In the introduction to the previous volume edited under the auspices of the Centre of Excellence for Civil-Military Cooperation (CCOE), we noted how pervasive the adjective ‘hybrid’ had become in the Euro-Atlantic security jargon (Cusumano and Corbe 2018). Anybody playing a ‘European security conference drinking game’ (Gramer 2017) where participants have to drink a shot each time ‘hybrid threats’ and ‘hybrid war’ were mentioned would soon end up drunk. Repeating the same game with the noun ‘resilience’ and the adjective ‘resilient’ would guarantee an equally painful hangover.
Initially used in scientific disciplines like psychiatry, ecology, and engineering, the notion of resilience eventually spilled over into the social sciences. Security scholars and practitioners discovered the concept relatively recently. Over the last few years, however, the concept of resilience has rapidly gained traction, becoming a leitmotiv of both North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and European Union (EU) declarations and policy documents. In the 2016 Warsaw Summit Communiqué, NATO heads of state and government referred to member states’ resilience as ‘the basis for credible deterrence and the effective fulfilment of the Alliance’s core tasks’. The European Union Global Strategy (EUGS), published in the same period, elected resilience as the guidance principle of EU external action. Both documents forcefully acknowledge that efforts to enhance resilience cannot be limited to strengthening EU and NATO member states. As illustrated by the Arab uprisings and their aftermath, conflict and unrest in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean have severe implications for the security of the Euro-Atlantic region. Consequently, creating resilient state institutions and societies in Maghreb, Sahel, and Middle East countries is imperative for the EU, NATO, and their member states alike.
Nine years after the uprisings, upheaval at the Southern end of the Mediterranean basin continues. In the spring of 2019, street protests in Algeria and Sudan forced presidents Bouteflika and Al-Bashir to resign after over twenty years in power, showing that the region keeps demanding democracy (The Economist 2019). As epitomised by the case of Libya, however, not all this turmoil is bloodless. Renewed clashes between Tripoli’s Government of National Accord (GNA) and general Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) caused over 250 casualties and the displacement of 30,000 people in the first two weeks of April 2019, raising concerns about growing migratory flows and terrorist infiltrations at Europe’s maritime Southern border (Chorin 2019).
This book examines the activities conducted by NATO and the EU to foster resilience across the Mediterranean, ranging from deterrence, force projection, and crisis management operations to capacity building, diplomacy, development cooperation, and humanitarian assistance. By doing so, the volume simultaneously pursues several goals. First, examining the scope and varying effectiveness of the humanitarian, diplomatic, and military initiatives carried out at Europe’s Southern borders contributes to several topical academic and policy debates, including migration management across the Mediterranean, conflict resolution in Syria and Libya, counterterrorism, state-building, the trade-off between democratisation and stability, and the security-development nexus.
Various studies and collections have explored the influence of EU external policies on these countries, such as, inter alia, Schumacher et al. (2017) and Bruns et al. (2016). Existing research, however, has mainly concentrated on EU policy instruments such as the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Consequently, these studies have simultaneously examined both the Eastern and Southern Neighbourhood and dedicated limited attention to security policies, largely disregarding the role of other regional organisations like NATO. Although many scholars have examined NATO’s contribution to European security as well as Transatlantic relations in a broader sense, this literature has focused nearly exclusively on NATO’s traditional role of providing deterrence and reassurance at its Eastern flank and conducting operations ‘out of area’ in Afghanistan and the Balkans (Johnson 2017; Sloan 2016; Auerswald and Saideman 2014; Michta and Paal Sigurd 2014). In light of the Alliance’s renewed activism in the Mediterranean, epitomised by the air campaign against Libya in 2011 and the recent establishment of a Southern Hub in Naples, NATO’s initiatives in the Maghreb and the broader Middle East warrant deeper attention. Our simultaneous examination of Euro-Atlantic diplomatic and military initiatives south of the Mediterranean will contribute to the study of EU–NATO relations, helping to map synergies, redundancies, inconsistencies, and potential tensions between these two organisations. At a time when Transatlantic relations are increasingly strained, this collection will thus provide fresh insights into the cohesion of the North Atlantic Alliance and the future trajectory of NATO–EU relations. In addition, the study of peacekeeping operations in Mali and Lebanon allows us to examine the role of the United Nations (UN) in the Sahel and the Middle East. Besides analysing the policies of international organisations and their member states, the book also explores the involvement of non-state actors in resilience-building initiatives, examining both commercial entities such as the shipping and oil industries and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Médecins Sans Frontieres.
Reappraising the role of states, international organisations and non-state actors in enhancing the resilience of countries and communities will not only provide novel empirical insights with timely policy implications. The study of resilience-based approaches to foreign policy also sheds new light on consensus-building strategies in international institutions, highlighting the ability of broad, open-ended notions like resilience to serve as ‘bridging concepts’ (Baggio et al. 2015) and catalysts for agreement within divided alliances and regional organisations. The term resilience has recently attracted considerable attention among international relations scholars. Most notably, Philippe Bourbeau (2015, 2018a, b), David Chandler (2014; Chandler and Coffee 2016), Jon Coaffee (Chandler and Coaffee 2016; Coaffee 2006), and Jonathan Joseph (2018) have conducted insightful examinations of the genealogy, analytical potential, and normative implications of the concept of resilience. International relations scholarship on resilience, however, has primarily been developed by academics and for academics only. The existing literature has mainly investigated resilience from a theoretical standpoint, without analysing in detail how the concept has guided the activities of international organisations like NATO, the EU, and their member states’ military forces. Moreover, these studies do not adopt a specific geographical focus, collecting empirical evidence from a host of different areas without systematically examining any region in detail.
Our volume departs from these studies in two different ways. First, as already mentioned, we primarily focus on the initiatives carried out by NATO and the EU in order to provide an in-depth examination of the potentials and pitfalls of resilience-building in the broader Middle East, Maghreb, and Sahel regions specifically. Second, we have attempted to use the study of resilience as a bridge between academic and practitioner communities. Efforts to enhance resilience far exceed the capabilities of military organisations, thus presupposing unity of effort across a host of government institutions, international, non-governmental, and commercial actors. Consequently, building resilience requires dialogue and cooperation between academics and practitioners, and between military and civilian communities. As such, the study of resilience-based approaches to foreign and security policy sheds new light on the importance of civil-military interaction and cooperation in today’s foreign and security policies. In the very spirit of civil-military cooperation, this collection includes contributors with different perspectives and professional backgrounds, ranging from renowned scholars of EU external relations to practitioners from international organisations, armed forces, think tanks, and humanitarian NGOs. By drawing on such a diverse body of expertise, we hope to strengthen the dialogue between academia and various segments of the policy community, thereby bridging the gap between academics and practitioners, and between civilian and military professionals.
The two sections below will introduce the key concepts used in this volume and briefly outline its content.
Key Concepts: From Hybrid Threats to Resilience
The physical a...