Policing Wars

On Military Intervention in the Twenty-First Century

Caroline Holmqvist

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349999903, 9781137323606
• eBook ISBN: 9781137323613
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Holmqvist presents an original account of the relationship between war and policing in the twenty first century. This interdisciplinary study of contemporary Western strategic thinking reveals how, why, and with what consequences, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became seen as policing wars.

1
Narratives of Disorder

Introduction: re-ordering conflict research

Conflict research was in vogue during the 1990s as theorists grappled with new global realities after the end of the Cold War, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union and global bipolarity. While Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of an ‘end of history’ was widely contested, it certainly seemed that ideology – which had so busied people during the Cold War – occupied a less prominent role in explaining conflict following the fall of the Berlin Wall than it had in the decades prior. The demise of superpower rivalry was followed by widespread assumptions about a growing international liberal consensus; to those so minded, the post-Cold War world offered unprecedented promise for more peaceful relations both between and within states. It was this mood that then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, captured when he in 1992 declared that ‘the nations and peoples of the United Nations are fortunate in a way that those of the League of Nations were not. We have been given a second chance to create the world of our Charter that they were denied.’¹ Optimism about the prospects for a new international order was by no means confined to discussions within the UN, however; then US President Bill Clinton uttered similar hopes at the time of the signing of the Bosnia–Croat peace agreement in 1994.² The most paradigmatic statement is probably that given by Tony Blair, two years into his period as UK Prime Minister, in a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999: Blair proclaimed prospects for international order under the banner that ‘we are all internationalists now’.³

Yet for all such proclamations, war, of course, persisted during the 1990s. And as images of death and destruction in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia were brought to Western audiences they stood in stark contrast to the visions of a ‘new world order’. In the context of wilful optimism about the international community’s capacity to create peace, it is perhaps not surprising that efforts to explain war came to centre on the question of whether armed conflict after the end of the Cold War was somehow of a different nature or new order than war previously. Inter-state conflict as it was conventionally known, after all, seemed to be in decline.⁴ Mary Kaldor’s concept of ‘new wars’ is archetypal in its amalgamation of many of the features that were highlighted in the conflict literature at the time: the effects of ‘globalisation’ (however defined); new practices and modes of warfare, including the increasing use of private force; and the prominence of particularist identity politics and other factors perceived to challenge the Westphalian model of state-on-state violence. All of these factors were included under a single label of purported ‘newness’.⁵ While Kaldor’s thesis spawned much criticism (notably for being ahistorical), the pivotal position it came to occupy in debates about the causes and dynamics of conflict testifies to a widespread sentiment during the 1990s that existing understandings of war were somehow inadequate.⁶ As this chapter will show, the assumption that there was something qualitatively different or new about war and conflict in the post-Cold War period was in itself closely bound up with the idea of a new apotheosis in the international community’s quest to limit war and violence. The surge in optimism about a new world order, in other words, only made sense if the wars to be extinguished were understood to be of a particular kind: namely, wars amenable to external intervention. The exceptions to this assumption were few and far between, as reflected in Edward Luttwak’s 1999 bizarrely entitled article ‘Give war a chance’.⁷

Interest in conflict ‘management’ and ‘resolution’ grew tremendously during the 1990s, both as fields of academic research and in policy circles, and served to strengthen the internationalist and interventionist impulse among liberal decision-makers. The view of conflict as amenable to external intervention stemmed from particular view about the nature, causes and dynamics of conflict itself; motifs that in turn foregrounded the emergence of the imagination of policing war. Yet, despite strong voices in the West advocating external intervention in conflict, Western forces were seldom involved themselves: this was the era of growth in South-to-South peacekeeping.⁸

Four narratives of (non-Western) war

Within the flurry of debate on the causes and dynamics of war during the 1990s, four strands can be identified as particularly influential in Western policy circles: first, the account of conflict as the breakdown or collapse of order and ‘normal’ political relations, often centred on the failure of the state; second, the depiction of armed conflicts as the unavoidable result of innate characteristics – a barbaric disposition, the clash between incompatible ethnic communities, civilisations and so on; and third, the understanding of conflict as essentially criminal in nature. Fourth, I turn to the more recent preoccupation with terrorism, and its particular impact on policy responses to conflict. All four narratives, as we shall see, are founded on the idea that war and war-fighting in developing states are somehow of a different kind from that of Western states – an essential differentiation that was to emerge as a key marker of liberal states’ imagination of their own military ventures as policing wars.

Conflict as the collapse of politics: war and state failure

In a widely cited article in Foreign Policy in 1992, Gerald B. Helman, former US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, and Steven R. Ratner, a former legal advisor to the US State Department and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, placed the issue of state failure firmly on the policy agenda. In their words, ‘from Haiti in the Western Hemisphere to the remnants of Yugoslavia in Europe, from Somalia, Sudan, and Liberia in Africa to Cambodia in Southeast Asia, a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation-state, utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community’.⁹ A wide debate on ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ states ensued, primarily among IR and political theorists. For I. William Zartman, whose 1995 edited volume Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority was one of the most frequently cited on this topic, ‘state collapse’ refers to ‘a situation where the structure, authority (legitimate power), law, and political order have fallen apart and must be reconstructed in some form, old or new. (…) Order and power (but not necessarily legitimacy) fall down to local groups and are up for grabs.’¹⁰ Described as ‘modern debellatios’, the failed or collapsed states were predicted to be on the path of inevitable descent into ‘violence and anarchy’.¹¹

The notion of state failure had a tremendous impact on understandings of war in that period, and was invoked to shed light on both the causes and dynamics of conflict. Much of the literature points to a purportedly inevitable link between state collapse or failure and the incidence of violent conflict; Helman and Ratner posit this ‘inevitability’ as a consequence of decolonisation, which, they argue, resulted in the establishment of states that were in fact unable to function as independent entities.¹² Others hinged their analysis of war in the failed state on the presence of ‘warlords’, entrepreneurs of violence – sometimes understood as acquiring prominence as a consequence of state collapse, and sometimes as being the agents of state collapse in the first place.¹³ In any event, the warlord persona that figured so prominently in the failed states literature of the 1990s contributed to the understanding of war as generally anarchic; in Roland Marchal’s words, the term itself served to summarise ‘a shared perception of a brutal and non-political figure’ as the agent of war in the failed state.¹⁴

The claim about the inevitability of conflict in failed states is manifestly problematic. First, the diagnosis of a state as ‘failed’ constitutes an attempt to capture a set of very complex conditions and processes under a single label. The apparition of a condition of complete ‘collapse’ is contingent on a particular, preconceived, notion of what constitutes order and normality. To take but one example: Ken Menkhaus points out in his discussion of the literature on Somalia in the 1990s (the archetypal failed state) that conventional understandings overlook many important aspects of Somali societal structure. Thus, the rule of law in Somalia was never associated with a formal judiciary and police; instead, order was a reflection of local contracts between individuals and local sheik leaders (a pattern that is recognisable in other parts of the world, including Afghanistan).¹⁵ Similarly, indifference to the external relationships of the ostensibly failed state and its position in the international system may lead to a naively decontextualised and ahistorical view both of the states in question and their violent conflicts.

Second, the particular understanding of war presented in much of the failed states thesis is problematic in its emphasis on uncontrollability, anarchy and relentless power-grabbing with little concern for ‘politics’ beyond a pursuit of power. Again, the Somali context is instructive: the description of state collapse in Somalia as a long and complex degenerative disease, leaving behind ‘little but the wreckage of distorted traditions and artificial institutions, a vacuum that the most ruthless elements in that society soon filled’, is illustrative of a depoliticised understanding of war.¹⁶ The framing of conflict-affected states as ‘failed’ essentially amounted to a discourse of pathologisation, where the domestic populations was described as fundamentally dysfunctional while external or intervening forces were posited as functional.¹⁷ In terms of understanding violence and war, the view of conflict simply as degeneration leaves precious little room for understanding the political content of conflict, its meaning or function for those involved. When Chris Hedges describes contemporary conflicts as ‘Hobbesian playgrounds’ pitting all against all, he pandered to just such views.¹⁸

Two impetuses appear to have shaped the dominant interpretations of the ‘failed state’ in the 1990s: a residual worldview shaped by the notion that winning is the sole object of war, and the assertion that a state is essential for the existence of a rule of law. The literature that coalesced around state collapse or failure shared the assumption that politics in the context of war and violence is necessarily tied to the state as the site of political encounters (a topic we will return to in Chapters 3 and 4). Accordingly, conflicts wherein the state’s role was obscured or the state bypassed altogether – not being the immediate object of contention in the conflict – were susceptible to a depoliticised interpretation; and conflicts that were not amenable to a state-centred analysis were considered degenerative and anarchic.

The notion of the failed state finding a proper place in an ordered and regularised international society stood out as utterly implausible in these accounts. Nor were the conflicts of a failed state taken to be serious or legitimate contests – they were, after all, the product of failure and breakdown. Helman and Ratner regarded the idea of the failed state as an actor in its own right as utterly unfeasible; instead they located the conceptual basis for any effort on the part of the international community in engaging with the failed states, or its wars, in the idea of ‘conservatorship’.¹⁹ Typically, analogies were made with disorder within the domestic setting, where communities have responsibility for managing the affairs of persons ‘utterly incapable of functioning on their own’, placing the ‘hapless individual under the responsibility of a trustee or guardian’.²⁰ The ‘failed’ epithet in this instance was unambiguous: with the societal malaise – whether the lone fool in the domestic setting or the collapsed, failed and utterly conflict-prone state in the international system – there could be no equal engagement.

While the debate about ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states was a quintessentially 1990s one, it was given new licence in the post 9/11 context. However, the language changed after 9/11: we currently hear less about state ‘collapse’ than about ‘weak states’, state ‘fragility’, or, more vaguely, a ‘lack of legitimate governance’ as both a cause and consequence of conflict.²¹ Tangential to the interpretation of conflict as collapse are narratives positing war as the result of innate hostility among human beings. In their emphasis on ‘unreason’ and ‘chaos’ such interpretations shared many of the assumptions of failed states literature.

Nature and culture: notions of inevitable conflict

Robert Kaplan, an American journalist and travel writer, came to exert considerable influence on thinking about war and conflicts, particularly in the US military establishment. In his 1994 article, ‘The coming anarchy’, Kaplan focused on the troubled West African sub-region (and in other writings on the Balkans), but his analysis and predictions were endowed with much wider purchase.²² For Kaplan Sierra Leone was a microcosm of what was taking place, albeit in a more tempered manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: ‘the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war’.²³ Combining Malthusian theory and essentialist identity claims, Kaplan painted an image of war transformed, where conflicts take the shape of ‘a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents’; Kaplan went so far as to write of ‘reprimitised man’. He found population growth, environmental degradation and ‘cultural and racial clash’ to be deeply related, and wrote ominously of what the next fifty years would behold: ‘now the threat is more elemental: nature unchecked’.²⁴

Interesting in this regard is how the pairing of environmental anxieties with the incidence of armed conflict undoubtedly fed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Narratives of Disorder
• 2 Perpetual Policing Wars
• 3 Policing the Globe
• 4 Power in Policing Wars
• 5 On Agency: Policing Logics and War ‘Without Antagonism’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index