Constructing Sovereignty for Security
In the aftermath of war, international actors often fret about the incoherence, tribalism, and division of war-torn countries. Those living in those countries, however, recognize that the divisions, rivalries, and fragmentation of authority of the “international community” constitute just as big an obstacle to what the UN calls “peace building.”
Such operations have the paradoxical mission of helping others build sovereign states. They constitute the contemporary version of a long-standing security task: the stabilization of the periphery by great powers, which now must be carried out in a world governed by a regime of universal juridical sovereignty of the national state. Even the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which adopted a doctrine of preventive war on the basis of unilateral judgment that governments might threaten U.S. security, was constrained to act within the same regime. Its inability to motivate Iraqis or international partners to collaborate with an occupation regime forced the administration to call on the UN to assist in the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis.
This recourse to the UN, despite political differences between proponents of multilateral peace building and prosecutors of unilateral preventive war, shows that these projects respond to a common security environment. The central fact of the environment in the past half century has been the replacement of global juridical imperialism by global juridical national sovereignty. The UN incorporates this organizing principle into its charter. This structure has altered the options available to great powers for coping with security threats or challenges to their interests.
The use by various states and organizations of sui generis terms such as “peace building,” “postconflict reconstruction,” “nation building,” or “stabilization” displaces these operations from their historical context. The use of such terms and the different types and degrees of political conflict over the interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Darfur shows that not all such actions are manifestations of a common project. The U.S. pursuit of security from both terrorism and challenges to its strategic dominance has different implications from the pursuit of human security through processes of global governance. These doctrines, however, constitute different responses to a common problem: maintaining order and security, however defined, in an increasingly integrated global system juridically and politically organized around universal state sovereignty.
For centuries stronger powers have intervened along their peripheries to establish politically acceptable forms of order. Initially unlinked regional empires (China, Rome, Mayans) tried to stabilize relations with unruly peoples on their frontiers. With the construction of more tightly linked system of mutually recognized and demarcated states in post-Westphalia Europe, the quest for security and profit on the periphery became an imperial—and ultimately global—extension of interstate competition among a single system of core states. European states tried to ensure their interests by integrating new territories through conquest or royal marriages, imposing direct or indirect colonial rule, supporting subordinate buffer states, settling occupied territories with immigrants from Europe, and waging one kind of war against rebellious natives and another kind of war against each other. They tried to regulate their competition and make it more predictable through meetings such as the Berlin Conference, which tried to establish a stable division of colonial rule in Africa. For the first time, states cooperated to impose a common juridical framework over the entire globe, if one that institutionalized unequal political and legal status for diverse territories and peoples.
Creating such a common global framework was a precondition for transforming it. The contemporary global framework for security developed with the foundation of the United Nations system after World War II. That war not only defeated fascism but also ended imperialism as a legitimate legal doctrine. The UN’s first task was overseeing decolonization, extending the international regime of national sovereignty enshrined in the charter to the entire globe, a process that continued through the UN-supervised transition to independence of Timor Leste.
During the Cold War, the struggle over building postcolonial states largely took the form of competing foreign aid projects by the alliance systems led by the United States and USSR. Postcolonial states positioned themselves within the strategic relations of the Cold War. To extract aid, they sometimes adopted, or pretended to adopt, structures based on models supported by one or the other global contenders.
The end of the Cold War freed the UN and some regional organizations to replace unilateral clientelism with multilateral state building efforts, especially in the aftermath of conflict. Agreement by the Security Council to entrust such operations to the UN reflected both the end of zero-sum strategic competition and the lowering of the stakes in who controlled these states. Major powers had less interest in either undermining or supporting such efforts.
The attack of September 11 showed that the United States could now be attacked from even the weakest state and hence reignited strategic interest of U.S. nationalists in the periphery. The regime of universal sovereignty, however, requires more powerful states and international organizations to work through the institutions of national states. Postwar operations attempt to transform states, rather than absorbing them into other, more powerful, units.1
At the most schematic analysis, state formation consists of the interdependent mobilization by a sovereign of three types of resources: coercion, capital, and legitimacy.2 The sovereign wields coercion, in the form of what we hopefully call security institutions, to exercise a monopoly of (legitimate) force over a territory. He needs the accumulation of capital to produce income that can be extracted as revenues to fund state functions and services. Symbolic and cultural resources consecrate the use of force and public revenues as legitimate and link them into a meaningful whole to induce people to comply voluntarily as citizens. The state claims to exercise its power as the delegate of an imagined community: the nation.
These three types of resources have been mobilized in numerous combinations and contexts to build, destroy, or undermine states. Contrary to nationalist historiography, states do not form in isolation but in relation to each other, as part of an interstate system. Interstate borders need states on both sides. The Great Wall defending the Chinese empire was not a border in the modern sense, as the Middle Kingdom did not recognize any equivalent entity on the other side. States’ locations in the international strategic and market systems have largely determined how they have formed. Some developed as trading (capital-intensive) states and others as more militarized (coercion-intensive) ones. Some extracted resources from foreign conquests or investments and others from domestic economic development or external relations of dependence or exchange.
The generalization of the sovereign national state and the consecration of the territorial integrity of existing states by the UN system has altered the environment for latter-day state builders. Epigrammatically, during the formation of national states in Europe, rulers struggled and negotiated with subjects who became citizens to extract resources to wage war against external threats. In the postcolonial world, rulers struggled and negotiated with external powers to gain aid or capital to protect themselves from domestic threats. Citizens often became disenfranchised, as rulers looked to foreign patrons rather than citizens for power resources. External powers were motivated not by concern for apolitical “stability” but by the strategic competition of the Cold War, and now the Global War on Terror, as well as by economic interests.
This process of extroverted state formation underlies many changes in the international system, including the shift from interstate to intrastate warfare and the crises of legitimacy and capacity of postcolonial states, leading to the violent contestation and collapse of many. Some states have collapsed from a lack of strategic importance combined with access to resources that funded armed oppositions (Sierra Leone, Liberia), and others from competing political projects on the part of global or regional powers that undermined weak states (Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo). These crises have thus generated many of the apparently domestic armed conflicts that have confronted international actors in the past several decades.
Participants in peace building or stabilization operations attempt to use foreign resources of the same types to build acceptable states in areas that pose a perceived threat to powerful actors. The threat may derive from the control of a state by an anti-status-quo leader (rogue states—the main concern of the United States) or the breakdown of control under the impact of strategic or economic competition (failed or collapsing states—of greater concern to globalist humanitarians). These operations aim at building states, sometimes after a transitional stage of international administration or occupation. They aim to make such states more effective agents of control over their own territories and population. To what extent states exercise this control as sovereigns, in service of nationally determined goals, and to what extent as agents of externally defined interests, whether hegemonic powers or international standards, constitutes what Ghassan Salamé calls the “dual legitimacy” problem of global state formation.3
The doctrines of the states and organizations engaged in this effort often contradict the goal of state building. Building a national state means creating a sovereign center of political accountability, which is not necessarily the same as building an ally in the War on Terror. Multilateral operations often consist of juxtaposing existing capacities—humanitarian aid, war fighting, peacekeeping, economic guidance and assistance, civil society support, democracy assistance—without a coherent strategy. A strategic decision maker would require command and budgetary authority over the entire operation, which was the rationale for the Brahimi report’s proposal for “integrated missions,” but the main instruments of strategic planning often remain endless “coordination” meetings among rival organizations and the stapler, which serves to assemble those organizations’ programs into a single “plan.”4
Such operations make use of the same types of resources as other processes of state building: coercion, capital, and legitimacy. The core tasks of security provision are peacekeeping or other forms of international transitional security provision; dismantling irregular militias that compete with the state’s monopoly of coercion (demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration, or DDR); and building new security forces, called Security Sector Reform (SSR), which enables the state to exercise that monopoly of coercion. Completion of DDR and SSR allows the international security force to depart. These tasks are essential for developing legitimate rule, as they permit what Anthony Giddens describes as the “extrusion” of violence from politics and administration. This is the process through which military and police functions are distinguished, separating the inside of the state, regulated by rule of law, administration, and policing, from external relations, regulated by diplomacy, military violence, and the balance of power.5
The initial distribution of the means of violence in these operations varies. In cases of civil war or failed states, the lack of effective, legitimate monopoly of force constitutes the problem. The foreign military defeat of incumbent regimes destroys a preexisting monopoly of violence, claimed by the invader to be illegitimate. Generally such interventions provoke an insurgency, which a new regime must co-opt or destroy, or which must succeed itself to implement its own state-building agenda.
One can characterize the pre-operation security situation as Tilly characterizes challenges to state building, namely the degree of accumulation and of concentration of violence. “Accumulation” refers to the amount of means of violence available, and “concentration” to how widely control over them is distributed. Afghanistan, for instance, had a high degree of accumulation and a low degree of concentration (many armed groups with a lot of weapons), while East Timor had a low degree of accumulation and a high degree of concentration (few armed groups with few weapons). Low accumulation and high concentration of weapons combined with a high degree of legitimacy or consent constitutes the most favorable environment for peacekeeping. Higher accumulation, lower concentration, and less consent require more international forces with a stronger mandate.
Peacekeeping mandates in the early part of the 1990s presumed full agreement among warring parties and full legitimacy of the operation among all parties. This is the case of “warlord democratization” under which armed groups voluntarily demobilize in order to resolve a security dilemma, requiring confidence building measures and transparency enforced by peacekeepers.6
When the agreement enjoys less consent, where some armed groups are outside the agreement, or where there is no agreement, the intervener’s role cannot be one solely of resolving a security dilemma. The military intervention to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda enjoyed broad legitimacy both internationally and domestically in Afghanistan, but the consent of the Northern Alliance factions to the power sharing in the Bonn agreement was obtained under pressure. The deposed groups (al-Qaeda and Taliban) were not parties to the Bonn Agreement, and successful state building requires eliminating or co-opting them. The Iraq invasion was far less legitimate, as the Security Council did not endorse it, significant portions of the Iraqi population continue to fight it, and even parts of the population who initially consented to the invasion’s political results appeared to want the invaders to leave.
State-building operations following internal armed conflict must include measures for DDR of combatants and for the changes in government security agencies (SSR). In cases of repressive, ethnicized, or racialized states, the security forces must be depoliticized and constrained to operate within the rule of law (El Salvador, South Africa, Burundi); in cases of state collapse, security forces must be created, trained, and empowered to act within the rule of law (Afghanistan).
All of these processes are intensely political. The provision of security to some means making those who threaten it insecure. In Afghanistan, the actors have had their own security missions. The coalition came to ensure the security of Americans from al-Qaeda and then the Afghan government from the Taliban, initially with the assistance of local commanders and warlords. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was supposed to provide the Afghan administration with security from warlord pressure, while helping the government to create new security agencies and administer a political transition to fully representative government. The UN, aid agencies, and NGOs define security as safe access to areas by civilian aid workers. Afghan civilians expected a “security assistance force” to provide them with security of their person and property, but no international force has had a mandate to provide such protection to Afghans.
Demobilizing militias and building security agencies are intimately related to the development of new political institutions. Where states and political institutions are weak, armed groups are simultaneously political, military, and economic actors, the latter by necessity if they are to survive. In a model of implementation of a peace agreement, groups agree to disarm in return for guarantees of nonviolent political participation. Often, however, they cannot exercise as much power in the civilian realm and must be compensated. Senior leaders can receive state positions or become political leaders. Rank-and-file fighters may enter the new security forces, but that is a highly fraught political decision, as they are likely to politicize or corrupt the new forces, and it is difficult to retrain guerrillas as lawful security agents.
Training and reforming security agencies is equally political. The intense, quasi-religious esprit de corps of military organizations derives from the human need to believe intensely in something for which one risks one’s life. Forming effective armies and police requires formation of a national authority that can command such loyalty, not just technical training. The formation of an officer corps depends on forming its coherence and spirit in service to a mission. Hence, though effective security is necessary to carry out credible elections and other political processes, political processes that build credible, legitimate national leadership are essential to building effective security forces. It is no wonder that first elections almost invariably require international security forces.
If the state cannot sustain the recurrent cost of its security forces, its stability will always be at risk. Nor can any state long survive the funding of its army and police by foreign powers. The “Afghan National Army,” fully paid for by the United States and deployed with embedded U.S. “trainers,” can be only a transitional measure. States must eventually develop an economic and fiscal capacity to pay for their security forces. Economic development, capital accumulation, collection of revenue, and suppression of illegal, untaxable parallel economies (such as trafficking in drags and other forms of smuggling) all require effective security forces. Hence among the tasks of transitional international security providers should be some they are often reluctant to assume, in particular strengthening the government’s fiscal capacity and providing security for property rights.
When peace building or stabilization operations begin, local economies and the capacity of the state to deliver services are typically damaged by war. Many people need humanitarian assistance to return to their homes and survive. Basic assets such as roads, schools, power supplies, and financial institutions have to be built or rebuilt for economic recovery to start. To varying degrees, war-tom societies need massive building of human capital through education, training, and health care. States have often lost the capacity—to the extent that they had it—to mobilize even modest amounts of resources and to supply even the most basic services. Much of the economy may be informal or illegal, producing incomes for mafias or patronage networks that capture parts of the state but do not contribute to it. These economic actors use illicit force and official corruption to seize assets and exclude competitors, stifling investment.
Just as the provision of security requires transitional international security provision, so the development of state capacity to deliver public services and foster economic development requires transitional international assistance. But just as various international and local actors define security differently, so they also define economic strategy according to their own models.
In the language of donors, aid must start with humanitarian assistance, make a transition to reconstruction, and then move on to development. The dominant modes of assistance delivery, however, ignore and indeed often undermine the fundamental strategic goal of economic assistance to state building: strengthening sustainable state capacity to mobilize resources to deliver services, which requires the growth of licit economic activity, which in turn requires public services such as security, rule of law, fiscal and monetary management, and education. The mobilization of resources requires that the state develop both legitimacy (partly through service delivery) and capacity.
The central state institution that coordinates mobilization of resources, provision of services, and legitimation of state power is the budget. And it is the process of mobilizing those resources domestically, and particularly the struggle over the budget, that is at the center of the process of state formation and legitimation.
In postconflict situations, however, international donors provide most of the resources for public services. These donors are reluctant to support recurrent expenditures and usually fund other expenditures directly, through their own implementing agencies. Rather than disbursing money from a common account under the control of a political authority that can be held accountable to the nation receiving the aid, each donor country or agency maintains its separate spending mechanisms and procedures, which are accountable to its own political authority. In the 2005 budget presented by the Afghan authorities, for instance, less than a quarter of all expenditures were channeled through the Afghan government’s budget.7 The creation of what Ashraf Ghani has called the “dual public sector” constitutes the problem of dual legitimacy in the fiscal realm. The internationally sponsored public sector operates according to its own rules. Its salary scales tend to suck capacity out of the national government by drawing most qualified nationals into the service of international organizations. Its inflationary effect on price levels may further depress the real value of state salaries.
Accountability also suffers. As far as donor states are concerned, aid money is “spent” when it is disbursed to an agency, not when the agency implements a program. Hence multilateral “state building” operations keep few accounts of what has been spent before projects are completed. Since citizens of the recipient countries, who hear reports of huge figures unmatched by what they think of as proportionate results, have no way to demand accountability for the funds, the frequent result is populist politics such as the campaign against NGOs in Afghanistan.
This method of giving “aid” fails to build the legitimacy and capacity of the recipient government. The government cannot make decisions about what services are to be provided, track expenditures, or gain experience in providing public goods. Multilateral operations risk creating elected governments fragmented among clienteles of several aid agencies, with no political authority to pursue a coherent strategy for building sovereignty. Elected governments without budgetary authority or control over security provision hardly merit the term “democracies.”
Of course the governments of countries emerging from war or violence are often incapable of exercising such responsibilities. International organizations have created a number of mechanisms to enable governments to increase their responsibility and build capacity. The most common such mechanism is a trust fund for categories of expenditure. Donors deposit unearmarked funds in return for a voice in the management of the fund. The recipient government must provide full documentation of expenditure for approval by the fund’s governors. The joint governance of the fund institutionalizes dual legitimacy transparently by providing both aid donors and the recipient government with voice in accounting for expenditure, while empowering the government to make decisions and learn by doing. This method does not, however, enable donors to plant flags on projects or impose agendas.
The problem of dual legitimacy can also occur in the area of economic policy. War economies lead to hyperinflation, parallel economic activities as both survival strategies and funding mechanisms for militias, and the capture of productive assets (including land), state enterprises, and regulatory bodies by “mafias” linked to armed groups. The standard international response is development of the rule of law, shrinking the state to core functions, and privatization. Some criticize the international imposition of this liberal development model in ways that preclude societies’ formulating their own economic policies through political processes. International development institutions (and some recipient governments, such as Afghanistan) support these measures on the grounds that they are dismantling the institutions not of a welfare state but of corrupt networks. Just as the alternative to a corrupt state based on patronage, cronyism, and corruption is a democratic state based on transparency and the rule of law, so the alternative to the criminalized economy that supports the corrupt state and armed groups is a market system based on transparency and the rule of law.
The problem in implementing such policies is that they contrast an actually existing economy (what Duffield calls “actually existing development”) with an idealized model of a market economy, including government-sponsored social safety nets and markets devoid of “illicit” power.8 The “actually existing economy,” criminalized as it may be, is providing livelihoods for many people, and those who are benefiting the most from that economy are liable either to control the process of marketization or to see it (possibly correctly) as a political plot by their opponents. The criminalized economy is at least nationally owned and operated.
Almost by definition, international state-building operations begin under conditions where states lack not only the capacity to provide security and services but also legitimacy. Legitimacy begins with that of the international operation. At one extreme, few contest the legitimacy of UN operations requested by all parties to a conflict to assist in implementation of a peace agreement approved by the Security Council. At the other extreme lies the war in Iraq, conducted with neither the consent of parties nor approval by the Security Council. International legitimacy of such operations appears to increase domestic legitimacy. Involvement by the UN provides a more neutral and credible interlocutor for political groups than an occupying power, as the Bush administration found to its apparent surprise in Iraq. International approval also communicates to opponents of the operation (called “spoilers” by those who support it) that they are less likely to gain external support.
The next stage is the establishment of a transitional administration. Besides a UN transitional administration or a foreign occupation regime, this may take the form of a coalition among national forces pursuant to an agreement or a monitored government consisting of previous incumbents. The main purpose of the transitional government is to preside over a process that establishes a legitimate legal framework for political contestation and rule (generally, a constitution) and to administer the first stages of the implementation of this framework.
Though the UN, unlike some regional organizations, has no clear standards for the type of government legitimate for its members, its operational doctrine requires that the transition lead to adoption of a constitution providing for at least an appearance of liberal democracy, with elections constituting the principal benchmark. The United States even more explicitly has made “democracy” (defined as a government elected by universal adult suffrage) the goal of such operations. International actors also require that any constitution or basic law profess adherence to international standards of human rights. Diplomats note that their parliaments at home may refuse to allocate aid funds without such adherence. This insistence may cause conflict with local elites, whether because of their belief in competing standards such as some interpretations of sharia or preference for more authoritarian limits on rights.
Elected governments presiding over a society that visibly supports them, however, will be better able to mount campaigns for empowerment by international actors than interim governments of dubious legitimacy. Hence the first election of a legitimate government, though a key step in the state-building process, is far from its termination point and may mark its true beginning. After his election, Afghan President Hamid Karzai openly opposed U.S. plans for aerial eradication of opium poppy, showing greater independence than previously.
Studies of state building operations often try to identify “best practices” without asking whom they are best for. Actors can learn how better to achieve their goals, but every step of the process of internationally sponsored state building generates political conflict.
Nonetheless, in a strategic environment where the goals of actors are interdependent, negotiation may lead to convergence among actors with differing motivations. The Bush administration entered Afghanistan committed not to engage in “nation building.” Eventually, though, it needed an “exit strategy,” which would be sustainable only if the United States and other international actors helped Afghans build institutions that would serve the common interests of Afghanistan and the international community.
Hence even though there is no purely technical solution to the political debate over the conditions for legitimacy of operations, the nationalist concept of “exit strategy” and the globalist concept of “sustainability” may at times converge on a mission of building a legitimate and capable state. Doing so effectively requires transitional governance institutions that incorporate the inescapable need for dual legitimacy transparently, as does governance of a trust fund, rather than in a fragmented and secretive way through ad hoc pressures.
This organizing principle of the contemporary global system requires that state building, and particularly multilateral state building, be placed at the center of the global security agenda. To do so will require negotiated delegation of some sovereign functions, not only of the reconstructed country but also of the donor countries. They will better serve their own needs by giving aid in ways that are more accountable to the reconstructed country’s citizens, not just their own.
1. Robert Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35(1), 1982, 1–24. For a more recent interpretation, see Michael Barnett, “The New United Nations Politics of Peace: From Juridical Sovereignty to Empirical Sovereignty,” Global Governance 1(1), Winter 1995, 79–97.
2. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1992, Studies in Social Discontinuity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).
3. Ghassan Salamé, Appels d’empire: Ingérences et résistances à l’âge de la mondialisation, (Paris: Fayard), 1996.
4. Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (the Brahimi Report); UN Doc. A/55/305-S/2000/809 (2000).
5. Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
6. Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder, eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). See also Leonard Wantchekon, “The Paradox of ‘Warlord’ Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation,” American Political Science Review 98(1), 2004, 17–33.
7. From a presentation given by Abdullah Abdullah, minister of foreign affairs of Afghanistan, at the presentation at the Afghanistan Development Forum, April 2005.
8. Mark Duffield, “Reprising Durable Disorder: Network War and the Securitisation of Aid,” in Bjorn Hettne and Bertil Oden, eds., Global Governance in the 21st Century: Alternative Perspectives on World Order, Expert Group on Development Initiatives (EGDI), Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist, 2002).