust. Whether the figure of “leaders” is embodied by the political elite, civil society, or international organizations, the model inevitably focuses on the best available strategies to reduce corruption through the adoption and implementation of public policies and other sociopolitical interventions.3

Addressing the intrinsically political nature of common anticorruption initiatives in the developing world, a secondary group of studies (which may be considered as the cleanups approach) addresses the emergence of anticorruption campaigns in countries affected by widespread corruption in the following terms: “The impetus to clean up corruption can be provided primarily by political exigency rather than by genuine interest in the efficient functioning of the nation’s political and economic institutions.”4 Viewed from this perspective, anticorruption efforts are not designed following technical considerations, but rather the expected benefits they might produce in terms of political capital and concentration of power; thus they tend to be highly temporal, limited by the term in office of the political leadership that adopted them.5

Pushing the political resistance to technically oriented anticorruption reforms further, it is even possible to see the adoption of counterreform measures (from the enactment of regulations to constitutional reforms) that facilitate the practice of public malfeasance: the censorship of the media, intervention of the judiciary and/or regulatory agencies, increased legislative powers to the executive branch, spread of special procurement types, and deactivation of formal channels for the monitoring of public spending, among others.6 Thus it becomes apparent that at the center of the discussion regarding ACR stand the particular interests of the political leadership, but what forms do these take, and how are they manifested?

Just as any other policy, anticorruption requires the initiative of a senior official (or a politician with prerogative) to address malfeasance by introducing a coherent group of actions aimed at reducing corruption in a certain part of the public and/or private spheres. As government activities are never free, the simple idea of performing an action against corruption requires us to consider the inherent costs of that action as a starting point.

Already in the 1980s, Robert Klitgaard, an advisor on economic strategy, institutional reform, and anticorruption, was considering the magnitude of implementation embedded in the anticorruption idea in an effort to provide a grounded advice to policy makers. Considering the variety of activities and instruments that could be adopted to fight corruption, each one with its specific cost to the organization, Klitgaard suggested that it would be inefficient to invest in all of them without considering the relative impact they potentially offered.7 As government, just like any other organization, does not have unlimited resources, it would be wise to invest in those activities that produced the highest margin of benefits in terms of anticorruption success; however, this success in turn needs to be considered in terms of benefits for the whole system. Corruption is not an evil by itself, only when considering its pernicious effects. Therefore, the cure for corruption should not be allowed to be more expensive to society (and not just in monetary terms) than corruption itself, and that is a real possibility when the marginal returns of anticorruption activities are considered, but the marginal returns of anticorruption efforts are not the only (or even the most important) element in the calculations of real-life politics. To stop at that would be to adopt the premise that social benefits and collective well-being are the only concerns of the leadership, when realistically speaking they usually are not. The whole concept of corruption entails the idea that social considerations are put aside in favor of private benefits. If the leadership is already engaged in illegal acts, the anticorruption drive will not just stop short of the maximum, but it will most likely stop much earlier than that. Klitgaard’s evaluation of the appropriate length of an anticorruption campaign is perfectly reasonable when considering public administration from a normative perspective, but it becomes futile when the politics of corruption is considered.8

Before tackling the issue of efficiency in a scenario of corrupt leadership, let us consider an additional element to the equation. Taking a more realistic approach, it is usually considered that, besides the considerations of technical, financial, and political costs related to the adoption and implementation of anticorruption policies, there is also the element of political capital. Anticorruption, just as any other government activity, not only translates into costs, but as it impacts in society (hopefully in a beneficial way), it also creates benefits for the government in the form of political capital. This capital, when we drop the assumption of a virtuous and devout leadership, explains in theory the reason why certain policies are adopted while others are ignored. Not surprisingly, political capital is especially important in democracies, where it has the ability to directly translate into votes and power. Therefore, Klitgaard’s idea of anticorruption efforts being efficient just as long as social welfare is attained could be converted into a more realistic statement: anticorruption efforts are pursued just as long as they are politically profitable for the leadership.9

While the above assertion is already difficult to contest, anticorruption policies are not just like other policies: they target the government itself (or at least the bureaucracy that supports it), contrary to most other policies that target in one way or another civil society. The contradiction or dilemma is obvious. Going back to the subject of efficiency in a scenario of corrupt leadership, there is a clear incompatibility between the objective pursued and the actors called on to address it. To give an analogy, it is equivalent to expecting a thief to arrest himself.

It could be added that, to convince corrupt politicians to ignore anticorruption recommendations, not only minority interests and patronage must provide higher political capital, but also political capital can be completely surrendered for higher rewards in the form of proceeds from corruption. We can take political capital completely out of the equation and expect a political leadership to reject any anticorruption activity that might create obstacles to his network of corruption or even prosecute it. Certainly, the relative weight of political capital against illegal incomes will depend on the subjective preferences of the political actors, but when the latter are prioritized, we could expect anticorruption reforms to completely stagnate; and this is a major peculiarity of anticorruption policies, for other types of policies do not introduce additional costs to their implementation beyond regular resources. Anticorruption policies effectively cost the organizational resources demanded to their adoption and implementation, and any surreptitious benefits the leadership may have been perceiving from corruption and the national anticorruption standards. All else being equal, they have a higher ratio of costs to political capital than most other types of policies.

Once we stop assuming that anticorruption reform is of any interest or benefit to the political leadership, and that even the contrary might be true (corrupt politicians stand to lose from reform), the implementation of campaign promises and international conventions become less likely, while counterreform efforts become a real possibility. Just as Florencia Guerzovich, a consultant in open governance, social accountability, and anticorruption, describes, “[i]n all societies, there are stakeholders with vested interests who stand to lose from [anticorruption] reforms.”10 She then goes even further: “According to different Mexican anticorruption stakeholders, as no institutional anchor (or proactive advocacy tactics) made it mandatory or politically costly to roll back disclosure, executive officials have been willing and able to undo positive transformations.”11 This situation highlights some qualities of the government as a reactive and creative system, one that not only adapts passively to the demands of its environment but that is able to develop new mechanisms to defend itself and even change its surroundings. The international anticorruption movement tends to see national governments as actors facing only two options, either adopt its recommendations regarding anticorruption reforms, or ignore them. In reality, however, national governments have two additional options: they can adopt policies that decrease the prevention and control of public malfeasance, effectively making it easy for political leaders to benefit from corruption without fearing detection and prosecution; and they can also undertake actions against the international anticorruption movement, diminishing its strength, changing its focus towards other nations, or convincing it of the merits of their national anticorruption standards. Each one of these options will naturally entail a different consequence and will have a different degree of difficulty. Nonetheless, all four are perfectly possible alternatives, and to describe a government as being only able to execute the first two is an oversight that may very well explain why there has been so little progress in the academic field of anticorruption reform.

Therefore, it is possible to say that to acknowledge the existence of a leadership tolerant to corruption is to accept the possible existence of government actions aimed at defending (and even reinforcing) the existing anticorruption standards, against any or all actions taken by international and local supporters of anticorruption reform.

Without making assumptions about the honest or corrupt nature of the political leadership, its description in the terms discussed above is both realistic and consequential. It is realistic based on what it is widely known regarding the level of high-level corruption in most developing countries around the globe, and of the level of adoption and implementation of anticorruption policies described earlier. We may call the governments of these countries apathetic, tolerant, or even corrupt; what matters is that we recognize the reality of the lack of incentives they have to adopt actions against malfeasance. It is consequential because it opens the door to analyze government activities, not just in terms of what they do to implement policy recommendations, but also in terms of what they do to resist implementation. The key to begin exploring the consequences of this reasoning will be, then, to explicitly adopt a description of the nature of national governments in relation to their interest in controlling corruption.

Ivan Krastev and Georgy Ganev ask and respond exactly in line with the present discussion:

Why anticorruption programs are not getting support from “the top” is the central question of this paper. It is not a study of anticorruption policies, it is a study of incentives. The “highest levels of the state” do not support anticorruption efforts (1) because they have incentives to be involved in corruption, or (2) because they do not have incentives to initiate anti-corruption campaigns even when they do not have incentives to be involved in corruption.12

These hypotheses will be at the core of the theoretical framework to be developed in the rest of this article. For an honest government, anticorruption policies should only be attractive in direct relation to the political capital they can generate for them; for a corrupt government, anticorruption policies should be avoided in direct relation to the interests they threaten. The discussion turns now to the construction of a model responsive to this premise.

A Systems Model of Corruption

The above discussion directly points to the inherent lack of incentives for anticorruption reform among the political elite and suggests the pervasiveness of political struggle behind demands to curb public malfeasance through challenges to the status quo. Translating this argument to a theoretical model, systems theorist David Easton’s Dynamic Response Model of a Political System is found to fit perfectly the tenets of the present study.13

At its core, Easton’s model aims at providing an essential structure to understand the different forces that might create stress for a political system and subsequently identify the coping mechanisms available to it to keep a minimum level of support flowing. Over this basis, the model incorporates multiple elements that are part of the dynamic processes embedded in the system; but at the end, all of them follow the author’s interest to address the survival of the political system.

The political system (which from here on will mean the national government, interchangeably, for the present purpose) works as a machine that converts inputs into outputs. The inputs will take the form of demands or support, both coming from civil society or international actors. In turn, the system produces outputs in the form of government actions aimed at affecting in one way or another civil society and the international scene (that is, the system’s environment). These “exchanges” or “transactions” between the government and the actors in the environment represent the life of the political system, the way a country is run. However, to work properly, demands and support need to be held constant lest the government begins to see its stability threatened.

While Easton sees both types of inputs crucial for the life of the system, the issue of survival is directly linked to the level of support.14 Although demands are the raw materials for government actions, as the leadership needs to create in response to specific necessities, without support the government is completely unable to perform any action. Therefore, the constant flow of support from society (or international actors) to the government is essential for the leadership to keep exerting its authority; without it, it would be hard to say it is still in power, especially when its subjects and peers are unwilling to recognize it a commanding role. Support, in these terms, is indistinguishable from political capital.

Demands tend to affect the government only in relation to the way they affect the level of support when left unattended. When demands increase, they usually reflect a situation that is unsatisfactory for society. If it is a reaction to previous government actions, such as the wrong monetary policy or corruption in defense procurement, this will usually be joined by a decrease in the overall support for the political leadership. If, on the other hand, demands are raised as a reaction to the emergence of new circumstances, such as a drought or the aggressive stance of a foreign nation, the level of support will depend on the government response to the challenge. This is the nature of demands which by themselves do not seem to create what Easton calls stress to the political system; demands are only stressful when the system fails to respond appropriately.

This brings us to the issue of output failure, which describes “the failure of the authorities to produce adequate outputs” in response or anticipation of societal and/or international demands, and the consequent “decline in the input of support.”15 In other words, output failure represents the scenario created by those government actions that are widely considered unsatisfactory, delegitimizing the leadership. It happens when either social circumstances, perceptions, or both, are incongruent with public demands. When demands increase, and support decreases, the political system has difficulty in making decisions and having them accepted, and so it is said to undergo stress. If left unattended for too long, stress may cause the authorities to be replaced, the regime to be modified, and even the political community to fall apart.

There can be no doubt, then, that corruption represents an unofficial output, but this is not all. Currently, most countries have included in their legal systems provisions to criminalize at least some (if not all) forms of corruption, making malfeasance in public life an illegal and criminal act. The identification of corruption as a problem of government sets it apart from other types of outputs. While the latter may increase or decrease support, depending on the quality of the output produced by the system and the way it impacts the circumstances and perceptions of the citizens, corruption is widely and almost unanimously considered to be detrimental to society, and thus it always creates stress to the government by decreasing the level of support and raising demands. In the words of Easton, “[e]xtended reliance on this kind of outputs. . . may well prove more effective in stressing than in maintaining a system.”16

The description of corruption as a specific type of output that is by nature stressful to the political system brings us back to the discussion about output failure, which was said to “represent the scenario created by those government actions that are widely considered unsatisfactory, delegitimizing the leaders.”17 Connecting the dots and employing the terminology developed in Easton’s work, we would then understand corruption as a kind of output that generates a scenario of output failure, which in turn creates stress for the system by giving rise to an increase in demands and a decrease in support. Furthermore, if such a situation remained unchecked, it could develop into the unsustainability of one or more of the political objects (authorities, regime, political community) and the consequent failure of the system to guarantee its own survival.

If the above description of corruption is accepted, it is possible to argue that corruption produces stress on the political leadership following four different patterns or scenarios: corruption perception; corruption in processes; corruption intolerance; and prolonged stress.

Corruption perception. In the first scenario, a corrupt activity involving one or more members of the ruling elite (the authorities) is perceived by domestic and/or international actors outside the public sphere (the environment, from now on); this situation is commonly referred to as a corruption scandal. Such output produced by the authorities is incompatible with the expectations of the citizens, and thus triggers the voicing of demands for anticorruption actions and a reduction of support for the government, causing stress to the system.

Corruption in processes. The second scenario shares with the previous one the implicit initial stage of a corrupt activity being undertaken by the authorities; however, in contrast to it being directly perceived by the environment, as in the cases of a corruption scandal, it is only perceived through its detrimental effects on the circumstances surrounding the individuals in the environment. These circumstances usually belong to the economic sphere, but they can take other forms. After the material circumstances in the environment are damaged by the incidence of corruption, the environment reacts in the usual pattern of withdrawal of support for the authorities and increase in demands; this time, however, the demands are not aimed at corruption control, but at solving issues which are but the symptoms of corruption, for example, declining economic growth, political inclusion, access to justice, and others.

Corruption intolerance. The third scenario describes not a situation where corruption is directly perceived or indirectly suffered, but a shift of paradigm to one in which corruption is addressed by the environment before it occurs. This is the case of the emergence of the International Anti-Corruption Regime (IACR) and the general environmental shift towards more stringent rules and procedures to prevent and dissuade the engagement of public actors in malfeasance. Although the development of the IACR is gradual and has moments of higher and lower intensity, the general pattern is one where the environment experiences an evident decrease in the levels of corruption it is willing to tolerate, and as a result it tries to affect the implementation of ACR in domestic settings through different forms of influence and pressure. This influence and pressure are what we have been calling demands. When the authorities in turn fail to meet these demands through their engagement in appropriate anticorruption activities, support decreases and the system is again said to be under stress.

Prolonged stress. Finally, the pattern of corruption in systemic terms can further reduce support through the system’s prolonged exposure to stress under any or all of the previous scenarios. In such a scenario, what takes place is not only a reduction in the level of support for the authorities, but also for the political regime in general. The level of stress exerted over the system, in this sense, affects not only the possibilities of a particular set of authorities to remain in power, but furthermore erodes the public support for the system of government, its institutions, and the legal structure of the country.

Through these four different patterns of effect, corruption creates problems for the normal functioning of government. Such scheme, certainly, departs drastically from the common and one-dimensional conceptualization of corruption, and allows us to study it from different perspectives depending on the scenario we wish to focus on, with its particular effects and dynamics. These scenarios will in turn provide the specific settings in which the political leadership will be forced to adopt strategies to defend the status quo against anticorruption demands.

The strategies, as advanced earlier, are to be regarded as coping mechanisms, and they take different forms following closely the characteristics and conditions of the stress scenario they are called to resolve. These elusive nonreform outputs that generate support and decrease demands are further elaborated in the following section.

Mechanisms for Coping with Anticorruption Pressure

As we have seen, the incidence of corruption creates stress for the political system under any one of four scenarios. Luckily, however, the political system has ways of securing the constant provision of at least a minimum level of support flowing, enough to keep the political system intact in order of priority: they are called the coping mechanisms, available to the system to deal with stress and guarantee its own survival. These coping mechanisms will explain how a political system manages to endure even after the government fails to tend to the demands of citizens and international actors.

In Easton’s elaboration of his model, coping mechanisms are ubiquitous; they are mentioned sporadically, directly referring to specific mechanisms, and are not collected under a special title. Nonetheless, in explaining the fundamental categories of analysis employed in his work, Easton states that:

We shall find that political systems accumulate large repertoires of mechanisms through which they may seek to cope with their environments. Through these they may regulate their own behavior, transform their internal structure, and even go so far as to remodel their fundamental goals.18

Coping mechanisms do not only (or even largely) aim internally at transforming the political system so as to adapt to public discontent, but they can also be directed externally at the sources of demands and support, that is, the system’s environment. In this way, coping mechanisms are indistinguishable from outputs as they have been discussed earlier, with the only difference being that the former describe the system’s response to actual or potential stress.

Therefore, we shall talk of coping mechanisms as those government actions that seek to secure support for the authorities without having to necessarily tend to the specific demands of civil society and/or international actors. In this manner, Easton’s model relates to the argument of this study regarding the ways in which the government managed to avoid drastic changes in the national anticorruption standards.19

Figure. Coping points in the systems model of corruption and anticorruption reform. (Adapted from David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 110.)

Disregarding the specific scenario we wish to focus on, coping mechanisms are distributed throughout the model and its processes of output production/reaction, output effects (outcomes), and input production/reaction (demands and support), reflecting the entire cycle through which the systems interacts with the environment. Based on the moment of the cycle when coping mechanisms can be expected to be effective, these four stages will be called coping points: (1) output concealment, (2) output perception attenuation, (3) negative input defuse, and, (4) stress amelioration. The figure shows the position of the stages in the model.

The coping point of output concealment covers the exit channels of the political system and allows for the activation of mechanisms that target precisely those channels through which corruption may be discovered, and preemptively disable or obstruct them. In other words, at this point actions are taken against certain anticorruption enforcement efforts that deal with investigation and detection. Examples are the inefficient implementation of access to public information or financial transparency laws and the adoption and implementation of norms and actions against freedom of press. As a consequence, coping mechanisms embedded in this stage are corruption enablers to different degrees.

The coping point of output perception attenuation covers the entry channels of social perception, and allows for the activation of mechanisms that address the way corrupt (or corruption tolerant) outputs generate increased demands and decreased support, by suppressing or altering the way citizens and international actors perceive information of public malfeasance. Their objective is to cut the link between corruption news and attitudinal change, preventing the generation of demands. Examples are smokescreens, the discredit of plaintiffs, and the fostering of corruption tolerance.

The coping point of negative input defuse covers the entry channels of the political system and allows for the activation of mechanisms that address the way demands are directed towards the government. They aim at cutting the link between popular dissatisfaction and the actual manifestation of demands, preventing their transfer into the system. Examples are the exercise of police repression/coercion, the creation of legal obstacles to advocacy, the manipulation of public priorities by agenda setting, and the allocation of responsibility on external actors. This is the final coping point before the government can be said to come under stress.

Lastly, the coping point of stress amelioration covers output failures after the system has come under stress and allows for the activation of mechanisms that serve as compensatory measures. There are two different kinds of mechanisms in this point: symbolic measures, which describe the production of outputs that aim at changing the perception social actors have of the way the government is handling the issue, without actually implementing them in any effective way; and genuine measures, which aim at generating support through the effective satisfaction of demands not related to the original source of stress. Examples of the former are public promises, adoption of ineffective policies, and conduction of mismanaged investigations; examples of the latter are clientelism and other forms of economic stimuli, alternative populist gratifications, political concessions, scapegoat convictions, and nonpartisan investigations/prosecutions. The multiplicity of mechanisms, of which each coping point introduced only a sample, suggests the very real problem of pushing for ACR without having full political will behind them.

Possibilities for Reform: Types of Environmental Pressure

Coping mechanisms are essential to understanding the possible ways in which the authorities are able to protect the status quo for years and even decades, getting past corruption scandals, periods of economic crisis, and the emergence of new global trends such as the international anticorruption movement. Those mechanisms available to the political leadership, however, are only as effective as the amount of support they can stimulate and the types of demands they succeed in repressing. Information on the strength with which civil society and international actors pressure the political system is just as important in understanding why certain mechanisms are successful while others are not. Certainly, civil society and international actors do not exert pressure over the government in only one way, but will also be found to have different strategies available to them depending on the intensity of the specific case, the scenario where it is embedded, and the resources available at that moment in time. Each strategy or activity in turn has a relative amount of effectiveness attached to it in terms of its potential to stress the system; what this amount is, however, is a matter of empirical analysis, but a basic typology can be laid down.

Direct pressure. The first category of the available forms of impact to environmental actors includes those activities that are commonly considered to exert unmediated pressure over the government. For local actors, these are public exhortations, popular criticism, protests, advocacy/networking, and legislative initiatives. On the side of the international community, the activities available under this category are public exhortations, international conventions, international agreements, and aid conditionalities.

Indirect pressure. Diminishing in their capacity to produce stress on the system, activities addressing the anticorruption status quo in an indirect manner work more as instruments that stimulate pressure rather than exerting it themselves. Available to civil society, these activities are media coverage, technical corruption-related reports, and corruption awareness. On the side of the international community, the activities available under this category are technical and financial assistance, international cooperation, and technical corruption-related reports.

Influence. The third and final category of impact available to environmental actors is of the subtlest kind. While direct and indirect pressure can usually be traced for their effects (or the lack of them) on the stability of the status quo, to talk about influence is to focus on all those activities that have anticorruption concerns at their core but are so ubiquitous that their impact is not explicitly recognized, and thus can barely be said to even exist. Nonetheless, small traces of their existence can be found almost everywhere in the political system. For both civil society and international actors, these activities involve the general dissemination of corruption awareness and anti-corruption principles and information targeting not members of the environment, but public officials. The objective of this influence is to affect the perceptions of the government itself in relation to the social, political, and economic costs of corruption.

Conclusions

The discussion undertaken here regarding the theoretical possibilities for ACR highlights the difficulties faced by reformers when considering the presence of coping mechanisms available to domestic authorities. The fact that the latter can actually and effectively repel demands for reform and roll them back whenever implemented, forces the literature on ACR to recognize and accept the existence of incentives to maintain the anticorruption status quo, and to build its theoretical models on that fact. Without dwelling on the actual incentives that different sets of authorities have to hinder ACR, the core of the issue is that such a situation exists, and to turn a blind eye to it condemns any effort to formulate anticorruption recommendations utterly useless. It would be very much like preaching to a completely uninterested choir: while in anecdotic cases it might have worked, there is no scientific logic to keep funding a project that resembles a missionary effort.

For political leaders in corruption-ridden societies, public office represents not only political power, but also a way of profiting economically. There, both political capital and corruption profits need to be considered as embedded in the structure of incentives for political life, and the current international anticorruption movement wastes its time and money appealing to only the former, disregarding the latter. And that is why the implementation of ACRs has been continuously disappointing for the past 20 years.

In addressing the inherent constraints of ACR, the present study also identified some strategies available to nongovernmental reformers that, although more scant, inflexible, complex and costly than those available to preserve the status quo, provide an opportunity to employ the resources of the international anti-corruption movement in a more effective and efficient way, informed by realistic assessments of social and political contexts. Following the systems model of corruption and anticorruption reform developed here, the most opportune strategy can then be identified based on the state of the system, the current levels of stress, and the resources and willingness of actors present. The rest is up to the expertise and power of the environmental actors to execute the selected strategy, and the further production of research regarding the processes implicit in it. If such a systematic approach is taken, then the state of ACR may see in the future an existence that the past has so far denied.

Notes

1. Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell, The Failure of Anti-Corruption Policies—A Theoretical Mischaracterization of the Problem, Quality of Government Working Paper Series 19, 8, The Quality of Government Institute (Gothenburg, Sweden: University of Gothenburg, June 2010), http://www.qog.pol.gu.se/digitalAssets /1350/1350163_2010_19_persson_rothstein_teorell.pdf.

2. Robert Klitgaard, Controlling Corruption (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 220; Jeremy Pope, “Elements of a Successful Anticorruption Strategy,” in Curbing Corruption: Toward a Model for Building National Integrity, eds. Rick Stapenhurst and Sahr J. Kpundeh (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1999), 97–104; Daniel Kaufmann, “Challenges in the Next Stage of Anti-corruption,” in New Perspectives on Combating Corruption ed. Daniel Kaufmann (Washington, DC: Economic Development Institute. 1998), 139–63; and Susan Rose-Ackerman, Anti-corruption Policy: Can International Actors Play a Constructive Role?, Yale Law and Economics Research Paper 440 (Durham, NC: Carolina Academics Press, 2013), http://graduateinstitute.ch/files/live/sites/iheid/files /sites/ctei/shared/CTEI/Pauwelyn/Publications/rose-ackerman-carrington%20pdf%20(2).pdf.

3. Alan Doig, “Good Government and Sustainable Anti-corruption Strategies: A Role for Independent Anti-corruption Agencies?,” Public Administration and Development 15 (1995): 151–65, https://www.researchgate.net /publication/229884570_Good_government_and_sustainable_anti-corruption_strategies_A_role_for_independent_anti-corruption_agencies; Mushtaq H. Khan, “Governance and Anti-corruption Reforms in Developing Countries: Policies, Evidence and Ways Forward,” G-24 Discussion Papers Series 42, (New York; Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2006), http://unctad.org/en/docs/gdsmdpbg2420064_en.pdf; O. C. Aron, “Anti-corruption Agencies on Government Agenda: Promises and Performances” (master’s thesis, Department of Public Policy, Central European University, Budapest, 2007); Michelle Man, “Political Corruption in Russia: An Evaluation of Russia’s Anti-corruption Strategies, 1991–2009,” POLIS Journal 2 (Winter 2009): 1–53, http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/assets/files/students/student-journal/ma-winter-09/michelle-man-winter-09.pdf; Mohammad M. Kisubi, “Involving Civil Society in the Fight against Corruption,” in Stapenhurst and Kpundeh, Curbing Corruption,117–25, https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/0-8213-4257-6; Aymo Brunetti and Beatrice Weder, “A Free Press Is Bad News for Corruption,” Journal of Public Economics 87 (2003): 1801–24 https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/orgs/econ_office_org/Institutions_Reading_List/17._Corruption_and_Economic _Performance/Brunetti,_A._and_B._Weber-_A_Free_Press_is_Bad_News_for_Corruption; Sahr J. Kpundeh, “The Big Picture: Building a Sustainable Reform Movement against Corruption in Africa,” in Civil Society and Corruption, ed. Michael M. Johnston (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 73–94; and Louise Shelley, “Civil Society Mobilized against Corruption: Russia and Ukraine,” in Civil Society and Corruption, ed. Michael M. Johnston (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 3–21; A. Timothy Martin, “The Development of International Bribery Law,” Natural Resources and Environment 14, no.2 (1999): 95–102, https://www.jstor.org /stable/40924392?seq=1#page_scan_tab_content; Alhaji B. M. Marong, “Toward a Normative Consensus against Corruption: Legal Effects of the Principles to Combat Corruption in Africa,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 30, (2002): 99–129, https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=30+Denv.+J.+Int%27l+L.+%26+Pol%27y+99&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=3d72864a48fd509ad86b95972b620353; Indira Carr, “Fighting Corruption through Regional and International Conventions: A Satisfactory Solution?” European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 15, no.2 (2007): 121–53, https://www.surrey.ac.uk/law/pdf/Corruption/Carr%20-%202007%20-%20Fighting%20Corruption%20Through%20Regional%20and%20International%20Conventions_A%20Satisfactory%20Solution.pdf; and Jan Wouters, Cedric Ryngaert, and Ann Sofie Cloots, “The Fight against Corruption in International Law,” Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies Working Paper 94 (July 2012), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract _id=2274775.

4. John M. Mbaku, “Bureaucratic Corruption in Africa: The Futility of Cleanups,” Cato Journal 16, no. 1, (1996): 108, http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/3186/Vol.pdf?sequence=1.

5. Anthony B. L. Cheung, “Combating Corruption as a Political Strategy to Rebuild Trust and Legitimacy: Can China Learn from Hong Kong?,” International Public Management Review 8, no. 2, (2007): 45–72, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235276931_Combating_corruption_as_a_political_strategy_to_rebuild_trust _and_legitimacy_can_China_learn_from_Hong_Kong; Scott D. Taylor, “Divergent Politico–Legal Responses to Past Presidential Corruption in Zambia and Kenya: Catching the ‘Big Fish,’ or Letting Him off the Hook?” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2006): 281–301, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436590500432325?journalCode=ctwq20; Alexander Kupatadze, “Explaining Georgia’s Anti-corruption Drive,” European Security 21, no. 1 (2012): 16–36, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09662839.2012.656597?journalCode=feus20; Melanie Manion, “Issues in Corruption Control in Post-Mao China,” Issues and Studies 34, no. 9 (1998): 1–21, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288632424_Issues_in_Corruption_Control_in_Post-Mao_China; John Mukum Mbaku, “Bureaucratic Corruption in Africa: The Futility of Cleanups,” Cato Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 99–118, http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/3186/Vol.pdf?sequence=1; and Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare, “When Corruption Fights Back: Democracy and Elite Interest in Nigeria’s Anti-corruption War,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 49, no. 2 (2011) 185–213, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals /journal-of-modern-african-studies/article/div-classtitlewhen-corruption-fights-back-democracy-and-elite -interest-in-nigeriaandaposs-anti-corruption-wara-hreffn01a-ref-typefnadiv/13B963B19904AEA75044EE38DA3E0872.

6. Bettina Peters, “The Media’s Role: Covering or Covering up Corruption?,” Global Corruption Report (2003): 44–56, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN008437.pdf; Marta Dyczok, “Was Kuchma’s Censorship Effective? Mass Media in Ukraine before 2004,” Europe–Asia Studies 58, no. 2 (2006): 215–238, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20451184?seq=1#page_scan_tab_content; Piero Stanig, “Regulations of Speech and Media Coverage of Corruption: An Empirical Analysis of the Mexican Press,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 1, (2015): 175–93, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24363603?seq=1#page_scan_tab_content; John McMillan and Pablo Zoido, “How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 69–62, http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/McMillanZoido2004.pdf; Lawrence W. Sherman, “Three Models of Organizational Corruption in Agencies of Social Control,” Social Problems 27, no. 4 (April 1980): 478–91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/800176?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents; Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, “Venezuela: Crowding out the Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 2 (April 2007): 99–113, http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/article/venezuela-crowding-out-opposition; Jessica Schultz and Tina Søreide, “Corruption in Emergency Procurement,” Disasters 32, no. 4 (May 2008): 516–36, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5416696_Corruption_in_emergency_procurement; Alasdair S. Roberts, “Less Government, More Secrecy: Reinvention and the Weakening of Freedom of Information Law,” Public Administration Review 60, no. 4 (July/August 2000), 308–20, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0033-3352.00093/full; and Gustavo Coronel, “Corruption, Mismanagement, and Abuse of Power in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela,” Development Policy Analysis, no. 2, (27 November 2006): 1–23, https://www.cato.org/publications/development-policy-analysis/corruption-mismanagement-abuse-power-hugo-chavezs-venezuela.

7. Klitgard, Controlling Corruption, 220.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Florencia Guerzovich, “Effectiveness of International Anticorruption Conventions on Domestic Policy Changes in Latin America,” Open Society Foundations, April 2012, https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org /reports/effectiveness-international-anticorruption-conventions-domestic-policy-changes-latin-america.

11. Ibid.

12. Ivan Krastev and Georgy Ganev, “The Missing Incentive: Corruption, Anti-corruption, and Reelection,” in Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption, ed. Ivan Krastev (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2004), 75–118.

13. David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 143; and David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 507.

14. Ibid.

15. Easton, A Systems Analysis, 230.

16. Ibid., 361.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 19.

19. Ibid.

*Dr. Joseph Pozsgai Alvarez has a doctorate in Political Science and holds the position of international associate at the University of Tsukuba (Japan). He is currently developing the Daily Corruption: News Feed and Database project for the indexing and quantification of daily corruption news from a number of countries. Dr. Pozsgai has been conducting corruption and anticorruption research for the past eight years, starting with a position with the corruption prevention team of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of Peru in 2009, before he turned full-time to academia to explore the topics of corruption tolerance among citizens and the politics of anticorruption policy implementation.

Towards an Explanation of the Recurrence of Military Coups in Lesotho

Everisto Benyera, PhD*

Lesotho’s history is littered with military coups, with the latest one—with questionable authenticity—complicating the already complicated role of the military in the South African country’s politics. This article unpacks what it terms a dangerous mix in Lesotho’s politics which pits the military against the monarch.1 This will be achieved by first exploring the history of monarch–military relations using the coloniality of power as the theoretical framework. 2 This relationship is here cast as one of legitimisation, delegitimisation, and relegitimisation.3 Some authors characterise the relationship as perpetually antagonistic and maintain that it was never meant to work.4 Accordingly, the two institutions tend to have a love–hate relationship, at times opposing each other while also reinforcing one another on another level. In this relationship, tensions occur when the military delegitimises the monarch and the state, leading in turn to the monarchy seeking to relegitimise itself. The extent of these tensions is expressed—among other things—through the various military coup d’états that have rocked the kingdom in the clouds for decades.

In Lesotho, the latest version of military coups occurred on 1 September 2014 and was the sixth successful coup in the country since 1970. Unlike other coups before it, this one was very different because it was disputed by many, including Lesotho’s powerful and influential only neighbour, South Africa, and the regional body—the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Then, Prime Minister Thomas Thabane alleged that his deputy had instigated the coup, which led to his brief exile in South Africa. On the ground, the coup was led by renegade Lt Gen Kennedy Tlali Kamoli, who had been relieved of command on Friday, 29 August 2014. In an uncharacteristic confrontation between the police and the army, within a short period the army subdued the Lesotho Mounted Police Service. According to Rupiya and Mothoagae, the army collected about 250 weapons from the police armouries, as well as all available uniforms.5 This was after they had fatally shot one police officer and seriously wounded three others who were believed to have resisted the coup.

In explaining the recurrence of military coups in Lesotho, this article argues that the conventional theoretical framework of deploying the concept of unconstitutional change of government is flawed as it misses the role played by historical factors which still haunt nation-building and state-building processes in Lesotho. The concept of unconstitutional change of government is very fluid and open to manipulation, especially by the military and outside forces. The SADC’s inability to act decisively in circumstances deemed to constitute an unconstitutional change of government is well known. The regional body, in principle, denounces such practices but lacks the practicalities for reversing them. Such events occurred in Mauritius in 2009 when Mark Ravanomana won the elections but was unable to assume office owing to a myriad of complicated state–military relations in that country.

The departure point for the article is its deployment of the concept of coloniality, as opposed to other liberal theories, such as those that view the persistence of military coups in Lesotho as a legal or democratic problem. The article attempts to answer the following four questions: (1) What is the historical context of the current monarch–military relations in Lesotho?, (2) What is the status of the monarch-military relationship?, (3) What accounts for the persistence of military coups in Lesotho?, and (4) Finally, is the Lesotho problem a Lesotho problem?

A Historical Overview of Lesotho’s Military Involvement in Politics

Before colonisation, there was no absolute monarch in Lesotho. After the Lifaqane wars of 1815 to about 1840, King Moshoeshoe amalgamated the many fragmented Sesotho speaking people to form a nation living on the mountain fortresses of modern-day Lesotho. Moshoeshoe was not born into a big chieftainship, but through his qualities, he built the Basotho nation around his chieftainship later with the help of the British. The Basotho lost much of their arable land to the Boer farmers in the modern-day Free State Province of South Africa, forcing them to live in the mountains where crop production was impossible given the harsh weather. This was the origin of the Lesotho’s dependence on South Africa, a situation which persists until today. In coloniality terms, this depicts coloniality of power, as land used for growing cash crops employing cheap Sotho labour was forcibly taken from the Sotho people, and the food sold to Basotho who have no option with no arable land of their own. In a way, the Sotho were captured by the Boers of the Free State.6

Later on, Moshoeshoe sought and was granted British recognition and protection, together with Botswana and Swaziland. Before then, the Sotho kings were answerable to the people. With British “protection” also came the British model of the monarch in which the people were answerable to the monarch. This was the second turning point in Lesotho’s troubled history and most important in the relationship between the monarch and the people. Power shifted from the people to the monarch, and this explains four factors: (1) the constitutional provision which reigns in the monarch and renders it ceremonial, (2) the monarch’s desperate moves to seek political influence through aligning and realigning itself with the various military factions and political alliances in Lesotho politics, (3) the Basotho’s unhappiness with the present monarch which they rightly view as a colonial creation meant to serve and preserve the monarch and not the people, and (4) it partly accounts for the failure of the constitutional monarch model in Lesotho, which before the importation of the British model was a rotational federal type of monarchy that was not under Moshoeshoe but owed him allegiance. The current British model of a constitutional monarch system is simply alien to the Basotho, and it creates fertile grounds for the emergence of political and military factions. According to it, the king is the head of state but does not actively participate in political activities while the prime minister is the head of government with executive authority.

On their part, the British colonialists wanted a stable monarch in Lesotho, one with a predictable lineage, and hence easy for them to control. This is a typical manifestation of coloniality of power, which divides and rules. At independence in 1965, the poorly lived experience of the Basotho continued; the only difference was that Lesotho was now being ruled by blacks who were mainly controlled by their only neighbour, South Africa. The Moshoeshoe dynasty as we know it today was thus firmed at independence and remains a British colonial project while the military remain a South African project. On their part, the political elites in Lesotho did not bother to overturn this political system for various reasons; the major one being that such a system allowed politicians to continue to have a hold on the monarchy. Without any real power, the monarchy usually sides with the military or sections of the political elite to find continued relevance, hence the argument being made here that the relationship between the monarchy, and the military in Lesotho is that of legitimisation, delegitimisation, and relegitimisation.

This has led to a series of coups which will be briefly discussed below. The first coup occurred in 1970 when then-Prime Minister Chief Leabua Jonathan annulled the election result and seized power after the military’s preferred candidate lost to Ntsu Mokhehle of the Basotho Congress Party. In this case, the chief seized power when a candidate he did not support won the election with the backing of the army. The second coup occurred in January 1986 when King Moshoeshoe II and a faction of the military led by Gen Justin Lekhanya took power. The king was installed by the military as the country’s leader and he issued Lesotho Order (No. 2) of 1986, which vested all executive and legislative power in himself, the king. The king was to rule with the help of a six-member military council headed by Maj Gen Justin Metsing Lekhanya.7 The king also passed the Suspension of Political Activities Order No. 4 of 1986, which all but banned any political activity.8 This military/monarchy antagonism was to end in a bitter separation as they blamed each other for the delays in returning power to a democratically elected civilian government. This constitutes what this paper termed the legitimation, delegitimation, and relegitimation of the monarch-military relationship.

The third coup occurred in February 1990 when a power struggle emerged within the monarch–military alliances, forcing King Moshoeshoe II into exile in Sweden. Others sarcastically said the king was on a sabbatical in England.9 Another coup occurred in August 1994 when King Letsie III staged a coup backed by a military faction to ouster the democratically elected leader, Ntsu Mokhehle. Within a year, in January 1995, Moshoeshoe II was reinstated by the military as the king. Three years of relative peace were ended in September 1998 by an army mutiny by junior officers. The latest, and certainly not the last, coup occurred in September 2014, with the then-Prime Minister Thabane as the target. These coups bring to the fore the question about the role of the monarch in Lesotho politics.

Politically, the debate on the role of the monarch in postcolonial Lesotho started in the early 1960s with two predominant camps. The first camp consisted of the Basotho Congress Party (BCP), which was the predominant nationalist party and wanted the monarch to be a constitutional monarch, with the military falling under the prime minster. They wanted the king to have no executive powers. The second group consisted of the Basotho National Party (BNP)—another nationalist movement—which wanted the king to have executive powers and be in full command of the security forces. The rationale was that if a conflict was to occur between any two political parties, there would be a need for one neutral person, like the king, controlling the army.

To this day, the question of why Basotho nationalists were so preoccupied with the occurrence of conflict in postcolonial Lesotho remains unanswered. However, things changed when the BNP won the elections, and the BCP lost. Suddenly, sentiments were reversed, with the BNP now wanting the military to be under the prime minister and not the king, probably because it had won the elections so it wanted to control the army. The BCP also suddenly started clamouring for the king to assume full control of the army because it saw this as the only way in which it could have official access to the military. The BNP was surprised that it had won the elections, while the BCP for its part was surprised that it had lost the elections. The surprise election results fuelled dishonesty among Basotho politicians, and they increasingly sought to align themselves with the army, with those crowded out reverting to the police as a source of power. This partially explains the army-police clashes in Lesotho. Such political practises relegate ideology and other political considerations to a peripheral status as the control of the military becomes the ultimate political possession.

Is the Lesotho Problem a Lesotho Problem?

By and large, Lesotho’s problems can be itemised as persistent hunger, high HIV and AIDS rates, over dependence on South African migrant labour and foreign aid, poor human security, unstable government, chronic political violence, poor economic growth, and a political climate in which political parties failed to mature. A sulking and politically ignored monarch which tries to remain politically relevant by siding with various political coalitions and certain branches of the security forces adds to the complications of the Lesotho problem, as does the national interest and role of Lesotho’s only neighbour, South Africa. That South Africa’s economic hub—Gauteng province— relies heavily on Lesotho’s water explains Pretoria’s repeated attempts to shape Lesotho’s leadership.10

Responding directly to the question: is the Lesotho problem a Lesotho problem? The answer is no, the Lesotho problem is a coloniality problem and it is a South African problem. As way back as 1965, Michael Ward rightly observed that Lesotho was an economic hostage of South Africa. To that I will add South Africa’s unwillingness to release Lesotho from this hostage situation. Thus in 1965, upon ‘independence’ Lesotho moved from British colonialism to South African hostage, this is termed coloniality. Ward noted:

But it is clear from even the most cursory examination of the economic situation that Lesotho will become more and more economically dependent upon South Africa—irrespective of the political party in power. As an enclave of South Africa, Lesotho has always been closely integrated economically with the Republic by virtue of its peculiar geographical position. This, together with the country’s extreme climate and inhospitable terrain, enforces an external dependence which makes nonsense of political desires for complete self-sufficiency .11

Lesotho’s dependence on South Africa for virtually everything is neither voluntary nor symbiotic, but one that is forced and maintained by South Africa through systemic violence. This interpretation is at variance with that of the then High Commissioner in London who noted that Lesotho was a “prisoner of geography.”12 South Africa benefits from instability in Lesotho in various ways; migrant labour for the mine, cheap water from a desperate neighbour, and bigger markets for South African goods with unfettered access to the Lesotho market.

Reconceptualising Military Coups in Lesotho

There are three ways of analysing the recurrence of military coups in Lesotho. Firstly, there is the legal perspective in which these military coups are viewed as a series of unconstitutional changes in government; secondly, there is the liberal perspective, which looks at the matter in simplistic terms and reduces the problem to Lesotho being a fragile democracy; and finally, the decolonial perspective, which is being advocated for in these pages and analyses these military coups as the continued work of the colonial matrices of power, knowledge, and being.

A number of theories and explanations have been used to account for the prevalence of military coups in Lesotho. Most of these theories lead to more questions while the original one remains partially answered. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, explained the behaviour of the postcolonial state as one best known for aberrant behaviour such as repression, brutality, corruption, inefficiency, and failure to promote the collective well-being of its citizens.13 But what accounts for the aberrant behaviour of the African state is still illusive at scholarship.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni further noted that a number of scholars responded to this question by articulating what he termed an “African exceptionalism” thesis. This thesis is premised on a “static, cultural relativist reading of the African condition and development.”14 He singled out the explanation by Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz as efficacious in analysing the general problems facing postcolonial African countries. Chabal and Daloz argue that “development in Africa is informed by a different logic to that which shaped the Western world.” For them, development or lack of it is a direct result of Africa’s obsession with short-term consumption (the politics of the belly). They further contend that Africa suffers from a perennial preference for reliance, if not dependence, on outside resources rather than productive activities or proper savings. For this analysis, while that is true, these are colonially imposed snares which trapped Lesotho into its current political quagmire. Finally, Chabal and Daloz argue that what appears as disorder to outsiders is actually order to the African beholder.

Chabal and Daloz’s arguments lead one to a seemingly simple yet sophisticated question: what is the problem with Lesotho? Is the Lesotho problem a Lesotho problem? The legal perspective, as alluded to earlier on, analyses the Lesotho problem as a legal challenge, as a series of unconstitutional changes in governments. This legalistic perspective is anchored in the African Union’s (AU) five categories of unconstitutional changes of government. According to Dirk Kotze, these are: (1) putsch or coups against democratically elected governments (for example, the various coups in Lesotho), (2) intervention by mercenaries to replace democratically elected governments, (3) the replacement of a democratically elected government by armed dissidents or rebels, (4) the refusal to accept the results of a legitimate election or the refusal by an incumbent government to hand over power to the winning candidate or party (for example, Madagascar’s Andry Rajoelina refused to hand over power to winning President Marc Ravalomanana in 2009), and (5) the elimination of competition by disqualifying candidates (for example, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore in 2014).15

The AU classification of unconstitutional changes of government does not include the removal from office by popular uprising such as the overthrowing of the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia on 14 January 2011 and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011. The major shortcoming with this legalistic view is that it equates the holding of elections to the existence of democracy and that an elected government is a legitimate government. The unqualified classification of elections as free and fair or free and credible exacerbates the confusion and creates incentives for elections to be manipulated. As witnessed in the Zimbabwe 2012 elections, the low threshold of free and fair elections effectively renders most elections free and fair, even the most scandalous ones. A case in point is Hosni Mubarak’s 97 percent landslide victory in 2005 and a similar 97 percent victory in the 2010 parliamentary elections, which was followed by popular uprisings which led to his ouster in 2011.16 So porous are the African Union provisions that they fail to recognise the role of internal armed conflicts in unconstitutionally removing governments. Such a framework cannot be relied on if one is to properly diagnose the underlying problems which causes Lesotho’s pandemic coups.

The liberal democratic perspective views military coups in Lesotho as a sign of the lack of a consolidated democracy. Proponents of this perspective, such as Afrobarometer, use empirical data to support their view that there is no democracy in Lesotho. Parameters used in gathering such data include the proportion of respondents who reject military rule, prefer democracy, prefer multiparty rule, prefer to choose their leaders in elections, and prefer to have the parliament make the rules.17 This is a good descriptive framework of what the Basotho prefer with little or no analysis of the reasons behind the indicated preferences, causalities of the lack of democracy or the recurrence of military coups. Put simply, the problem with democracy in Lesotho is that there is no democracy. It is very rare that a country’s democracy is underwritten by other countries. This flies in the face of the seminal concept of state sovereignty. The moment that democracy is imposed on a country, it ceases to be democracy and becomes something else, maybe, kakistocracy, plutocracy, or mobocracy.18 The underwriting of Lesotho’s democracy by South Africa translates to coloniality of power where real power resides with the latter as it did during colonialism where the apartheid regime directly intervened in Lesotho to protect its national interest.

This article offers an alternative perspective to the above, that is, the decolonial perspective. Simply defined, coloniality is the continued existence of the colonial matrices of power long after the official end of colonisation. Nelson Maldonado-Torres puts it thus, “. . . coloniality is an invisible power structure that sustains colonial relations of exploitation and domination long after the end of direct colonialism.”19 The deployment of the decolonial perspective helps in understanding the distinction between colonisation, decolonisation and coloniality. As a continuation of colonisation, coloniality stands on three legs—coloniality of knowledge, power and being.

Of the three legs, coloniality of power is efficacious in explaining monarch-military relations in Lesotho. Postulated by Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker Anibal Quijano, the term denotes the colonial structures of power, control, and hegemony imposed mainly by Europe and America on the global south which continues to operate through the control of authority, labour, sexuality and subjectivity.20 Coloniality of power makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for development to occur in Lesotho as the country remains trapped by its former colonisers. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that coloniality of power:

. . . has positioned Africa at the interface between different value systems and different forms of logic: Western and African; urban and rural; patriarchal and matriarchal; religious and secular; nationalist and tribal/ethnic; modern and traditional; progressive and conservative; cultural and technical. . . . Until today, Western values and concepts coexist uneasily with African concepts, partly because colonialism manipulated and deployed both Western and African concepts as tools of control, domination, and subjection, destroying some of the concepts and values originating in pre-colonial Africa and re-inventing others.21

Ndlovu-Gatsheni further located the effect of the above as the creation of a clique of African elites “who dream in both western and African languages.”22 These African elites became the leaders of the decolonisation process and subsequently the leaders of the postcolonial states in Africa. The challenges that face these African elites are numerous but can be summarised as trying to use a colonial mind to decolonise itself. The product is recurrent coups and an entrenched culture of looting akin to primitive accumulation. Thus, countries like Lesotho must choose either to be traditional or western and not to try and be both because they end up being neither of the two as is the case right now. Lessons from other countries such as Japan are useful for Lesotho in this regard. An analysis of the Japanese model demonstrates that it is possible to develop a hybrid political system in which certain cultural aspects are mixed with modern democratic practices to generate a political environment in which culture and tradition play complementary and not competing roles.

That is, the monarchy must play a stronger role in the politics of Lesotho and cease to perform mere titular ceremonial functions, but first it needs to revert to the status quo ante wherein the monarch was answerable to the people and vice versa. Constitutional provisions which allow the prime minister to bypass the king must be reversed, with the king being allowed to have more powers than the prime minister. These provisions render the king ineffective when it comes to making decisions regarding major political issues.

Towards an Explanation of Lesotho’s Recurrent Coups

It is difficult to comprehend the causality of six military coups in less than 40 years of independent rule in a country that is monolingual and monocultural, tenets which tend to foster unity and nation-building, resulting in a more efficient state. It must be admitted from the outset that the 2014 coup was disputed by the Lesotho military and the opposition.23 By contrast, scholars such as Martin Rupiya argue that what happened suited every definition of a military coup.24 If it was not a genuine military coup, then what exactly happened and why? If it was stage-managed, why did that stage management occur? Contrary to Rupiya’s views, this article argues that what happened was a stage-managed coup which was meant to create an environment consistent with the views and fears established by Thabane. This section explains the likely rationale for the stage-managed 2014 coup in Lesotho.

Theoretically, a military coup is an irregular transfer of state power by the regular armed forces or internal security forces through the use or threat of force.25 What cast doubts on the authenticity of the October 2014 Lesotho coup were the events preceding the coup. Thabane had just dissolved Parliament which was about to pass a vote of no confidence against his failure to control the feuding parties in the two-year-old coalition government. This was the chief reason why it is widely argued that he stage-managed the coup to create the impression that he was being persecuted by his political opponents, hence giving him a legitimate reason to dissolve parliament. In other words, Thabane dissolved Parliament before it passed a vote of no confidence in him.

The popularity of Deputy Prime Minister Mothetjoa Metsing was soaring, and Thabane was worried that his deputy would overthrow him and move on to form a new coalition that would oust him. Hence, the clash can be interpreted as a clash between the army which backed Deputy Prime Minister Metsing and the police force which largely supported Prime Minister Thabane. In a bid to stamp his authority on the military, Thabane had fired the Lesotho Defence Force commander, Lt Gen Kennedy Tlali Kamoli, and replaced him with Brig Gen Maaparankoe Mahao. This move backfired with Lieutenant General Kamoli teaming up with Deputy Prime Minister Metsing to mobilise Parliament to pass a vote of no confidence in Thabane. So how does one make sense of all this? Below are four possible explanations.

1. Of Instrumentalised State Institutions

The military has been instrumentalised to the point where it is now a willing tool at the disposal of top army officials and politicians for use against their rivals. Those politicians lacking support of the military quickly seize the police as an alternative instrument and source of power. After being instrumentalised, the military then instrumentalised itself, that is, it moved from being a politicised, partisan institute to governing the country in its own name. Simply put, the military in Lesotho overshot its mandate, accordingly abusing its structures, mechanism and authority. However, this perspective does not fully explain the role of the monarch.

2. A Constitutionally Weakened Monarchy

The constitution of Lesotho incapacitates the monarchy as it outlaws any political involvement by the monarchy.26 His majesty is merely a titular rubber stamp of the prime minister and Parliament. With the king’s hands tied by the constitution, His Excellency is always busy trying to be seen as not siding with either side in Lesotho’s politics. The weakening of the king via the constitution has placed him in the position of a mere spectator, with the military and the government being the only institutions with real power. Accordingly, Schedule 1 of the Constitution of Lesotho delivers the most immobilising blow to the monarchy, as the Oath of Office reads:

In the presence of Almighty God and in the full realisation of the responsibilities and duties of the high office of King (Regent) and of the binding nature and binding force of this Oath, I do swear that I will obey and observe the provisions of the Constitution and all other laws of Lesotho, that I will discharge my duties in such manner as to preserve the character of the monarchy as a symbol of the unity of the Basotho Nation, and that I will accordingly abstain from involving the monarchy in any way in politics, or with any political party or group.

SO HELP ME GOD.27

The eunuchisation of the monarchy gave the king an incentive to form alliances with the military so he could have control over political developments in Lesotho. This monarch–military romance started around 1986 when the military ousted the democratically elected leader of the BCP, Ntsu Mokhehle. Thus, the monarchy is now largely viewed as a political contestant, albeit as a junior partner to the military and politicians. The coups in Lesotho can be explained as emanating from the lack of a solution to previous coups. SADC has consistently failed to fully address the recurrence of military coups in Lesotho. Instead, piecemeal compromises have always been deployed as stop-gap measures, leaving the original problems unsolved. SADC’s obsession with elections as a panacea to governance problems in the region is puzzling. After the February 2015 elections, Lesotho still faced the same problems and the risks of becoming a failed state, as it currently sits in the “high warning” stage on the Fragile States Index.28 It is ranked number 72 out of 172 countries, with Swaziland ranked 51, the Democratic Republic of Congo 4th and South Sudan 1st. Only 6 out of 55 African states are rated worse than Lesotho.

The role of outsiders in the recurrence of military coups in Lesotho cannot be overemphasised. Lesotho, being completely surrounded by South Africa, depends on the revenue it generates from the sale of water from the Lesotho Highlands to South Africa’s water utility company Rand Water. As such, South Africa has a direct permanent interest in Lesotho, which renders it an integral part of what happens or does not happen in Lesotho. On the other hand, Lesotho is an impoverished country of about two million people whose workforce constitutes the bulk of the migrant workers working in South Africa’s mines. The overreliance of the Basotho as migrant labourer in the mines of South Africa is a huge source of cheap labour for South African mines, a situation which must be sustained by continued instability, poverty and general lack of development in Lesotho. The sustenance of these asymmetrical colonial matrices of power lies at the core coloniality of power.

The Lesotho military has a long relationship with the apartheid regime while the Basotho mineworkers form the bulk of South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). NUM is an affiliate of the trade union federation, the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), of which COSATU is a tripartite member in the South African ruling alliance comprising the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and COSATU. This relationship renders Basotho mine workers key protagonists in South African politics, especially when it comes to participating in protracted mine strikes which have a devastating impact on the South African economy. By destabilising the Lesotho economy, South Africa will be trying to make conditions unbearable in Lesotho, such that in cases of protracted strikes, the mine workers will be left with no option but to return to work.

Internal squabbles and bickering with the Royal Lesotho Defence Force (RLDF) is one of the major internal contributing factors to the recurrence of coups in Lesotho. The rank and file of the RLDF are constantly complaining about low wages and poor working conditions (obviously, they compare their conditions with those of their counterparts in the South African National Defence Force. This makes the rank and file of the RLDF willing accomplices in the execution of any coups in which they will be promised better salaries and working conditions. An extreme version of this scenario is one that argues that junior army officers may actually be responsible for instigating the coups, as demonstrated by their willingness to support the various factions in Lesotho’s politics including the monarchy.

3. Incompetent, Weak Political Parties and Ever Changing Alliances

When in power, Lesotho’s political parties fail to reign in the military and actually become subservient to it. Political parties in Lesotho have consistently failed to institutionalise themselves. They have not managed to crystallise themselves in a manner that will result in them stabilising political behaviour in Lesotho. Consequently, political parties in Lesotho have lost their connection with the population and, with fragmented party structures in place, party politics in Lesotho is all about leadership jostling.29 This is in stark contrast to the organisation of the RLDF, which emerges as the most dominant institution in Lesotho politics. It is not surprising that Lesotho has 21 political parties in a country of just over 2 million people and 850,000 voters. For some, politics is the only way to earn a living in Lesotho, hence the endless proliferation of political parties with no following or structures. In the end, the military feels duty bound to control this “industry.” The incompetence of these political parties is manifest in their difference, which is only in terms of official colours; everything else is more of the same. Additionally, these political parties lack internal democracy, and expecting them to run the country democratically is expecting too much from them. Such lack of democratic tendencies at the political party level is a fertile breeding ground for military coups. While plausible, this perspective exonerates colonialism from its role in the Lesotho crises.

4. Towards a Decolonial Explanation of Lesotho’s Coups

From a decolonial perspective, the causes of the various Lesotho coups are rooted in coloniality. The British colonialists created the Moshoeshoe dynasty which replaced the federal chieftainship that existed before conquest. This angered other kingdoms which were alienated in the process. This discontent at being dethroned remains a contentious issue in Lesotho politics today. Secondly, the lack of genuine development in pursuit of the Truman type of developmentalism has left Lesotho and the Basotho reeling in poverty and “undevelopment.” Truman developmentalism is the process of westernising nonwesterners through various methodologies, “missionarism,” forced democratisation and various forms of development aid.30 This is in contrast to the 1955 Bandung Conference definition which sees development as the attainment of freedom from the political, economic, ideological, epistemological and social domination that was installed by colonialism and coloniality.31 In other words, Lesotho’s problems are rooted in pursuing the wrong type of development, a development which “undevelops” it. Real development is the elimination of coloniality. Of course, there is a paucity of ideas in Lesotho on how to take the country forward. This results from the obnoxious task of using a decolonised mind to decolonise itself.

The colonial project was effective in creating what Mamdani terms “bifurcated states” inhabited by two distinctive sets of populations, citizens and subjects.32 Mamdani argues that the crisis with postcolonial Africa emanates not from how it was exploited but how it was governed. That is, it was governed by colonialists so that it became ungovernable. For him, the colonial government created and decentralised despotism, a phenomenon synonymous with Lesotho’s problems today. Chiefs were tamed and turned against their people, becoming native informers and gatekeepers for the colonial state. Elsewhere in Africa, tribal differences were turned into a colonial resource called ethnicity. At “independence,” Lesotho was faced with hard choices. Mamdani characterised these choices as either to co-op the decentralise despots or to smash them.33 The despots had mastered the art of oppressing the people from their creators and they coalesced and formed today’s political, military and monarch elites in Lesotho.

Citizens had rights and subjects suffered extreme deprivation of their rights to everything including the right to rights. Tribes were refused the “space to coalesce into a majority identity, by fracturing them into different and competing minitribes and minorities.”34 In Lesotho, this took the form of fracturing the many chieftainships which had beforehand coexisted for many decades operating on a rotational federal basis. This imposition of a single king actually constituted the centralisation of traditional power into one family. Closely linked to the fragmentation of these chieftainships was the militarisation of most aspects of the Basotho people. This was meant to discipline the colonial subjects. To that effect, Mbembe is correct in noting that, “. . . the colonial state model was, in theory as in practice, the exact opposite of the liberal model of discussion or deliberation.”35 He further notes the forms of violence that were used against the natives. These were the “foundational violence” which authorised the right of conquest and had an “instituting function” of creating Africans as its targets; the “legitimating violence,” which was used after conquest to construct the colonial order and routinise colonial reality; and the “maintenance violence,” which was infused into colonial institutions and cultures and used to ensure their perpetuation.36 The recurrence of coups in Lesotho today is a continuation of Mbembe’s “maintenance violence,” which in essence maintains Lesotho and Basotho as coloniality subjects.37 Violence in Lesotho is efficacious in allocating and reallocating power and disciplining antisystemic natives such as those agitating for the Bandung type of development.

The corruptness of Lesotho’s elites is undeniable. However, one has to trace its roots in order to fully comprehend its magnitude. Colonisation was a grand corrupt system, one which laid the foundation for today’s primitive accumulation tendencies among Lesotho’s elites. Having been exposed only to corrupt systems, it is not surprising that Lesotho’s elites are corrupt, power hungry and overtly scandalous because such that is all they know. The state was never structured to serve the people except the elites; it was equally structured to be ungovernable, unsustainable and unproductive. It is extroverted towards serving South Africa and the only source of power is the barracks underwritten by South Africa.

The global responses to Lesotho’s problems are equally problematic. The notorious World Bank’s Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) was harmful as it made the poor poorer and left the country worse off in a balance of payment crisis.38 The country experienced overall negative growth of about 1.5 percent during the ESAP years and, to date, the economy has never recovered. With a sabotaged, “dysfunctional, malfunctional and unfunctional” economy, the only way to distribute the little available resources is by force and those who feel marginalised will respond by deploying the military.39

Possible Solutions to the Lesotho Problem

From a liberal perspective, a number of possible solutions to the recurrence of military coups in Lesotho can be postulated. The first is the need for constitutional reforms that remove the harnesses placed on the monarch, that is, the removal of Schedule 1 of the Constitution of Lesotho. This would have the effect of giving the monarchy political power and thus curtailing the monarch’s proclivity to turn to the barracks to find a political voice. Other reform suggestions worth noting come from politicians, notably Ntsu Mokhele, who suggested the abolition of the independent kingdom in favour of integration into South Africa. Termed the “Eire option” by James Cobbe, the idea is modelled on the United Kingdom/Eire arrangement.40 In terms of this arrangement, the Basotho would have similar rights to South Africans while the two countries would retain their independence. However, this is an idea that will be contested by South Africa, which harbours resentment for the high immigrant rates from their economically poor neighbours, especially as immigrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique have already faced various episodes of Afrophobia.41

Another suggestion is the development of economic programmes that reduce Lesotho’s heavy dependency on foreign aid, migrant labour and revenue from the Lesotho Highlands water project. One such project would be the development of the tourism sector of Lesotho, whose potential to prop up the country’s economy is undoubted. Military institutional reforms led by SADC and the AU aimed at, among other things, redefining the mandate of the RLDF away from “throning and dethroning” kings to maintaining the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the kingdom. These efforts must be led by the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security and the Inter-State Defence and Security Committee. With Lesotho facing no immediate military threat, the time to reform the military is now. These reforms must scale down the military, thereby reducing the pressure on the fiscus, which for years has been mounting from the defence sector while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the army. The danger of this option is that, being used to being the kingmakers, the military will certainly resist any moves meant to disempower them by simply staging a coup and installing either one of their own or a compliant politician who poses no threat to the military.

Broader democratisation is desirable as a long-term solution to Lesotho’s fragile democracy, which manifests in many forms including recurrent military coups. An empowered monarch would play an oversight role, as in the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Thailand. This is a movement away from the current post-1994 arrangement, which South Africa acts as the guarantors/sponsor of Lesotho’s democracy. Stable democracy need not be imported but grown locally and organically. This will, in turn, lead to civil supremacy over military power.

Conclusion

This article qualified the recurrence of military coups in Lesotho using three perspectives: the legal, liberal democratic, and decolonial perspectives. It noted that the decolonial perspective is the most efficacious in explaining the perennial problems of political instability in Lesotho, a phenomenon which emanates from the instrumentalisation of the army by the elites. In turn, this problem was traced back to the colonial era when Britain altered the nature of the monarch as part of the colonisation process of Lesotho by “manufacturing” the Moshoeshoe dynasty. The tug of war involving the monarch and the politicians over the control of the armed forces is merely a manifestation of the problem caused by coloniality of power. Such problems bedevil not only Lesotho, but all the formerly colonised countries, and must be explored using decolonial epistemologies so that the full extent of the problem can be comprehended. This needs to happen before any hasty prescriptions are offered; such prescriptions have failed since they were alternatives within as opposed to alternative to the political system. Decoloniality is recommended as an epistemology necessary in the disentanglement of those people who continue to live as colonial subjects from the colonial matrices of power—millennia.

Notes

1. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). See also Fako Johnson Likoti, “The 1998 Military Intervention in Lesotho: SADC Peace Mission or Resource War?,” International Peacekeeping 14, no. 2 (2007) 251–63, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13533310601150875.

2. Coloniality of power is a concept coined by Anibal Quijano to denote the resilient and interrelating practices of colonialism in power relations, social orders, and forms of knowledge that persist long after the official end of colonialism.

3. Michael Amoah, Nationalism, Globalisation and Africa (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011), 73.

4. Pat McGowan and Thomas H. Johnson, “Sixty Coups in Thirty Years—Further Evidence Regarding African Military Coups d’Etat,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 24, no. 3 (September 1986): 539–46, doi.org/10.1017 /S0022278X00007175. See also Thomas H. Johnson, Robert O. Slater, and Pat McGowan, “Explaining African Military Coups d’Etat, 1960–1982,” The American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (September 1984), 622–40, doi .org/10.2307/1961833.

5. Martin Rupiya and Mpho Mothoagae, “Tracking Lesotho’s Sixth Military Coup, 30 August 2014: What Has Changed?,” in The New African Civil-Military Relations, eds. Martin Rupiya, Gorden Moyo, and Henrick Laugesen (Pretoria, South Africa: The African Public Policy and Research Institute, 2015), 186–260.

6. GlobalSecurity.org, “Basotho Wars (1858–68),” accessed 25 July 2017, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/basotho.htm.

7. Khabele Matlosa and Neville W. Pule, “The Military in Lesotho,” African Security Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 62–74, doi.org/10.1080/10246029.2001.9627937.

8. Ibid., 65.

9. Tefetso Mothibe, “Lesotho: The Rise and Fall of Military-Monarchy Sharing: 1986–1990,” Africa Insight 20, no. 4 (1990), 242–46, http://repository.hsrc.ac.za/handle/20.500.11910/155.

10. For example, Leabua Jonathan, Lesotho’s prime minister during independence in 1965, was helped by South Africa’s prime minister B. J. Vorster to hold onto power after he faced electoral defeat in the 1970 elections. Vorster’s apartheid regime funded Jonathan’s military until 1982 when Jonathan criticised Vorster who responded ruthlessly by withdrawing all the military support and killing many refugees and innocent Basotho civilians.

11. Michael Ward, “Economic Independence for Lesotho?,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 5, no. 3 (1967): 355–368, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-modern-african-studies/issue/386290CE1E22E5E702C0A839D03AE48D.

12. Ibid., 355.

13. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Coloniality of Power in Development Studies and the Impact of Global Imperial Designs on Africa,” The Australasian Review of African Studies 33 (October 2012): 155–67.

14. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s “Coloniality of Power,” 161.

15. Dirk Kotze, “Africa’s Concept of ‘Unconstitutional Change of Government:’ How Appropriate?,” Conflict Trends 4, no. 3 (2013): 3–10, http://journals.co.za/content/accordc/2013/4/EJC146700.

16. Ibid., 4.

17. Michael Bratton and Wonbin Cho, “Where Is Africa Going? Views from Below: A Compendium of Trends in Public Opinion in 12 African Countries, 1999–2006” (Afrobarometer working paper no. 60, Cape Town 8001 South Africa, May 2006), http://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Working%20paper/AfropaperNo60.pdf.

18. There are, however, some instances in which imposed democracy became sustained, genuine democracy. These rare cases include Germany and Japan after World War II.

19. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (2007), 240–70, doi .org/10.1080/09502380601162548.

20. Anibal Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power and Social Classification,” Journal of World-Systems Research 6, no. 2 (2000): 342–86, https://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf.

21. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of Power, 14.

22. Ibid.

23. The 2014 “coup” was generally interpreted by various governments such as the United States and South Africa as a clash between the police and the army.

24. Martin Rupiya and Mpho Mothoagae, “Tracking Lesotho’s Sixth Military Coup, 30 August 2014: What Has Changed” in The New African Civil Military Relations, Rupiya, Gordon Moyo, and Henrik Laugesen, eds. (Pretoria, South Africa: African Public Policy and Research Institute, 2015), 189.

25. Francis Deng et al., Identity, Diversity, and Constitutionalism in Africa (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2008), 119.

26. Chapter 5 of the Lesotho Constitution section 99(4) specifically mentions that “no act of the King shall be valid to the extent that it is inconsistent with an act deemed to be his act by virtue of subsection 2 or 3.”

27. Lesotho Constitution, Schedule 1, Section 51, Oath of Office of the King or Regent, http://www.unesco .org/education/edurights/media/docs/5f117d45be0d3d8ed8e573ee1db7db551ad68565.pdf.

28. The Fragile States Index measures the fragility of states and has the following 11 categories (in descending order): very high alert, high alert, alert, very high warning, high warning, warning, less stable, stable, very stable, sustainable, and very sustainable.

29. Wole Olayele, Democratic Consolidation and Political Parties in Lesotho: Realising Effective and Sustainable Democratic Governance in Southern Africa and Beyond (Pretoria, South Africa: Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, 2003), 7.

30. Jack Healey, “Lesotho Development Aid Needs New Direction,” Lesotho Times, 6 February 2016, http://www.lestimes.com/lesotho-development-aid-needs-new-direction/.

31. Thandika Mkandawire, quoted in Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Coloniality of Power in Development Studies and the Impact of Global Imperial Designs on Africa,” The Australasian Review of African Studies 33 (October 2012), 63.

32. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

33. Ibid.

34. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 87.

35. Achille Mbembe, On Private Indirect Government: State of the Literature (Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research, 2000), 6.

36. Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 108.

37. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Coloniality of Power in Development Studies,” 51.

38. Tabo Foula and Quentin Grafton, “Structural Adjustment in Lesotho: An Evaluation,” Journal of Policy Modeling 20, no. 6 (1998): 791–814, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4856280_Structural_Adjustment _in_Lesotho_An_Evaluation.

39. Ibid.

40. James Cobbe, “The Changing Nature of Dependence: Economic Problems in Lesotho,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 21, no. 2 (June 1983): 293–310, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of -modern-african-studies/article/the-changing-nature-of-dependence-economic-problems-in-lesotho/5F05D00A22F2043F6944B6B9FB6CC3FD.

41. Although not watertight, the term Afrophobia is preferred over xenophobia because hatred was expressed towards certain sections of immigrants and not the totality of them. Thus, past so-called xenophobia attacks in South Africa only targeted black immigrants predominantly from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Somali, Eritrea, Kenya, and Mozambique. Immigrants from the United States, United Kingdom, or any other European country were never attacked.

*Dr Everisto Benyera is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa. He holds a doctorate in African Politics from the same university and researches on transitional justice mechanisms focusing on traditional peacebuilding initiatives.

The first draft of this article was presented at a workshop on African Government Forces: New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, organized by the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, 1–2 December 2014.

Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni whose inaugural lecture titled “Coloniality of Power in Development Studies and the Impact of Global Imperial Designs on Africa” formed the crux of this article. I am equally indebted to Dr. Thabisi Hoeane of the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa for contextualising my analysis.

Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, International Politics and, US Foreign Policy

A Feminist Normative Analysis of the Libyan Intervention

Faith I. Okpotor, PhD*

In recent years, there have been a number of military humanitarian interventions on the African continent, including in Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and Libya—the latter of which the United States played a major role. A military humanitarian intervention is one that involves military action but is carried out for humanitarian reasons.1 The Libyan intervention was billed to protect civilians against the backdrop of the Libyan government’s crackdown on mass protests for democratic reforms in 2011 as part of the so-called Arab Spring. Entire cities and sections of the country faced the threat of a possible government onslaught. Thus, the United States pushed for the passage of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1973 that authorized the use of any means necessary to protect the civilian population.2 This effort paved the way for the involvement of a coalition of several nations, garnered some international support for, and provided a cloak of legitimacy for the operation. France and the United Kingdom carried out the initial air strikes meant to enforce the no-fly zone that prevented Col Muammar Gaddafi from launching bombing campaigns against segments of the Libyan population, especially in Benghazi. US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces later anchored the operation.

This intervention is particularly interesting when viewed in the context of the recent history of violence-driven humanitarian crises on the continent of Africa. After its unsuccessful military humanitarian intervention in Somalia, the United States chose to pass on other cases such as Rwanda, Darfur, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which almost a million Tutsis were slaughtered in about three months, represented such a failure on the part of humanity at large for standing idly by while this happened, that it popularized the human rights norm of responsibility to protect (R2P).3 The norm requires other nations to intervene, militarily if necessary, to protect a population against gross human rights violations and mass atrocity crimes, if a state has failed to do so, or is the actual violator. In such an instance, the state is considered to have forgone its right to sovereignty. The idea of R2P has in turn led to calls from activists, governments, regional organizations, and others to members of the international community and particularly the US government to engage in military humanitarian interventions.

Foreign policy practitioners, decision makers, and observers alike are to varying degrees concerned about US foreign policy regarding humanitarian interventions. Some of the contentious issues involve: whether human rights concerns are even compatible with foreign policy; whether the United States can afford humanitarian interventions; and the selectivity versus consistency debate—why the United States chooses to intervene at certain times or in certain contexts and not others.4 However, a feminist perspective and a gender lens expand this debate beyond concerns of affordability, compatibility, and consistency versus selectivity, including concerns about the gendered nature of humanitarian intervention and to question the security discourses associated with such interventions. This article is primarily concerned with the following question: what is the feminist normative perspective on the US policy of humanitarian intervention in general and the Libyan intervention in particular? It seeks to answer this question by providing a feminist normative assessment of the Libyan intervention through a discursive analysis of UNSC Resolution 1973 and related public statements by key US officials, using critical moral ethnography.

The resolution serves as an appropriate analytic site for a number of reasons. First, under international law, it legitimizes the Libyan intervention and grants the intervening forces legal authority. Second, its passage represents the first implementation of the R2P norm adopted as UNSC Resolution 1674 in 2006, which affirmed the UN’s “responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.”5 Third, US involvement in the passage and implementation of Resolution 1973 demonstrated the Obama administration’s commitment to multilateralism and burden sharing as expressed in the 2010 National Security Strategy, and therefore provides an avenue for analyzing contemporary US policy on humanitarian intervention.

Human Rights and US Foreign Policy: Compatibility, Consistency,and Selectivity

Repeated calls that the United States intervene in humanitarian crises around the world raise the issue of the compatibility of human rights concerns and responsibility to others with US foreign policy. Within human rights and IR scholarship, Donnelly identifies three arguments often put up against emphasizing human rights in foreign policy.6 First, the realist argument reduces international politics to a pursuit of power and the national interest (defined in material terms) among states in an anarchic environment. Therefore, concern for human rights that does not serve the national interest is problematic and weakens a state.7 For realists, human rights concerns are moral concerns that should be excluded from foreign policy considerations, or at least deemphasized, except when there is a strategic advantage to do so.

Second, statist or legalist arguments privilege sovereignty and state rights over human rights concerns, arguing that the human rights practices of any given state is its prerogative, and any interference with its internal affairs by other states is a violation of its sovereignty.8 A third argument against the compatibility of human rights and foreign policy is the relativist or pluralist argument, based on the principles of self-determination, international pluralism, and respect for cultural diversity. Any attempt to interfere with the human rights practices of other peoples is deemed moral imperialism.

In practical terms, US foreign policy practitioners and decision makers fall into three camps: those who favor active international involvement, those who do not,9 and a third, who foster active international involvement through multilateralism. Members of the first group have a variety of motivations, one being that US involvement would lead to overall good for the world. They argue that “order and peace would be stimulated by the dissemination of the notions of liberty and democracy. Attention to human rights in world politics would lead to the dissemination of these notions.”10 Another reason is they believe it is in the national interest of liberal democracies to spread their norms and values around the world, including human rights norms.11 Those who oppose active international involvement on the other hand, believe that US moral leadership is best expressed internationally by perfecting American society at home and serving as an indirect example to the world.12 Those who favor multilateralism argue that it is a better way to exercise both American strength and moral leadership, by carrying other nations along. Presidents of the United States have often fallen into one of these three camps. Examples of inward-looking presidents include Washington and Jefferson.13 Modern presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama have favored greater US involvement in the world, often involving human rights concerns, but have differed on how this involvement is expressed. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were more unilateralist for example, while George H. W. Bush and Obama were more multilateralist.14

A second debate involves selectivity versus consistency. There is no shortage of accusations that US foreign policy over the years has lacked consistency when it comes to issues of human rights.15 This usually pits utilitarians, who are “concerned with calculating relative costs and benefits, rather than rigidly following a moral law”against cosmopolitans, who emphasize a moral responsibility to all who suffer injustice, including human rights violations.16

The United States has chosen several ways to be selective in its foreign policy in general, and with respect to human rights in particular. First, it chooses to criticize the human rights records of some rights-violating countries and not others. For various strategic reasons, the United States has often chosen to ignore the poor human rights records of despotic leaders and in many cases even propped up some of those regimes. Examples include Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain, whose populations in the wake of the Arab Spring clamored for change; Pakistan, which was under a military dictatorship for a long time and where the military continues to hold significant political power; and presently in sub-Saharan African countries such as Uganda, and in the recent past, Ethiopia, the DRC and Liberia. The United States has also chosen to maintain economic relationships with countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, irrespective of their human rights records.17 Second, the United States emphasizes certain human rights and not others. For example, the United States chooses to emphasize civil and political rights, such as the right to vote and to own private property, while ignoring social, cultural and economic rights such as the right to basic education, food and labor rights.18 Third, and perhaps most controversial, is the choice of whether or not to embark upon a military humanitarian intervention. In recent times, the United States has been criticized for choosing to militarily intervene in certain cases of egregious human rights violations, including genocide, and not others.19 It intervened in Kosovo and Somalia, for example, but passed on Rwanda and Darfur.

It is important to note that feminist IR scholarship has expanded the debate surrounding humanitarian intervention vis-à-vis foreign policy beyond the aforementioned concerns to include discussions about feminizing the state, and postcolonial concerns of imperial domination. The next section is devoted to a review of feminist security scholarship on military humanitarian intervention.

Feminist International Relations and Military Humanitarian Intervention

Feminist IR scholarship is rooted in the epistemological commitment of using gender as a category of analysis.20 Feminists understand gender to mean the socially constructed characteristics (a set of discourses) that are presumed to be related to biological sex differences between men and women, that in turn lead to the superimposition of masculine characteristics, such as “strength, protection, rationality, aggression, public life, domination and leadership” on men, and feminine characteristics, such as “vulnerability, emotion, passivity, privacy, submission and care,” on women.21 This distinction between masculinity and femininity is not value-neutral, as masculine traits/masculinity are valorized and feminine traits/femininity are devalued in social and political life.22 Therefore, “to feminize something or someone is to directly subordinate that person, political entity, or idea, because values perceived as feminine are lower on the social hierarchy than values perceived as neutral or masculine.”23 Thus, feminists argue that a lot of social and political life and in fact, international politics, is based on “stereotypes, behavioral norms, expectations, and rules assigned to men and women,”24 and is therefore gendered.

Central to discourses of intervention, humanitarian or otherwise, is the idea of sovereign statehood, which historically has had varying meanings as monarchical sovereignty gave way to popular sovereignty.25 It is intertwined in what international relations professor Cynthia Weber calls the sovereignty/intervention boundary. 26 She argues that while the belief that sovereign authority resides in the people is now widely accepted, understandings of sovereignty in relation to representation and “just who the people are and who can legitimately speak for them” are constantly contested and constructed in international practice.27 Thus, the intervening masculinized state(s) acting on behalf of the international community, and on behalf of a universalized/masculinized idea of “the people” represented by man as a liberal democratic citizen, seize(s) authority and control from a government/state that is seen as no longer a legitimate representative of its people. This in turn rewrites the sovereignty and identity of the now feminized state upon which the intervention is carried out. To be clear, feminist scholars have portrayed the state as masculine and the purveyor of patriarchy and male dominance.28 Also, atrocities and violence against women are often the result of competing masculinities.29

Amidst the masculine domain of the state, however, there is a degree of masculinity, such that more powerful states are able to dominate and feminize weaker states.30 L. H. M. Ling, an international affairs professor at The New School, demonstrates such gradated masculinities in the West’s response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to 1998, in part a result of Asian capital adopting the hypermasculinized competition learned from the West. However, the West, through the liberal international order, responded by proposing reforms that led to buying up Asian capital at bankrupt prices, thereby disciplining Asian capitalism and using reforming crony capitalism as the operating logic through which Western dominance was reasserted.31 This move proceeded to “(re)feminize Asia by discrediting the region’s claim to a muscular, alternative capitalism.”32

Returning to the issue of intervention, while on the surface it appears laudable that helpless people are being protected from the dangers posed to them by their state, feminist interrogations ask such questions as: Who are the people on whose behalf intervention is carried out? Where are the women? Why this particular state and why now? V. Spike Peterson, a School of Government and Public Policy international relations professor at the University of Arizona, argues that the modern state structure as currently understood is gendered, with a masculine gender identity of sovereign state equivalent to sovereign man, masculinist state power “variously construed and/or manifested as authority, autonomy, sovereignty, or political identity.”33 This gendered state in turn reinforces dichotomous constructs like us/them, public/private, masculine/feminine, protector/protected.

Humanitarian intervention is usually hinged on the idea of protecting vulnerable civilians often portrayed as women and children. This has been problematized by feminist scholars as an example of essentializing and dichotomizing discourse that, on the one hand portrays women as necessarily pacifist, and on the other, serves as questionable justificatory logic for interventions.34 For example, to gain support from women’s groups for the war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration gave, as one of its reasons for going to war, the liberation and protection of Afghan women from the draconian policies of the Taliban;35 however, earlier attempts by feminist groups to call attention to the plight of Afghan women were ignored by the administration. In her discussion of the productive nature of the discourse surrounding who is civilian, political science professor Helen Kinsella argues that the shifting definition of noncombatants (who deserve protection during war) from Grotius’s “innocents” to the current accepted understanding of “civilians” as “women, children, old people and the sick,” invariably leads to discriminating against combatant women and failing to protect noncombatant men.36 Men of fighting age are presumed to be combatants regardless of their actual deeds leading to disastrous consequences. Examples include the massacre of noncombatant men in the Balkans,37 and the various cases of the US government picking up noncombatants with no hostile intentions towards the United States as prisoners of war from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom ended up in Guantanamo Bay.38

Therefore, gendered understandings of war (based on social and cultural interpretations of sex that portray women as weaker without the mental capacity to make decisions about war) leads to the exclusionary and discriminatory treatment of women, which in turn “prevents demobilized female combatants from receiving appropriate resources after conflict, and often hinders their successful reintegration within society.”39 In addition to unease about women being left out of the peace process in the aftermath of a military humanitarian intervention, feminist scholars and activists are also concerned that the intervention does not harm or worsen the lot of women.40 This concern is born out of the empirical reality that the security of women is significantly linked with the peacefulness of states, as well as the fact that the death toll on women resulting from all known cases of violence against women in the twentieth century dwarfs the known death tolls of all wars combined.41

Finally, a postcolonial feminist analysis of military humanitarian intervention would explore the racialized, gendered and class bases of power obscured and naturalized by traditional studies of world politics. It would interrogate the cultural politics of the colonial past, postcolonial present, and the accompanying contestations of global hierarchy built on colonial historical practices and imperialism.42 A postcolonial feminist analysis addresses how colonial historical practices shape world politics and the exercise of power in global, national, and local spaces, thus calling attention to the Eurocentrism embedded in the more powerful, masculine, Western state carrying out intervention against the less powerful, feminized, non-Western state. For example, discourse surrounding the EU’s late response to the Arab Spring uprisings in general, and to the Libyan crisis in particular, has focused not on humanitarian concerns but on the need to project power and assert itself as a strong player in its neighborhood.43

Methodology: Feminist Normative Political Theory

Feminist normative inquiry is concerned with the sociological analysis of gendered power relations with an emphasis on its practical implications for justice.44 Therefore, feminists interested in the ethical dimensions of IR must be willing to take on extensive sociological, ethnographic or economic research.45 It is “gender-focused but not exclusively women-centered.”46 Care ethicist Fiona Robinson argues that feminist normative theorizing has three main characteristics.47 First, it adopts a relational ontology. Second, its analysis reflects critically on the consequences of the social (or other) arrangements being studied using a particular feminist moral framework—an ethic of care. Third, it is based on a view of ethics that is different from the theoretical juridical (depicts morality as a set of law-like propositions that prescribe the behavior of a fully-formed moral agent) but instead is expressive-collaborative—culturally situated, practical, and interpersonal.

Adopting a relational ontology entails “regarding individuals as existing in, and morality arising out of, personal and social relations.”48 It involves recognizing that humans are both individual and social beings and therefore thinking of rights as relationships,49 and avoiding the dominant male-centered analysis that emphasizes individualism, rationality, autonomy, and independence.50 Thus, an ethic of care—based on the empirical reality that women define themselves in terms of human relationships and judge themselves on their ability to care—views rights as a legal, political and moral concept. Critically interrogating the consequences of social arrangements requires rejecting the idea common in traditional normative theory and rights-based philosophy that morality and ethics are distinct from the empirical world of politics and power. Instead, feminist normative theoretical analysis is based on “recognition of the intrinsic and inextricable relationship between ethics and politics/power.”51

Consequently, feminist ethical analysis must uncover gendered arrangements underlying accepted moral understandings and the authority structures that produce and support them; investigate the social sites of such moral views and the power relations embedded therein; be empirically grounded;52 and include discursive analysis “of the moral language used in local, legal, religious, customary, or policy documents, and the implications of that language for distributions of power and responsibility, and the existence or lack of consensus, participation, and trust of all actors involved.”53 It deviates from the universal, generalizable, abstract metatheorizing of traditional normative theory based on “canonical western moral philosophy—philosophical reflection of moral problems, supported by the work of other moral philosophers.” Rather, it is socially situated and focused on everyday contexts.54 Examples of such metatheorizing regarding humanitarian intervention by traditional normative theorists can be found in the works of John Rawls and Peter Singer.55

Robinson argues that in practice the feminist normative approach outlined above entails two kinds of methods: critical moral ethnography and mapping geographies of responsibility. This article focuses on the former in its analysis of the Libyan intervention. Critical moral ethnography involves two related aspects. First, it demands “an awareness of, and exploration into, the sociopolitical and cultural context in which moral contestation is taking place.”56 Therefore, a discussion about rights, for example, would require asking: whose idea of rights is promoted, for what purpose are they being promoted, and for whom? Relevant to this article, it also involves a discursive analysis of the use of rights language in policy documents.57 In this case, the policy document is UNSC Resolution 1973, which authorized the Libyan intervention. Secondly, it “requires looking critically, in the hope of moving toward transformation,” upholding the idea of moral criticism while eschewing moral objectivity. 58 Selma Sevenhuijsen, a professor in ethics and the politics of care in the Netherlands, et al., applies critical moral ethnography to the study of South African social welfare policy.59 Through a discursive analysis of a policy document—The White Paper for Social Welfare—they uncover its contradictions using a feminist ethic-of-care lens. While the document uses language that espouses social justice principles, they reveal that it places care within the framework of the family, which is ill-equipped to adequately address the society’s welfare needs. Thus, they argue that care be “positioned in notions of citizenship rather than family or community.”60 In the next section, this kind of discursive analysis is applied to the Libyan intervention, focusing on the authorizing document, as well as American policy in its drafting and implementation as articulated by key US officials.

US Foreign Policy, UNSC Resolution 1973, and the Libyan Intervention

UNSC Resolution 1973 was adopted on 17 March 2011 following calls from various segments of the international community and within the US government (like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham) for intervention in Libya. 61 Representatives of the Arab League on various news outlets called for the United States to enforce a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Gaddafi from carrying out aerial attacks on the opposition stronghold of Benghazi. The Arab League also officially called on the UN to take on the responsibility to protect civilians at risk. In addition, the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union expressed concern regarding the situation in Libya and set up an ad-hoc high-level committee to produce recommendations on how to resolve the crisis. Listed among the elements of a roadmap for the way forward in Libya agreed to at a 10 March 2011 meeting of African heads of state and the PSC was “dialogue between the Libyan parties and establishment of a consensual and inclusive transitional government.”62

Given what was often portrayed in the media as a vacillating response by the United States to the uprising in Egypt, a recognition of the prevailing state of US public opinion on foreign wars and foreign interventions, and a commitment to multilateralism and burden sharing as expressed in the 2010 National Security Strategy, the Obama administration, through UN Ambassador Susan Rice, pushed for an international response approved by the UN Security Council.63 The result was UNSC Resolution 1973. In the UNSC vote that authorized the resolution, there were 10 in favor (US, UK, France, Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Portugal, Nigeria, South Africa, and Gabon), three of whom were the permanent members, and five abstentions (China, Russia, Germany, India, and Brazil). China and Russia, both permanent members, have traditionally opposed military intervention. Among the many concerns that abstaining countries had were the following: the need for a peaceful resolution to the situation and the unintended consequences of armed intervention; unanswered questions about the specifics of how and by whom the provisions of the resolution would be implemented; concerns that the vote needed to be put off until the UN secretary general’s appointed envoy to Libya, Abdel-Elah Al-Khatib (who was appointed on 11 March) returned with his report of the situation on the ground; and concerns that the provisions in the resolution went beyond what was needed to protect civilians.

It is important at this juncture to note that the United States and Libya have shared a complex bilateral relationship that proceeded in four stages.64 The first stage was with the Libyan monarchy from the country’s independence until the revolution in 1969 that brought Gaddafi to power; the second was a period of active hostility between both countries during which Libya was considered a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States; the third stage was a period of rapprochement beginning in 2003 during which key US officials visited Gaddafi, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008, and Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins in 2009; and the fourth stage was the period beginning in 2011 with the popular uprising and opposition movement against Gaddafi’s government.

To get Gaddafi to back down from his crackdown on the opposition, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1970 on 26 February 2011, which referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court, imposed an arms embargo and other arms restrictions on the Libyan government, imposed target sanctions against key figures within the Libyan regime, provided for humanitarian assistance to areas of need in Libya, and committed to further review of the situation in Libya.65 However, by March, Gaddafi’s obstinacy had made him a political liability both at the UN and within the Arab League, even though despite his dismal human rights record as a dictator, he had enjoyed normal diplomatic relations with a majority of countries, including the United States. It is clear that it had become politically expedient to disavow Gaddafi, given the empirical fact that in nearby Sudan, President Omar Bashir’s government had also been killing innocent civilians in Darfur without receiving the same kind of attention from the international community. Therefore, Resolution 1973 was adopted. This analysis here is not an absolute condemnation of Resolution 1973, for it may indeed have saved some lives. Had such a concerted effort of international action been pursued in Rwanda or Sudan for example, massacres may have been prevented. The Libyan crisis, like in many other similar cases, is rife with grey areas and ambiguities that make clear-cut, right-wrong, declaratory moral statements difficult. Rather, this article pursues a critical analysis that interrogates the silences, contradictions, and omissions within the document, with a view to a transformation and improvement of the process in future cases demanding international action.

The language of UNSC 1973 expressly states that the intervention was to be carried out as a result of growing concern over “heavy civilian casualties,” to “ensure the protection of civilians,” and in response to the “demands of the Libyan people.” Adopting a feminist lens leads one to ask: who are the people, who are the civilians, and of course, feminist theorist Cynthia H. Enloe’s famous question, “where are the women?”66 By adopting the kind of universalizing language stated above, the resolution is gendered as it makes no mention of women, thus naturalizing their absence and implied sameness to men. This silencing is of particular importance given that women were prominently involved in the protests and uprising against the Gaddafi regime.67 There is at least one documented incident of a woman, Iman al-Obeidi, who claims to have been targeted and raped precisely because of her involvement in the protests.68 There are also reports of women being raped by Gaddafi’s troops on his orders, and some legal advocates argue they should be treated as wounded combatants, not as war victims.69 When the situation deteriorated into a full-blown civil conflict between the opposition and the Libyan government, many women in Benghazi, particularly those whose friends and family members were fighting the Libyan government, were actively involved in supporting the efforts of their male counterparts.70

Additionally, the omission of women runs counter to the aims of UNSC Resolution 1325, which specified the need to consider gender in all Security Council decision making, especially regarding issues of conflict, security and peace, and their impact on women in conflict zones.71 “It calls for the prosecution of crimes against women, increased protection of women and girls during war, the appointment of more women to UN peacekeeping operations and field missions, and an increase in women’s participation in decision-making processes at the regional, national and international level,” as well as “outlines actions to be taken by the secretary general, the Security Council, UN departments and member states to “mainstream gender” into peace and security policies and practices.”72 These include incorporating a gender perspective into all UN peacekeeping operations and providing for the protection, rights, and particular needs of women. These stipulations are missing from Resolution 1973.

The use of the blanket term civilians is problematic in a variety of ways. First, as discussed earlier, it has implications for who benefits from demobilization resources when hostilities cease, who is invited to peace talks, and could lead to discriminating against combatant women and inadequately (or not) caring for noncombatant men.73 Such contestations later became obvious as the new Libyan government tried to quell conflicts between various factions of former rebel fighters.74 Without expressly mentioning women, there is the naturalized, depoliticized assumption that all women are civilians and noncombatants. Furthermore, the principle of distinction (between civilian and combatant) is the lynchpin of international law especially as it relates to the laws of war and forms the basis for assigning responsibility for war crimes committed against civilians. 75 In a time of asymmetric warfare, the success or failure of military operations depends in large part on the ability to target combatants pretending to be civilians while evading their attacks.76 Resolution 1973 fails to uphold the principle of distinction.

Secondly, the resolution appears to, on the one hand, use the term civilians and civilian-populated areas to refer to all who opposed Gaddafi, not delineating between combatants and noncombatants. This is empirically inaccurate. Granted, it is the nature of modern urban warfare that there are no clear-cut battle lines, and fighting often takes place in residential areas, but in Benghazi, the population was not all civilian. It was made up of armed combatants and noncombatants all dressed as civilians. The combatants were battling the Libyan government, albeit outgunned and without clearly marked military uniforms, but they had confiscated munitions from formerly government-controlled munitions depots. On the other hand, this empirical muddling is further exacerbated by the contradictions within the resolution. It includes references to “an immediate cease-fire,” “the cessation of hostilities,” “a cease-fire and a complete end to violence,” which imply an armed struggled between at least two sides. It also called for an arms embargo against the Libyan government, while there were considerations among drafters and signatories to the resolution about arming rebels that were supposedly civilian.

Thus, while the resolution contains a crucial omission/silencing—a failure to acknowledge the existence of an armed opposition—public officials of the key architects of the document (US, UK, and France) were in negotiations with representatives of the Libyan opposition (often referred to by the same officials as rebels), and there were discussions about whether and how to arm them.77 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued that the United States had a right to arm the rebels despite its apparent illegality given the arms embargo on Libya imposed by Resolution 1973, precisely because of the resolution’s broad language; and when asked, President Barack Obama said he was not ruling it out either.78 To compound the contradictions, earlier in 2009 during a meeting between a McCain-led Senate delegation and Gaddafi, as well as his son Mutassim Gaddafi, then Libya’s national security adviser, McCain promised to ensure that the United States supplied Gaddafi with military equipment and weapons in light of a new burgeoning bilateral relationship after Gaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction.79 McCain later denied following up on the promise. However, soon after the military intervention began, he visited rebel-controlled areas, calling specifically for the use of US airpower against Gaddafi, accusing him of having American blood on his hands (in reference to the 1980s Lockerbie bombing widely believed to be masterminded by Gaddafi) and conveniently forgetting his earlier promises and favorable comments about the dictator.80

Eventually, France, as well as Egypt (with the US blessing), supplied arms to the Libyan rebels,81 and NATO provided the necessary air cover through air strikes in the final days of the Gaddafi regime that handed the rebels their victory.82 Arguably, if the goal of Resolution 1973 was to enforce a peaceful resolution to the Libyan crises, its implementation failed in doing so, as the arms of one faction were effectively taken away while the other faction was supplied with arms. The UNSC and its agents are charged with ensuring international peace and security, not increasing the insecurity of civilians, especially women, who bear the brunt of any armed conflict.83 Therefore this strategic nonacknowledgment of an armed opposition while simultaneously supporting it, fosters militarism, defined as “the blurring or erasure of distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian.”84

This is not to say that the Libyan government’s legitimacy wasn’t questionable given that Gaddafi had effectively declared war on segments of the country instead of seeking peaceful ways to address their grievances. Nevertheless, the UNSC, United States, France and United Kingdom obscuring the true state of affairs —that it had become a civil conflict with two sides, one less armed than the other —is not any more justifiable. While there were some civilians who were truly in danger of being attacked, others being called civilians had taken up an armed rebellion against their government, including some defectors from the Libyan military. Therefore, the real aim was regime change in Libya, and a military humanitarian intervention paved the way to make that possible. No wonder then that Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, commander of Operation Unified Protector (the NATO operation that carried out the military mandate of Resolution 1973) in declaring the mission a success at its conclusion in October 2011, acknowledged that NATO air strikes created an environment that made it possible for Libyan rebels to topple Gaddafi’s government: “I believe at the end of the day, 7 months was a very short period of time to watch a force organise themselves from a disorganised group to a group that was able to defeat the regime.”85

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to make a feminist normative assessment of contemporary US policy of humanitarian intervention by studying the Libyan case through a discursive analysis of UNSC Resolution 1973, and the statements and actions of relevant US officials. The article began within the debates of compatibility of human rights concerns with foreign policy, consistency, and selectivity, all present in human rights scholarship. Then, it reviewed feminist IR scholarship on military humanitarian intervention and the feminist normative theoretical approach. Then, that approach was applied to critically analyzing the UNSC resolution that authorized the Libyan intervention. Such feminist curiosity shows that while the document uses rights-based language and makes references to universally accepted norms like protecting civilians and non-combatants, it is particularly silent about women.86 Also, by not acknowledging that a segment of the opposition was engaged in armed struggle against the government—in fact they were rebel forces—the resolution obscures the true nature of the Libyan crisis and promulgates militarism. Additionally, it facilitates the use of the term humanitarian intervention evidenced in the NATO name of the operation (Operation Unified Protector), while obfuscating the militaristic nature of the exercise, that this was in fact a war. Feminist normative theoretical analysis is meant to make visible these omissions, silences and contradictions. If indeed peace and security were the aims of the intervention, disarming both sides and bringing the parties to the table for a peaceful resolution would have been of foremost concern. This is precisely what future applications of the R2P norm should strive to achieve.

Events since the first version of this article was written support this analysis. The attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens have since been linked to terrorists with possible al-Qaeda connections.87 While the details regarding the attack are still contested, the presence of armed militias that were not disarmed as part of the military humanitarian intervention would have only worsened the security situation in Libya. Also, insurgents in Northern Mali, who successfully battled the Malian government, have been linked to groups with heavy weapons from Libya.88 Therefore, it is interesting to note that in the Senate hearings on the Benghazi attacks, the focus was on whether or not Clinton failed in her duties as secretary of state by not providing additional security at the consulate as requested by Ambassador Stevens. There was no debate about the appropriateness of an intervention policy that involved violating an arms embargo to arm rebels without simultaneously ensuring that those weapons are secured after the fighting.

Finally, as the events in Libya unfold, it is important to keep asking the questions: who are “the people,” who are the civilians, and where are the women? Only time and a post hoc analysis will tell if the women will become visible and if they would be incorporated into the democratic process; or who the people who fought Gaddafi really are. Early indications are that some of the rebels may be individuals who had fought against the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan.89 Additionally, Libya has been mired in political instability and a civil war since the toppling of Gadaffi as the country’s internationally recognized government continues to battle several Islamist insurgencies.90 Thus, is the uncanny nature of unintended consequences. For US foreign policy, it appears to be yet another example of previous cases of unintended consequences resulting from arming rebels.

Notes

1. Other authors have also used this definition. Louis Henkin, “Kosovo and the Law of ‘Humanitarian Intervention,’” The American Journal of International Law 93, no. 4 (1 October 1999): 824–28, doi:10.2307/2555346, https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/collages/41842; Daniele Archibugi, “Cosmopolitan Guidelines for Humanitarian Intervention,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 1 (1 January 2004): 1–21, http://www.danielearchibugi.org /downloads/papers/Humanitarian_intervention.pdf; T. Modibo Ocran, “Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention in Light of Robust Peacekeeping,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 25 (1 December 2002), http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&context=iclr: 1; Comfort Ero and Suzanne Long, “Humanitarian Intervention: A New Role for the United Nations?,” International Peacekeeping 2, no. 2 (1995): 140–56, doi:10.1080/13533319508413548, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1353331950841 3548; and Mel McNulty, “France’s Role in Rwanda and External Military Intervention: A Double Discrediting,” International Peacekeeping 4, no. 3 (1997): 24–44, doi:10.1080/13533319708413677), http://www.tandfonline.com /doi/abs/10.1080/13533319708413677. Using this definition, the interventions in Bosnia and Somalia for example would qualify as military humanitarian interventions. Some advocates have also called for nonmilitary humanitarian interventions.

2. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1973, 2011, http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf /pdf_2011_03/20110927_110311-UNSCR-1973.pdf.

3. Thomas G. Weiss, “R2P after 9/11 and the World Summit,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 24 (2006–7): 741, https://hosted.law.wisc.edu/wordpress/wilj/files/2012/02/weiss.pdf .

4. George F. Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 1 December 1985, https://www .foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1985-12-01/morality-and-foreign-policy; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 1 July 1996, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1996-07-01/toward-neo-reaganite-foreign-policy; Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003, 155); and David P. Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 152.

5. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1674, 2006, https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/blog/document /security-council-resolution-1674-2006-on-protection-of-civilians-in-armed-conflict/.

6. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 155–59.

7. Ibid., 155–56.

8. Ibid., 157.

9. Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations, 161.

10. Peter R. Baehr and Monique C. Castermans-Holleman, The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2.

11. Ibid.

12. Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations, 161.

13. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Hove, United Kingdom: Psychology Press, 2002), 45.

14. See the Obama administration’s 2010 National Security Strategy, which emphasizes burden sharing with other nations. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security strategy.pdf (accessed 5 December 2011).

15. Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy”; and Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.”

16. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 169.

17. Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations, 167.

18. Baehr and Castermans-Holleman, The Role of Human Rights, 64; and Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations, 166.

19. Richard K. Betts, “The Delusion of Impartial Intervention,” Foreign Affairs 73 (November-December 1994): 20, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1994-11-01/delusion-impartial-intervention.

20. J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 11.

21. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, “Introduction,” in Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 3.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–10.

26. Cynthia Weber, “Reconsidering Statehood: Examining the Sovereignty/Intervention Boundary,” Review of International Studies 18, no. 03 (7 January 1992): 199–216, doi:10.1017/S0260210500117231, https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/5869-a-weber-c-reconsidering-statehood-examining-the; and Weber, Simulating Sovereignty.

27. Weber, “Reconsidering Statehood,” 215.

28. Varda Burstyn, “Masculine Dominance and the State,” Socialist Register 20, no. 20 (18 March 1983), http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5491; Wendy Brown, “Finding the Man in the State,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 1 (1 April 1992): 7–34, doi:10.2307/3178212, http://www.academicroom.com/article/finding-man-state; R. W. Connell, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics,” Theory and Society 19, no. 5 (October 1990): 507–44, doi:10.1007/BF00147025, http://xyonline.net/sites/default/files/Connell,%20State,%20Gender.pdf; and Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 1–41.

29. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, “Competing Masculinities: Probing Political Disputes as Acts of Violence against Women from Southern Sudan and Darfur,” Human Rights Review 7, no. 2 (January 2006): 59–74, doi:10.1007/s12142-006-1030-7.

30. L. H. M. Ling, “Cultural Chauvinism and the Liberal International Order: ‘West versus Rest’ in Asia’s Financial Crisis,” in Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class, eds. Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).

31. Ibid., 118.

32. Ibid., 115.

33. V. Spike Peterson, “Security and Sovereign States: What Is at Stake in Taking Feminism Seriously?,” in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, ed. V. Spike Peterson (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), 22.

34. Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq: A Feminist Reformulation of Just War Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006); and Laura Sjoberg, “Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (13 November 2006): 889–910, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2006.00430.x, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents .

35. Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2008).

36. Helen M. Kinsella, “Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War,” in Power in Global Governance, eds. Michael N. Barnett and Raymond Duvall (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 257, 266–67.

37. R. Charli Carpenter, “‘Women and Children First’: Gender, Norms, and Humanitarian Evacuation in the Balkans 1991–95,” International Organization 57, no. 4 (September 2003): 661–94, doi:10.1017/S002081830357401X, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/women-and-children-first-gender -norms-and-humanitarian-evacuation-in-the-balkans-199195/416E848849B8C92DBB571D4855F7BFEB# .

38. Mark Denbeaux et al., “Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data,” Seton Hall Law Review 41 (2011): 1211; and Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), http://law.shu.edu/publications/guantanamoReports/guantanamo_report_final_2_08_06.pdf .

39. Kinsella, “Securing the Civilian,” 252, 254.

40. Carol Cohn, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings, “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 1 (2004): 130–40, doi:10.1080/1461674032000165969, 132, http://www .tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1461674032000165969.

41. Valerie M. Hudson et al., “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” International Security 33, no. 3 (2009): 7–45, doi:10.1162/isec.2009.33.3.7, http://www.belfercenter.org/publication/heart-matter-security-women-and-security-states; and M. Caprioli, “Primed for Violence: The Role of Gender Inequality in Predicting Internal Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 2 (June 2005): 161–78, doi:10.1111/j.0020-8833.2005.00340.x, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3693510?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents .

42. Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, “Power in a Postcolonial World: Race, Gender, and Class in International Relations,” in Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class, ed. Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (London; New York: Routledge, 2002); and Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

43. Marco Pinfari, “The EU in Libya: One Year On,” Maghreb Bulletin 13 (29 April 2012): 1–2, http://www .eurasiareview.com/29042012-the-eu-in-libya-one-year-on-analysis/.

44. Brook Ackerly and Jacqui True, “Studying the Struggles and Wishes of the Age: Feminist Theoretical Methodology and Feminist Theoretical Methods,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, ed. Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 252.

45. Fiona Robinson, “Methods of Feminist Normative Theory: A Political Ethic of Care for International Relations,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, ed. Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

46. Ibid., 228.

47. Robinson, “Methods of Feminist Normative Theory.”

48. Ibid., 223.

49. Jennifer Nedelsky, “Reconceiving Rights as Relationship,” Review of Constitutional Studies 1 (1993–94): 1, https://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/nedelsky/Review1.1Nedelsky.pdf .

50. Robinson, “Methods of Feminist Normative Theory,” 225; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Robinson, “Feminist Normative Theory,” 224.

51. Ibid., 226.

52. Ibid.; and Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

53. Robinson, “Feminist Normative Theory,” 227.

54. Ibid., 231.

55. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples: With the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1999); Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

56. Robinson, “Methods of Feminist Normative Theory,” 232.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 233.

59. Selma Sevenhuijsen et al., “South African Social Welfare Policy: An Analysis Using the Ethic of Care,” Critical Social Policy 23, no. 3 (August 2003): 299–321, doi:10.1177/02610183030233001.

60. Ibid., 299.

61. Both were at the time members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Sen John McCain as its most senior Republican was the committee’s ranking member.

62. Jean Ping, chairperson, African Union Commission, letter, subject: “The African Union and the Libyan Crisis: Putting the Records Straight,” Letter from the African Union Commission Chairperson, (November 2011), https://europafrica.net/2011/11/16/the-african-union-and-the-libyan-crisis-putting-the-records-straight/.

63. Ole R. Holsti, “American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Did the September 11 Attacks Change Everything,” in American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, ed. David P. Forsythe, Patrice C. McMahon, and Andrew Hall Wedeman (New York: Routledge, 2006).

64. John Miglietta, “The United States and Libya: The Evolution of a Complex Relationship” (conference, Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, 2011).

65. United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1970, 26 February 2011, http://www.nato.int/nato_static /assets/pdf/pdf_2011_02/20110927_110226-UNSCR-1970.pdf.

66. Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 133, 143, 200.

67. Lakomtube, “Libya—Women Protest in Derna Call for Ouster of Gaddafi,” YouTube, 23 February 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URoAm8NT6Ts.

68. Mark Tran, “Libya: Woman Allegedly Raped by Militia Has Been Freed, Says Regime,” The Guardian, 27 March 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/27/benghazi-woman-rape-and-detention.

69. Hilmi M. Zawati, “Hidden Deaths of Libyan Rape Survivors: Rape Casualties Should Be Considered Wounded Combatants Rather Than Mere Victims of Sexual Violence,” The National Law Journal, no. 9 (9 January 2012): 35, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193102.

70. Al Jazeera English, “The Women of Benghazi,” YouTube, 10 March 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SaSjAzz_6E&feature=related.

71. United Nations Security Council, “Security Council Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1325 (2000), Calls for Broad Participation of Women in Peace-Building, Post- Conflict Reconstruction,” 31 October 2000, http://www.un.org/press/en/2000/20001031.sc6942.doc.html; and Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings, “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325.”

72. Ibid., 130.

73. Helen Kinsella, “Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War”; and Helen Kinsella, “Gendering Grotius Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War,” Political Theory 34, no. 2 (1 April 2006): 161–91, doi:10.1177/0090591705279530, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591705279530.

74. Lauren Gambino, “Libya Militias Clash Leaving 14 Dead,” The Telegraph, 3 April 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/9184359/Libya-militias-clash-leaving-14-dead.html.

75. Helen M. Kinsella, The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 187–89.

76. Ibid., 187.

77. Mark Landler, Elisabeth Bumiller, and Steven Lee Myers, “Washington in Fierce Debate on Arming Libyan Rebels,” New York Times, 29 March 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/world/africa/30diplo.html.

78. Ibid.

79. Associated Press, “McCain Says Libya May Get US Goods—Boston.com,” 15 August 2009, http://articles.boston.com/2009-08-15/news/29254041_1_libya-john-mccain-military-equipment; and Tim Mak, “Leak: McCain Pushed to Arm Qadhafi,” POLITICO, 26 August 2011, http://www.politico.com/story/2011/08/leak -mccain-pushed-to-arm-qadhafi-062114.

80. Justin Elliot, “John McCain’s Libya Amnesia,” Salon, 22 March 2011, http://www.salon .com/2011/03/22/john_mccain_libya/; and Patrick J. McDonnell, “Libya McCain: John McCain, in Libya, Calls for More Airstrikes and Weapons Aid for Rebels,” Los Angeles Times, 23 April 2011, http://articles.latimes .com/2011/apr/23/world/la-fg-libya-mccain-20110423.

81. ASDNews, “French Military Confirms Arms Drops to Libyan Rebels,” Defense News, 29 June 2011, http://www.asdnews.com/news-36530/French_military_confirms_arms_drops_to_Libyan_rebels.htm; and Charles Levinson and Matthew Rosenberg, “Egypt Said to Arm Libya Rebels,” Wall Street Journal, 17 March 2011, http://online .wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704360404576206992835270906.html.

82. Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers, “Sharper Surveillance and NATO Coordination Aided Rebel Advance,” New York Times, 21 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/world/africa/22nato.html.

83. Tickner, Gendering World Politics, 50; and Hudson et al., “The Heart of the Matter.”

84. Sjoberg and Via, “Introduction,” 7. For more on militarism and feminism, see Cynthia H. Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Jacklyn Cock, “Feminism and Militarism: Some Questions Raised by the Gulf War,” Southern African Defence Review, no. 6 (1992), http://www.africabib.org/rec.php?RID=P00012698; and Micaela di Leonardo, “Morals, Mothers, and Militarism: Antimilitarism and Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 11, no. 3 (1 October 1985): 599–617, doi:10.2307/3180121, https://www .jstor.org/stable/3180121?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents .

85. Statement from NATO’s Operation Unified commander, “We Answered the Call”—The End of Operation Unified Protector,” NATO/OTAN, accessed 7 March 2012, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_80435.htm.

86. Enloe, Globalization and Militarism.

87. Mark Hosenball, “White House Told of Militant Claim Two Hours after Libya Attack: Emails,” Reuters, 24 October 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-usa-benghazi-emails-idUSBRE89N02C20121024.

88. Scott Straus, “Wars Do End! Changing Patterns of Political Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Affairs 111, no. 443 (1 April 2012): 179–201, doi:10.1093/afraf/ads015, https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/111/443/179/17247/Wars-do-end-Changing-patterns-of-political .

89. David Wood, “Anti-American Extremists Among Libyan Rebels U.S. Has Vowed To Protect,” Huffington Post, 19 March 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/19/extremists-among-libya-rebels_n_837894.html.

90. Dominique Soguel, “Libya Crisis: ‘We Are Fighting against Men Who Once Fought with Us,’” Christian Science Monitor, 7 May 2015, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2015/0507/Libya-crisis-We-are -fighting-against-men-who-once-fought-with-us; Council on Foreign Relations, “Global Conflict Tracker: Political Instability in Libya,” accessed 21 August 2015, http://www.cfr.org/globalconflicttracker/; and Chris Stephen, “War in Libya—the Guardian Briefing,” The Guardian, 29 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014 /aug/29/-sp-briefing-war-in-libya.

*Dr. Faith Okpotor earned her PhD in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware in May 2017 and is an assistant professor of political science at Moravian College as of fall 2017. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of international and comparative politics. She studies political violence and international security with a special emphasis on Africa. Her current research examines the dynamics of postelection violence. She has been published in African Conflict and Peace Building Review, Africa Today, and in an edited volume in US Foreign Policy Toward Africa. She has received research support from the National Science Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, Minerva Research Initiative, International Studies Association, American Political Science Association, and University of Delaware.

Table of Contents

00Contents-E

01Editorial-E

02Lind-E

03Raitasalo-E

04Pozsgai-E

05Benyera-E

06Okpotor-E