Legitimacy and the Use of Armed Force

Chiyuki Aoi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135233112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the concept oflegitimacy as it may be used to explain the success, or failure, of key stability operations since the end of the Cold War.

In the success of stability operations, legitimacy is key. In order to achieve success, the intervening force must create a sense of legitimacy of the mission among the various constituencies concerned with and involved in the venture. These parties include the people of the host nation, the host government (whose relations with the local people must be legitimate), political elites and the general public worldwide—including the intervening parties' own domestic constituencies, who will sustain (or not sustain) the intervention by offering (or withdrawing) support. This book seeks to bring into close scrutiny the legitimacy of stability interventions in the post-Cold War era, by proposing a concept that captures both the multi-faceted nature of legitimacy and the process of legitimation that takes place in each case. Case studies on Liberia, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Iraq explain how legitimacy related to the outcome of these operations.

This book will be of much interest to students of stability operations, counterinsurgency, peace operations, humanitarian intervention, and IR/security studies in general.

1
Legitimacy in stability operations

This book focuses on the notion of legitimacy to explain the success (or failure) of stability operations in the post-Cold War era. The end of the Cold War witnessed a dramatic and rapid rise in stability operations. In the immediate post-Cold War era, the triumphant Western democracies embarked on a range of peace operations, intended primarily to address internal crises and their humanitarian consequences, which ended with varied levels of success. Efforts to support nation-building with multilateral stability missions received a serious setback in Somalia in the early 1990s, after which the use of armed forces for stability purposes became more restricted, although it continued throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s in places such as the Balkans, East Timor and West Africa. In the aftermath of the Iraq War in 2003, too, lingering violence there led to deep-reaching re-evaluation of the strategic value of stability operations. In Afghanistan, operations that started in 2001 entered a new phase as the Taliban re-emerged around 2005 to 2006, posing a significant challenge to the Western nations involved.

In the success of stability operations, I argue, legitimacy is key. The intervening force must create an enduring sense of the legitimacy of its mission among various parties such as the people of the host nation, the host government (whose relations with the local people must be legitimate), political elites and the general public worldwide (including the intervening parties’ own domestic constituencies, who will sway the course of the intervention by offering or withdrawing support), and states in the international community that will determine and establish conditions regarding legitimate intervention.

The importance of legitimacy has long been recognised in the history of counterinsurgency and stability operations,¹ but the difficulty of establishing it in specific intervention contexts is today felt even more acutely due to the complexity and diversity of actors, the difficulty of defining “success,” and the complications involved in setting specific goals and priorities in order to achieve that success.²

Hence, to closely scrutinize the legitimacy of stability interventions in the post-Cold War era, this book proposes a concept that captures both legitimacy’s multifaceted nature and the process of legitimation that takes place in each case. The study radically reconceptualizes legitimacy by focusing on what James Gow calls the triangulation or crasis of legitimacy to capture its complex elements—elements relating to bases, performance, and support.³ Through analysis of each of these constituent elements, which are all mutually connected, the following chapters explain the outcome of specific operations, which, over the long term, define the operations’ justifiability and utility as means for the viable management of international relations.

Development of stability operations

Stability operations have a long history. The United States, known for its proclivity for high-intensity and high-technology approaches to warfare, has fought 11 high-intensity wars in its history, as well as “hundreds of other” military operations, most of which are now considered to be stability operations.⁴ Operations conducted on the soil of the Americas and elsewhere since the eighteenth century afforded the US military broad-ranging experience in stability operations, and the occupations of Germany and Japan are considered by the US Army to be the precursors of modern stability operations.⁵ European and Japanese colonial powers had also long engaged in various types of stability operations in overseas territories during the colonial era, with varying methodologies and results.

For the duration of the Cold War, however, as ideological confrontation locked international relations into a global balance of power between two major entities—the Western and Eastern blocs—stability operations, often dubbed “low-intensity operations,” took a back seat to the predominant logic of strategic deterrence.⁶ Although national-level commitment to operations belonging to this lower end of the spectrum varied depending upon the historical and strategic environment surrounding particular nations—and indeed, low-intensity conflicts (LIC) were constantly being fought in various parts of the world⁷—in general, Cold War thinking pushed them to the periphery. After the 1991 Gulf War, these conflicts were placed in the category of “military operations other than war” (MOOTW)⁸ but continued to attract considerably little attention from policy-makers as well as from military practitioners.

Yet with the dramatic shifts that took place in the global balance of power when the Cold War came to an end, this neglected area of operations immediately assumed dominance. In some cases, the shift resulted in the resolution of Cold War-fueled conflicts (such as in Cambodia) by implementing the transition to peace. In others, the shift took on a violent form, such as when the central authority of Cold War protégé regimes or former communist states became contested or broke down, giving rise to complex civil conflicts requiring international mediation. In places such as Liberia, Bosnia and Somalia, the mediation required some use of force.⁹

To deal with these internal crises, internationally mandated missions during the 1990s embarked on peace support operations (PSO) supervised through the UN or regional organizations. Starting from the 1990 allied intervention in Northern Iraq, the decade’s major multilateral civil–military interventions in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, East Timor, and elsewhere responded primarily to humanitarian concerns and were conducted under insecure conditions. These experiences led to the reappraisal of both peacekeeping methodology and the basic rules or premises of humanitarian intervention. With regard to peacekeeping methodology, traditional peacekeeping (or UN PKO) missions were updated to peace support operations with more robust capabilities, filling in the middle area between peacekeeping and peace enforcement.¹⁰ With regard to rules and premises of humanitarian intervention, there were renewed and active debates about the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention, particularly in cases conducted unilaterally and outside the aegis of the UN.¹¹ Interest accordingly arose in the “responsibility to protect,” a concept that is primarily concerned with the protection of civilians during conflict. Such responsibilities are seen as focused on sovereign states, and, should they fail, on the UN Security Council.¹² Peace support operations and humanitarian interventions have since been generally categorized as “stability operations,” which have entered the mainstream policy discourse in most Western nations.

But military organizations, especially in the United States and other Western nations, did not always engage seriously with stability-related tasks. During the mid-1990s, for example, the US military argued that in Somalia “mission creep” had transformed what had initially been a humanitarian venture into “nation-building,” resulting in operations that were high-cost, required protracted involvement and entailed numerous casualties. To the US military this experience meant that it would stay away from “nation-building.”¹³ Since that time, the US military acquired some hands-on experience with stability missions through peace support in the Balkans. An early example of the mainstreaming of stability operations may be further observed in the US Army’s concept of the “full-spectrum operation,” which since 2001 has placed stability as one of the four main activities the US Army simultaneously conducts in any war situation (the others being offense, defense, and support).¹⁴

Even so, until the early 2000s there was within the US military an ingrained de-emphasis on “peace-building” or stability-related tasks, and the concept of peace-building was scarcely developed in doctrine and training.¹⁵ Further, with the early Bush (Jr.) administration particularly averse to the US military performing “nation-building” tasks, the implicit understanding during the early phase of the Iraq War was that while stability operations were part of US military missions, the primary responsibility for conducting such operations lay with civilian agencies.¹⁶

Only when the 2003 Iraq War dragged on, to the extent that destabilization grew unpredictably severe and persisting insurgencies endangered the realization of US global strategy, did the US military and government begin to seriously consider how they should conduct stability operations. It was thus not until 2005 to 2006 that the government started to actively invest in the implementation and development of the idea of stability operations and to promote an interagency process involving the government as a whole.

The situation was much the same in the United Kingdom, a close US ally and one of the few countries that had deployed troops in Iraq since 2003. The United Kingdom was also caught largely unprepared to deal with the failure of the Iraqi state and the nation-building tasks that ensued. The thinking about counterinsurgency operations in the British Army at the time was strongly affected by its experience with Northern Ireland counter-terrorist operations. But the situation in Iraq, where the intervening force faced the breakdown of state administration and civil security, was quite different, presenting challenges for both stability and counterinsurgency operations.¹⁷

The experience in Iraq and the prolongation of stability/counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan have forced Western nations to recognize that stability intervention requires a well-planned, comprehensive, broad-ranging civil–military mix of capabilities, including whole-of-government and comprehensive approaches, in order to deal with conditions of state collapse. Although definitions, concepts, and approaches differ from one nation and agency to another, “stability operations” may essentially be described as civil–military operations intended to assist in the achievement of a “viable political settlement between/among the state, significant elites and the broader society within the host nation.”¹⁸ Stabilization is thus a “process” that works toward an objective, which is a legitimate state and governance as perceived by the populace.¹⁹

Stability operations by definition also involve situations associated with failed or fragile states, including weak or lacking state apparatuses and administration; conditions of general instability, with or without a clearly identifiable “enemy”; extensive development challenges, including general poverty, illiteracy and poor health, sanitation and other infrastructure; weak capacity for economic production, capital accumulation, and self-sustainability; weak fiscal capacities; and weak and undeveloped media.²⁰ Hence, the newly developed November 2009 UK Ministry of Defence doctrine on security and stabilization defines stabilization as:

the process that supports states which are entering, enduring or emerging from conflict in order to: prevent or reduce violence; protect the population and key infrastructure; promote political processes and governance structures which lead to a political settlement that institutionalises non-violent contests for power; and prepares for sustainable social and economic development.²¹

Moreover, it is important to note that today’s stability operations often draw their authority from an international mandate, a condition that distinguishes them from older colonial counterinsurgency operations, in which intervening national actors tended to have greater control over the host nation, regardless of the legitimacy of that control. Finally, today’s operational environment is by necessity “crowded” with numerous and diverse actors participating in civilian state-building tasks.²² These may involve, aside from the military, various UN agencies, international and local NGOs, national development and other agencies, private firms and so on. Operational procedures and principles differ significantly among these actors, contributing to the difficulties of coordinating their different approaches.²³

Success in stability operations²⁴

In conventional warfare, the “end” of war equals “victory” over enemy forces. In stability operations, by contrast, the end-point of operations is “success,” which entails the creation of certain “conditions” that enable intervening parties to achieve the political purposes for which force was used in the first place. Those conditions, hence, equal success, which is not synonymous with victory.²⁵

Morris Janowitz’s studies of civil–military relations capture these differences between “success” in stability intervention versus conventional military operations, in which success is defined in terms of “victory,” or of “absolute” or “total” victory. Janowitz distinguishes between officers who are “absolutists,” or who favor total victory and minimal civilian interference in war, and those who are “pragmatists” characterized by their concern with the measured application of force and its political outcomes²⁶ and their orientation toward “viable international relations, rather than victory.”²⁷ He associates the second type with the “constabulary” concept.

The notion of objective civilian control as defined by Samuel P. Huntington and the ensuing Janowitz–Huntington dichotomy of civil–military relations likewise capture the conceptual divide between constabulary force (as defined by Janowitz) and objective civilian control, which is a civil–military relationship that allows for the military to focus on its key task, namely the application and management of violence.²⁸

Stability operations are by nature akin to the constabulary and pragmatic approach to “viable international relations.” General Sir Rupert Smith aptly put these ideas into a contemporary context when he argued that the modern-day utility of force lies in creating “conditions” for the realization of diverse goals, not outright victory, in “war amongst the people.”²⁹

Thus the definition of the end-point of a stability operation has historically involved more diverse goals than “victory,” goals that have often been criticized as ambiguous.³⁰ For example, peace support operations in the Balkans encompassed the broad goals of containing the spread and intensity of the conflict, mitigating its inhuman impacts and encouraging opposing parties to reach a political settlement.³¹ Numerous other operations in the early 1990s aimed similarly to enable delivery of humanitarian aid, prevent the recurrence of humanitarian crises, help implement ceasefire and peace agreements, and so on.

Such tasks soon led to the even broader and longer term objective of “state-building.” What began as short-term humanitarian involvement in Somalia burgeoned into an expansive state-building mission. In Bosnia, the UN-organized peacekeeping mission eventually came to involve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), resulting before its end in a multiagency project aimed at establishing a viable peace. Similarly, NATO intervention in Kosovo led to the establishment of a multiagency international administration. Whereas initially the objective of peace support had been to mitigate the impact and volatility of the conflict while creating conditions suited to encouraging and promoting diplomatic an...