Rethinking Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa: Security, Sovereignty and New Political Orders by Abel Polese & Ruth Hanau Santini

Author:Abel Polese & Ruth Hanau Santini [Polese, Abel & Santini, Ruth Hanau]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367180881
Google: EN0EvgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 42728908
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-15T13:22:38+00:00

3. The Effects of Security Assistance in Areas of Limited Statehood

This paper aims at further exploring a still under-studied topic in international security which revolves around the shapes and effects produced by the interaction between external actors engaging in security assistance and domestic actors in contexts characterized by Areas of Limited Statehood, by looking at two empirical cases in the MENA region, Tunisia and Lebanon.

While finding the notion of hybridity fruitful as far as it captures a wide range of degrees of security governance solutions resulting from the combination of local and international elements, different conceptual lenses, such as ALS, can offer more fine-grained insights when analyzing these local political orders. The article will namely refer to states displaying areas of limited statehood, be they geographic and/or functional.

Hybridity has been referred to as combining different kinds of agency, external, and domestic, with only partially overlapping logics.26 By other authors, hybridity has been used to depict the coexistence of traditional and modern forms of authority, making up fundamental mechanisms of everyday governance.27 To their merit, these approaches contribute to a broader understanding of domestic agency, and successfully rectify the ‘weak state’ or deficit perspectives by honing in on the strength of societies in contexts where the central state is weak. The idea behind hybrid political orders is their non-teleological nature, as opposed to notions derived from liberal statebuilding or neo-Tillyean state formation approaches.28 However, among scholars using the notion of hybridity, the emphasis in terms of the concept’s connotation shifts from the dichotomy formal-informal; external-domestic; traditional-modern, providing it hard to operationalize and covering a descriptively wide range of governance arrangements. If the critical literature stigmatizing the use and abuse of notions of ‘weakness’ applied to the analysis of non-Western states now abounds, this is not the case for the recent use of the notion of hybridity, whose underpinnings are supposedly non-normative, as the term rejects binary classifications, but whose conceptual vagueness and attribution with different meanings has hollowed out the employability of the notion. However, while talking of hybrid political orders fails to specify the degrees and different qualities of hybridity, hybrid security governance captures the combination of recipient countries’ security sectors’ norms, organizations and practices with some elements derived from external actors’ security assistance normative or policy transfers.

These efforts include but go beyond security sector reform programs in fragile, post-conflict and, we add, post-authoritarian polities. The SSR agenda, as mentioned above, has gone hand in hand with liberal statebuilding projects and has received similar criticisms concerning its normative connotation as far as its twofold goals are concerned, namely, the democratic governance ambition ruling the use of violence by the state and the civilian control of the military.29 Beside the Eurocentric trap of defining different forms of configuration of political authority diverging from Weberian idealtypes as weak forms of states, what goes missing as a consequence of the normative design of these policy programs is a more realistic assessment of the sources of local power settings and equilibria. While governance of

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