Stabilization as the New Normal in International Interventions

Low Expectations?

Roberto Belloni, Francesco N. Moro, Roberto Belloni, Francesco N. Moro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032839097
• eBook ISBN: 9781000033564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stabilization as the New Normal in International Interventions provides the first comprehensive analysis of stabilization, which constitutes the new reference point for international intervention in unruly parts of the Global South.

The notion of 'stabilization' and the practice of 'stability operations' experienced a revival over the last decade. The United Nations, the European Union, NATO, as well as most member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have embraced these terms in their foreign policy bureaucracies. The general disillusionment with the achievements of large-scale peacebuilding operations in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the failures of the so-called Arab Springs, contributed to the success of this new discourse. Yet, while widely mentioned and endorsed, stabilization is rarely defined. This volume identifies common elements to stabilization doctrines and examines how they are applied in practice. It dissects how stabilization emerged and unfolds, how different actors adopt it and for what purposes, and how it is linked to the broader security and development discourses.

Stabilization as the New Normal in International Interventions will be of great interest to scholars of Peacebuilding, International Intervention and International Relations more generally. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Stability and Stability Operations: Definitions, Drivers, Approaches^†

ROBERTO BELLONI

& FRANCESCO N. MORO

ABSTRACT The notion of ‘stability’ and the practice of ‘stability operations’ experienced a revival in the last decade. The paper shows how different actors (UN, NATO, US and European countries) have been using the concept ‘stability’ in their recent doctrines. It then shows how as a multi-faceted notion stability can benefit from methodological pluralism, how actors adopt different and even conflicting meanings across a range of different cases and stability operations seem to carry troubling political and normative implications. In sum, this introductory essay specifies how the present collection contributes to the literature and the ongoing policy debate by dissecting the notions of stability and stability operations.

Introduction

The notion of ‘stability’ and the practice of ‘stability operations’ experienced a revival in the last decade. The United Nations, starting with MINUSTAH in Haiti and then with operations in Central African Republic (CAR), Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Mali, re-framed the lexicon and practice of its interventions in this direction (Curran & Holtom, 2015). In 2015 the revised European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) identifies ‘stabilization as its main political priority’ (European Commission and HR, 2015, p. 2). NATO restated at the Warsaw summit of 2016 that ‘projecting stability’ is one of the cornerstones to guarantee the Alliance’s security. Likewise, most member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have embraced the term in their foreign policy bureaucracies.

While widely mentioned and endorsed by both international organizations and states, ‘stabilization’ and ‘stability operations’ are rarely defined (Belloni, 2017). According to Muggah (2014a), ‘the conceptual and operational parameters of … stabilization interventions are still opaque.’ Stability, and stability operations, have not attained a clear doctrinal or conceptual status in either policy or academic circles. Since the early 1990s with documents such as An Agenda for Peace, the UN has contributed important conceptual innovations to further the effectiveness of peace operations. However, thus far it has left ‘stabilization’ undefined, using it essentially as a term of convenience with uncertain strategic applications. Accordingly, calls to clarify the term are increasing. For example, the High-Level Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations suggested the need for the UN to elucidate the meaning of ‘stabilization’, since the expression ‘has a wide range of interpretations’ (HIPPO, 2015, p. 30).

^† The papers included in this Special Issue originated from a workshop held at the University of Trento on 2–3 February 2018, titled ‘Low Expectations? Stabilization and Stability Operations as the “New Normal” in International Interventions’.

As this introduction and the pieces in the collection show, the revival of the stability discourse can be attributed to the very vagueness of the term. Stabilization shares some objectives, and features, with peacebuilding and counterinsurgency—the dominant practices of intervention in the post-Cold War era—and yet it differs from them on some important aspects. Stabilization is a residual category that overlaps with other existing and emerging (e.g. ‘robust peacekeeping’) practices. Yet, the real-world consequences of a loose application of stabilization motivate pleas to elucidate its (ambiguous) doctrinal meaning. The lack of doctrinal clarity means that peacekeepers are trained based on wrong assumptions and out-of-date concepts, as the unprecedented high number of fatalities and injuries in UN stabilization missions testify (de Coning, Aoi, & Karlsrud, 2017). Because ambiguity can lead to unintended consequences it is important to explore if costs might actually be higher than the benefits, particularly in the medium-long run.

In order to make sense of stability, this introduction first disentangles the doctrines on stability crafted by both major powers and international organizations from what stability operations have entailed in practice. The (preliminary) picture that emerges is that stability operations have their own peculiarities in terms of approach, time horizons, objectives and main actors. The contribution then discusses the premises of the collection and the key dimensions on which the featured contributions shed light to. The conclusions wrap up the major findings and provide a preliminary assessment of the notion and practice of stability operations.

The Doctrine(s) of Stabilization

Stability operations involving both coercive force and various forms of development assistance have been deployed for at least a century, if not longer, in order to promote peace and security in unruly parts of the world. Interventions in the Philippines (1898–1902), Algeria (1956–1962), Vietnam (1967–1975) and El Salvador (1980–1992), among others, were all driven by the logic of stabilization (Zyck, Barakat, & Deely, 2014). However, it is possibly the Western experience with stabilization in the 1990s in Bosnia, where a sequential approach was adopted but was widely perceived as scarcely effective, that changed the understanding among policy-makers of what stabilization entails. No longer does stabilization develop through the initial involvement of military actors, to be followed by growing civilian engagement (Grimm & Mathis, 2015). As the UK Stabilization Unit affirms, ‘linear approaches, such as an early focus on security, then politics, and then development are unhelpful’ (SU, 2014, p. 15). Rather, stabilization implicates a cluster of military, humanitarian and development activities aimed at bringing stability to fragile states. Security, governance and development are interdependent and thus comprehensive programs addressing all of these issues are required in order to break the vicious circle of underdevelopment and violence (Muggah, 2014b). Accordingly, most Western governments and multilateral organizations endorse ‘whole of government’, ‘integrated’ and ‘comprehensive’ approaches involving a range of hard and soft stabilization measures.

Recently released (Western) military doctrine publications provide definitions of stability operations. In 2010, France adopted the joint military doctrine Sécurité, Développement, Gouvernance: Contribution des Forces Armées à la Stabilisation (MDRF, 2010), in which military force is greatly valued as a tool for intervention (Novosseloff & Tardy, 2017) and security sector reform is the core element. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff published the joint doctrine, which provides authoritative guidance to US armed forces in stability operations (US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2016). The document calls for a multi-dimensional approach that includes both improvements in the security domain in the short term and governance achievements in the medium and long run. The UK Ministry of Defence released the joint doctrine publication Shaping a Stable World: the military contribution (UK MoD, 2016), which draws on a definition of stabilization elaborated by the Stabilisation Unit and shared between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of Defence and the Department for International Development. These national doctrines add to NATO’s definition of stabilization as provided in the Allied Joint Doctrine for the Military Contribution to Stabilization and Reconstruction published in 2015.

A common baseline can be identified in these doctrines. In general, the conflictual elements of global-local encounters emerge as fundamental policy concerns (Björkdahl & Höglund, 2013). These elements involve in particular resistance and violence from spoiler groups and make security a priority over governance achievements. In the context of on-going wars, the latter are typically expressed in the objective of reaching a political settlement which, however, does not necessarily has to comply with Western democracy or human rights standards. While the above documents all define stabilization in roughly similar terms, important inconsistencies remain within and between them. For instance, the UK joint doctrine recognizes (and accepts) inconsistencies with the NATO doctrine, which links stabilization with reconstruction (whereas the UK does not); and with the US doctrine that sees stabilization as being a subset of counterinsurgency (UK MoD, 2016, p. 16; see also Griffin, 2011). The UN, which has not yet defined the term, refers to stabilization in the context of the deployment of ‘robust peacekeeping’ operations during on-going conflicts meant to protect or support state authority from armed elements. A move towards robust military interventions can also be extrapolated from Western governments’ use of the term. Thus, while stabilization is mostly framed as a civilian-led approach with a political objective (particularly by the UK and France), military action is an important part of it. Table 1 provides a schematic overview of the main approaches to stabilization, its components (military action and governance) and its relation to peace operations and reconstruction.

Stabilization in Practice

Does the practice of stabilization conform to the doctrine? In this collection, we argue that such coherence is only partial: stabilization operations aim at providing security to the population while at the same time creating a stable and legitimate state able to deliver basic services (de Coning et al., 2017). In doing so they differ from both more comprehensive, liberal peacebuilding and from counterinsurgency (COIN) as (re) developed in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2006 in at least 4 major aspects: (1) approach, (2) time horizon, (3) main objective and (4) agency (see Table 2 for a summary). We hereby detail the specificities of stability operations and then propose the research agenda of the current collection.

Table 1. Approaches to stabilization, its components and relations with peace operations and reconstruction^a

Actor	Stabilization	Military action	Governance	Peace operation	Reconstruction
United Nations MINUSTAH, MONUSCO, MINUSMA and MINUSCA mandates^b	No definition of stabilization. Stabilization includes actions aiming at: protection of civilians; consolidation, extension and restoration of state authority; organization of elections; prevent the provision of support to armed groups; security sector reforms; promoting human rights.	Use of force aimed at the active removal of non-state actors, including deterrence measures to prevent their return.	Consolidation,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Stability and Stability Operations: Definitions, Drivers, Approaches
• 2 Political Transitions and Macro-level Foundations of Political Stability
• 3 Stabilization and Local Conflicts: Communal and Civil War in South Sudan
• 4 United Nations Stabilization Operations: Chapter Seven and a Half
• 5 From Liberal Statebuilding to Counterinsurgency and Stabilization: The International Intervention in Iraq
• 6 NATO’s Landscape of the Mind: Stabilisation and Statebuilding in Afghanistan
• 7 (B)ordering Hybrid Security? EU Stabilisation Practices in the Sahara-Sahel Region
• Index