Nested Security

Lessons in Conflict Management from the League of Nations and the European Union

Erin K. Jenne

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801453908
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701269
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why does soft power conflict management meet with variable success over the course of a single mediation? In Nested Security, Erin K. Jenne asserts that international conflict management is almost never a straightforward case of success or failure. Instead, external mediators may reduce communal tensions at one point but utterly fail at another point, even if the incentives for conflict remain unchanged. Jenne explains this puzzle using a "nested security" model of conflict management, which holds that protracted ethnic or ideological conflicts are rarely internal affairs, but rather are embedded in wider regional and/or great power disputes. Internal conflict is nested within a regional environment, which in turn is nested in a global environment. Efforts to reduce conflict on the ground are therefore unlikely to succeed without first containing or resolving inter-state or trans-state conflict processes.Nested security is neither irreversible nor static: ethnic relations may easily go from nested security to nested insecurity when the regional or geopolitical structures that support them are destabilized through some exogenous pressure or shocks, including kin state intervention, transborder ethnic ties, refugee flows, or other factors related to regional conflict processes. Jenne argues that regional security regimes are ideally suited to the management of internal conflicts, because neighbors that have a strong incentive to work for stability provide critical hard-power backing to soft-power missions. Jenne tests her theory against two regional security regimes in Central and Eastern Europe: the interwar minorities regime under the League of Nations (German minorities in Central Europe, Hungarian minorities in the Carpathian Basin, and disputes over the Åland Islands, Memel, and Danzig), and the ad hoc security regime of the post–Cold War period (focusing on Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic States and Albanian minorities in Montenegro, Macedonia, and northern Kosovo).

1

The Promises and Pitfalls of Cooperative Conflict Management

The end of the Cold War brought many changes to global governance, not least of which was a technocratic revolution in the management of intra-state conflict.1 During the 1990s, the world powers resolved to work together to achieve a lasting peace, which partially meant refocusing their energies from ending civil war to preventing mass violence in the first place.2 A leading authority on peace research decried the international community’s “myopic focus on crisis negotiation,” proclaiming that “too little attention is paid to the prevention of conflicts in the latent stages.”3 UN secretary-general Kofi Annan avowed, “For the United Nations but also for me, personally, as Secretary-General there is no higher goal, no deeper commitment, and no greater ambition than preventing armed conflict.”4 The 2000 Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations concluded, “Prevention is clearly far more preferable for those who would otherwise suffer the consequences of war, and is a less costly option for the international community than military action, emergency humanitarian relief or reconstruction after a war has run its course.”5 In this spirit, a number of international organizations emerged to facilitate peaceful ends to emerging wars, including the International Crisis Group, International Alert, the Crisis Management Initiative, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Swisspeace, Conciliation Resources, and numerous regional organizations.6 These and other actors have sought to suppress conflicts in their early stages—using early warning mechanisms, preventive diplomacy, mediation, arbitration, conditionality, and other methods of cooperative conflict management to ameliorate internecine struggles around the world.7

In a related trend, states and international organizations (particularly the UN and the United States) have increasingly favored cooperative over coercive techniques of managing intra-state conflict.8 Cooperative conflict management is “a form of third-party intervention in a conflict…[that is] not based on the direct use of force and is not aimed at helping one of the participants to win…[but] to bring the conflict to a settlement that is acceptable to both sides.”9 Preventive diplomacy is a variant of cooperative conflict management that aims to defuse low-intensity conflicts before they lead to widespread violence. Michael Lund describes preventive diplomacy as “actions or institutions that are used to keep the political disputes that arise between or within nations from escalating into armed conflict”; Stephen Stedman describes it as “concerted action designed to resolve, manage, or contain disputes before they become violent.”10 In practical terms, this means offering incentives for peace to the parties in conflict, such as membership in international organizations, financial aid, or “good offices” through which settlements can be negotiated in lieu of war.11

There are several reasons why cooperative techniques are particularly well suited for defusing low-intensity conflicts.12 First, and most obviously, addressing nascent disputes before they escalate is best accomplished through skillful backdoor diplomacy. Second, participants are likely to be more open to diplomatic solutions in the early stages of conflict than after years of warfare, at which point negotiated settlements become exponentially more difficult to achieve. Third, cooperative conflict management seeks out positive-sum solutions that improve the status of at least one side of the dispute without leaving either side worse off. This stands against zero-sum interventions that leverage one side against the other, creating a moral hazard that perversely exacerbates internal tensions.13 Such a conservative approach is ideal for de-escalating minor conflicts, where the aim is to bring calm rather than dramatically change facts on the ground. Finally, whereas violent intervention tends to undermine state capacity, a cooperative approach is more likely to enhance state institutions—a critical assist to weakened or transitioning states that must suddenly deal with challenger groups at the same time that they face other pressing domestic or international concerns.

While much of the conflict-resolution literature focuses on how to conduct (relatively short-term) coercive interventions, relatively little is known about the conditions for successful cooperative conflict management. This is all the more striking given the growing centrality of this approach in the peace-building toolbox since the end of the Cold War.14 The interwar and post–Cold War European regimes are two of the most highly institutionalized experiments in soft-power conflict management, yielding a voluminous archival record—including both primary and secondary data—compiled by historians and security studies scholars. It therefore makes sense to mine the history of these regimes to explain their variable success, and thus the variable success of mediation in general. Using structured-focused comparative analysis, I examine these data closely, finding that building nested security from the outside in (that is, containing turbulence in the external environment) is critical to containing emerging communal conflict, particularly where the third party has a limited coercive capacity. This is because mediators have neither the tools nor the mandate to contain conflict spillover from the neighborhood or to prevent a neighboring state from sending in troops. In the absence of military occupation or some other application of force, global or regional powers must back third-party mediations by neutralizing the external conflict environment at the same time that the third party conducts its mediation. Otherwise, cross-border flows of refugees, guns, and fighters and/or neighbor state interventions may upset any peaceful settlement that is brokered at the domestic level. The upshot is that in the absence of regional stability, cooperative techniques may not succeed even when conditions on the ground are optimal for conflict mediation. Throughout the book, I explore an even bolder claim that domestic peace can be built from the outside in, even when conditions on the ground are suboptimal for conflict mediation.

The remainder of this chapter lays the groundwork for this argument. The first section outlines the puzzle that takes center stage in the book—why soft-power conflict management appears to work in some places, but not in others. Next, I present a theory of nested security to account for this puzzle, showing that the wider conflict environment can account for a great deal of domestic conflict. I then explain the role of regional security regimes in managing these “nested” conflicts. This is followed by an outline of the research design, including the metric used to gauge intervention “success.” Finally, I explain my focus on conflicts in Europe and lay out the plan of the book.

What Explains Variation in Mediation Success?

I seek to explain why, over the course of a single intervention, communal tensions on the ground can vary—sometimes dramatically—over time. I measure “success” as a marked reduction in the level of collective tensions between the minority and dominant group (or majority).15 This is a departure from more conventional measures of success, which is the nonoccurrence or cessation of violence in a given hot spot. There are a number of reasons why it makes practical sense to measure “success” as the reduction of communal tensions. First, as a general rule, the line that separates success from failure is fairly arbitrary, so dichotomization is best avoided wherever possible. Second, it is highly problematic to attribute the cause of a nonevent (the absence of civil war) to any factor in particular. This is because the nonoccurrence of mass violence cannot be definitively connected to the presence or absence of any given factor. By focusing instead on the level of conflict over time, I locate the point at which the shift occurred and apply backward induction to trace the chain of events that instigated the reduction or escalation of conflict. Third, dichotomized outcomes imply that once success is achieved, the conflict is terminated. However, mediations are often long-term affairs in which communal tensions are sometimes contained, but rarely decisively resolved; they usually fluctuate over time. Much as domestic law enforcement manages (but does not eliminate) violent crime in society, third-party mediators (particularly those operating under regional security regimes) must engage in long-term “policing” of communal conflicts that, once left alone, could re-escalate at a later date.

For these reasons, I use “success” and “failure” as shorthand for the de-escalation and escalation of communal tensions over the course of a single mediation. In practice, I focus on explaining shifts in communal conflict, beginning at the point when the intervention has begun. By combining process tracing and comparative historical analysis, I unpack the causal chain of events that connects the level of conflict on the ground with events in the state, the mediator, and the wider neighborhood. To do so, I periodize multiyear mediations into higher and lower conflict phases and trace the micro-processes that alter the level of communal tensions from one period to the next. This allows me to identify the conditions at time t = 0 that precipitate a reduction (or escalation) in conflict at time t = 1. If the theory of nested security is correct, then the destabilization of the wider environment should lead to conflict escalation—even if domestic-level factors are ripe for peace. By contrast, the neutralization of conflict dynamics in the wider environment is expected to reduce the level of conflict on the ground, all other things being equal. If the model is generalizable, I expect to observe a similar general pattern across different cases, historical periods, mediators, domestic institutions, and conflict participants.

The Argument

The theory of nested security holds that successful cooperative conflict management requires a neutralized external environment. Indeed, nested security may be not just a necessary, but also a sufficient, condition for domestic conflict reduction. The theory rests on the observation that protracted internal conflicts are rarely confined to the borders of a single state—what Buhaug and Gleditsch call the “closed polity” thesis of civil wars16—but are instead horizontally and vertically “nested” in regional and/or global conflict processes. As George Modelski once put it, “Internal wars occur not only within a political system but also within an international system.”17 Gary Goertz likewise argues that internal conflicts are nested within a wider international context.18 In fact, fully three-quarters of the civil wars waged since the end of the Cold War featured intervention by foreign governments—most often neighboring states with a significant stake in the outcome.19 Domestic conflicts are also bound up in transnational conflict processes, such as diaspora activism (either transnational or transborder); the actions of external interest groups, networks, or multinational corporations; conflict spillover from neighboring states; wider events such as financial crises, regional war, and political transition; and demonstration effects from conflicts in other states.20

There are numerous ways that the regional environment can accelerate a domestic conflict, even when it is undergoing third-party mediation. One is through contagion, where civil war in one state pushes refugees, weapons, and warriors across state borders.21 Examples include the 1994 Rwandan war, when Hutu refugees fleeing the Rwandan Patriotic Front sparked a vicious civil war in neighboring Congo; also, the 1997 civil unrest in Albania, which produced a flood of weapons that were trafficked over the border for use in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) insurgency. Weapons and fighters have considerable longevity and may turn up in numerous wars in a given region. For instance, U.S. weapons transferred to the mujahedeen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s later turned up in the 1990s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo; the mujahedeen themselves participated in these conflicts as volunteers and mercenary soldiers. Most recently, the civil conflict in Syria gave rise to the so-called Islamic State insurgents, who captured territory in eastern Syria before moving across the border to seize oil-rich areas of northern Iraq. Regions plagued by conflict spillover are sometimes described as “bad neighborhoods.”22 Idean Salehyan has identified three uniquely dangerous neighborhoods or “conflict clusters” in West Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia where cross-border flows of refugees, weapons, and warriors serve to perpetuate civil violence in an endless feedback loop.23 In 2001, former KLA fighters slipped over the Kosovo border into Macedonia, igniting a violent conflict between Skopje and the Albanian minority. Cross-border ethnic ties, too, can escalate domestic conflict when the political leaders of the first state attempt to “rescue” a domestic constituency’s transborder kin as a means of securing their electoral support.24 A rebel movement in one state can likewise use the territory of a second state as a physical sanctuary, escalating conflict in the first state, as seen when the Tamil Tiger rebels used the Indian state of Tamil Nadu as a safe haven from which to strike back at the Sri Lankan government.25

Second, the regional environment might prolong or exacerbate domestic conflict through diffusion or demonstration effects, as a successful movement in one place inspires activists in another place to mimic these tactics in hopes of achieving the same result.26 Methods of resistance in one conflict are routinely copied by groups that find themselves in similar situations elsewhere. Mark Beissinger, for e...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Promises and Pitfalls of Cooperative Conflict Management
• 2 The Theory of Nested Security
• 3 Preventive Diplomacy in Interwar Europe
• 4 Induced Devolution in Interwar Europe
• 5 Preventive Diplomacy in Post–Cold War Europe
• 6 Induced Devolution in Post–Cold War Europe
• 7 Nested Security beyond Europe
• Great Powers and Cooperative Conflict Management
• Notes
• References
• Index