GS João Bazelga

Global Security
IRO (2022/2023) - Leiden University
Block 3

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GS João Bazelga

Introduction to security Studies

SECURITY

Security: in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values, and in a
| subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values will be attacked;
|
|Contested concept
|
|—> Survival model: freedom from life-determining threats (narrow);
|—> Survival-plus model: freedom to have life choices;

Two prevalent philosophies of security

I. Security = accumulation of power (understood as a commodity);
II. Security = emancipation, which is a concern with justice and the provision of human rights
(understood as a relationship between di erent actors).

The referent object of security

• People (central focus);
• State (central focus of academic IR) - focuses on the national interest;
• Society (for people that don’t view group identities and collectivities in purely instrumental
terms);
• Analytical framework for thinking about possible referent objects from the lowest level (the
individual), through various sources of collective identities (including bureaucracies, states,
regions, civilizations etc.), right up to the level of the international system;
• Planet earth (has gained more prominence recently).
|
|—> These are not necessarily independent of one another.

Studying security is important because it may help people (even though most analysis refuse the
idea of total security).

SECURITY STUDIES

Security theory: theory that aims at the understanding and/ or management of security issues
(divided more strongly than comparable elds into subsets without mutual recognition).

Security studies: sub eld of academic IR that involves interpreting the past, understanding the
| present and trying to in uence the future.
|
|Involves the interplay of 5 forces
|
|—> Great-power politics;
|—> Technology;
|—> Key events;
|—> Internal dynamics of academic debates;
|—> Institutionalisation.

Key dimensions of security (Buzan):

• Military security (concerned with the interplay between the armed o ensive and defensive
capabilities of states and their perceptions of each other’s intentions);
• Political security: focused on the organisational stability of states, systems of government and
the ideologies that give them their legitimacy;
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• Economic security: revolved around access
to the resources, nance and markets
necessary to sustain acceptable levels of
welfare and state power;
• Societal/Social security: centred on the
sustainability and evolution of traditional
patterns of language, culture, and religious
and national identity and custom;
• Environmental security: concerned with the
maintenance of the local and the planetary
biosphere as the essential support system
on which all other human enterprises
depend.

Security issues are socially constructed (by media and

political preferences for instance).

The search for perfect security defeats its own ends

(playing for safety is the most dangerous way to live).

Problem-solving theory: takes the world and it nds it;

Critical theory: does not take institutions and social and

power relations for granted but calls them into question;

ORIGIN

Second World War and Cold War —> Technological developments (e.g.: nuclear weapons)
|
|
Need (A) for civilian experts to balance military leadership and (B) coordinate military and non-
military considerations.
|
|—> Emergence of strategic studies.

THE GOLDEN AGE (1950-1960)

• Field was productive, in uential, and relatively coherent;

• The national interest was focused on security rather than welfare;

• The nuclear revolution brought research on deterrence, containment, coercion, escalation and
arms control (with a belief in deductive, rational thinking);

• Work focused on game theory and deterrence theory;

• Work related to systems analysis, a method for solving problems of force structure and resource
allocation that drew on economic theory as well as operations research developed by natural
scientists, engineers, and economists during the Second World War;

• Many of the new developments (notably perceptions and decision making) were reactions to the
di culties that the classical form of security studies ran into.

THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE (1960-1970)

• Limits to traditional approaches

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|—> Not applicable to pleasant war in Vietnam;
|—> Limited view of politics (only military balances, not beliefs and perceptions);
|—> Assumes perfect information and constant ability to rationally calculate;

• Public disinterest in national security (critique of Vietnam War made security studies an
unfashionable subject at universities);

• Focus on International Political Economy;

INSTITUTIONALISATION AND STAGNATION (1970-1980)

• Crisis for security studies - stagnation of theory development and institutionalisation;

• Highly theoretical and academic scholarship of the earlier period had succumbed to 'hectic
empiricism;

• Gradual IR-i cation of security studies;

• Moved from interdisciplinary into becoming one of IR's two pillars, paralleling International
Political Economy (IPE) - became a synonym of (neo)realism;

• The institutionalisation of security studies emerged in the US and was exported to Europe (these
two tracks only merged during the 1980s and 1990s);

• New data (more systematic use of historical analysis and more access to archives);

• New methods (structured-focused case comparisons and more diverse social scienti c
approaches to explain historic events);

• New realities (end of Cold War détente; Iranian and Nicaraguan revolution; and Soviet
interventions in Africa states and Afghanistan);

• End of Cold War - shifts in the character of warfare (contested argument):

A. Civil wars
- Civilians as targets (as opposed to well-ordered battles between soldiers
in uniforms);
- Criminalisation of violence (as opposed to state-building enterprises);
- Identity-based wars (as opposed to forward-looking f ideological
agendas);

B. International wars:
- Hybrid wars;
- Grey-zone warfare;
• Changes after the 09/11 and the “global war on terror”;

DISCIPLINARY QUESTIONING AND THEORETICAL RESEARCH (1980-2000)

• Increasingly abstract and ambitious theorising on both sides

of the Atlantic (on separate tracks);

• US school was more rationalist and European school was

more re ectivist (much work was similar but their theoretical
context di ers);

• There were diverging understandings on the role of the security studies eld.
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NEW SECURITY STUDIES (21ST CENTURY)

• Security studies is in a strong position;

• New European security studies does not remain structured by separate ‘schools’;

• In the USA, these theories are inseparable from the IR theory;

• Most obvious joint issue for both schools is terror and order and, now, environmental security.

Anarchy, Uncertainty and War

EXISTENTIAL FEATURES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Anarchy: the absence of government over states (whether inter-state relations are violent or non-
| violent is distinct from the presence of anarchy).
|
|—> States exist in a “self help” world.

Uncertainty: the quality of not (being) known beyond doubt (existential condition inherent to all
| human relations - cannot be avoided, but how it is understood can very signi cantly);
|
|It’s a driving force in international (in)security
|
|—> Mission of intelligence agencies - to supply country’s top political leadership with information
about past events, current state of the world, actors’ intentions, and likely future state of the
world.

Types of uncertainty:

A. Unresolvable uncertainty (state decision makers, including military planners and foreign
policy analysts, can never be certain about the current and future intentions of those with
the capability of harming them militarily);
|
created by…
|
|—> Material factors (“ambiguous symbolism” of weapons and their deployment - Can
| o ensive and defensive weapons be distinguished?);
|
|—> Psychological factors (the “other minds” problem - Limited understanding of the
| intentions and motives, hopes and fears, and emotions and feelings on the part of
| the decision makers of one state about their counterparts elsewhere).
|
A serious misjudgement could result in the waste of money and the loss of prestige;
ultimately, defeat in war and foreign occupation might be the outcome.

B. Uncertainty about the future (still possible to make predictions and assumptions) - this is
resolvable because we will gure it out, just not in the present.

Power distributions: categorising states by power;

|
|—> Superpowers: operate globally;
|—> Great powers: in uential in multiple world regions;
|—> Regional powers: in uential mostly within a single region;

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Types of distribution of power (neorealism): Multipolarity, Bipolarity and unipolarity.

CONSEQUENCES OF EXISTENTIAL FEATURES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Anarchy + Uncertainty = Problems

|
|—> Striving to attain security from such attacks, they are driven to acquire more and more power
| in order to escape the e ects of the power of others;
|—> Vicious circle of security and power accumulation.

The security dilemma: a two-level strategic predicament in relations between states and other
actors in which the relevant parties confront a dilemma of interpretation,
about the motives, intentions and capabilities of others, and a dilemma of
response, about the most rational way of responding to the former -
actions taken by one state to increase its own security causes reactions
from other states which in turn decreases rather than increases the
security on the original state;
|
|—> Quintessential dilemma in international politics);
|—> Core concept for understanding con ict escalation and arms race;
|—> Produced by anarchy and the resulting “self help” system in which security-seeking states
| exist;
|—> Driven by uncertainty and fear about the intention of others;
|—> Consequences are unintended and “tragic”, but not inevitable;
|—> Irreducible dilemma: inability of one set of decision makers to enter into the counter-fear of
| others;
|
|the “spiral” of competition creates…
Security paradox: two or more actors, seeking only to improve their own security, provoke through
their words or actions an increase in mutual tension, resulting in less security all
round (paradox in studying security is that the more we learn about threats, the
more the world appears to be dangerous).

Solving the security dilemma

1. Fatalist logic - de ne the other as a rival and therefore maximize one’s own (military) power
|
|—> Assumes that uncertainty is always there and can’t change (Mearsheimer);
|
|—> May lead to security paradox (a situation in which two or more actors, seeking only to
improve their own security, provoke through their words or actions an increase in
mutual tension, resulting in less security all round);

2. Mitigator logic - create security regimes or an international society;

|
|—> Create greater predictability through mutual learning (states can reveal their intentions
and reassure rivals; arms control agreement or unilateral force reductions can show
that a security-seeking state’s policies are defensive - defensive realism);
|
|—> Develop cooperative and con dence-building measures (international institutions
create transparency and communication - liberalism and neoliberal institutionalism;
international law creates reliability - English School/Bull);

3. Transcender logic - create a di erent world order;

|
|—> Identify the problem and abolish its source (capitalism, patriarchy, anarchy -
constructivist theories);
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GS João Bazelga
|
|—> Form security communities (groups of states between which war becomes
unthinkable);

If the security dilemma is not resolved, then there is usually an escalation to war.

War: the continuation of policy by other means (habit that most human societies have acquired
and become deeply attached to - can be culturally, politically, legally and sociologically
explained);
|
|—> Violent;
|—> Large-scale;
|—> Between organized political entities with political goals;
|—> Generally launched to prevent a frightening future from materialising;
|—> Has been a crucial part of de ning heroism and bravery;
|—> Inevitably related with peace.

Philosophies of war:
- Political philosophy: warfare as ‘an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to ful l
our will’;
- Eschatological philosophy: teleological view of history that would culminate ‘in a “ nal” war
leading to the unfolding of some grand design - divine, natural or human (in the global
variant, the “grand design” is presumed to arise from the chaos of the “ nal war”);
- Cataclysmic philosophy: war as a catastrophe that befalls some portion of humanity or the
entire human race (the global variant sees what as a cataclysm that a ects humanity as a
whole).

1945-present: unusual period - “The Long Peace”

|
|—> No wars between great powers (since 1953);
|—> No states have been eliminated by conquest;
|
This argument has been challenged by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
|
Skeptics of the “Long Peace”: From a statistical perspective, there is nothing special about the
current “long peace” (long peace statistically rare only if lasts
another approximately 100-150 years).

Globalization
|
|—> “New” type of warfare: (Kaldor)
- Erosion of the state’s monopoly of legitimate organized violence;
- Struggle between cosmopolitan and exclusivist identity groups;
- Incites “fear and hatred” rather than win “hearts and minds”;
- Financed through a globalised war economy that is decentralised and increasingly
transnational and in which the ghting units are often self-funding through plunder, the
black market or external assistance;
|
Criticism:
• A lot of these trends are not new (e.g.: atrocities);
• Globalization is a much older process that is essentially about circulation, henceforth, not being
separate from war itself;

Domains of warfare (expanding):

• Increase in “metrowar” (war in urban environments);

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• Emergence of “robot warriors” and development of arti cial intelligence (which raise some
intriguing ethical issues about war and humanity’s place in it);
• Decrease in the human participation;
• Growing use of drones;
• Moving beyond geospaces into cyberspace and outer space;
• Greater accessibility to instruments of war (di use);
• Broad spectrum of means (diverse);
• Con ict parties will presumably seek to disrupt critical infrastructure, societal cohesion and
governance functions of their adversaries rather than simply focus on defeating enemy forces
on the battle eld (disruptive);

How do wars start?

- Several categories of level analysis: Individual; country/society; and international system;
- Security dilemma implies war is accidental and undesired;
|
|—BUT—> Accidents do not cause war, decisions cause war.

Conceptual framework of war (rationalist):

- The inherent destructiveness and costly nature of war means all actors involved in a dispute
prefer peace to war;
- Therefore, if there is a risk of what, it means that something stands in the way of peaceful
resolution.
|
Rationalist explanations of war
|
|—> Informational problems (created by anarchy and uncertainty);
|—> Credible commitment problems (created by anarchy and uncertainty);
|—> Issue indivisibility (possible but unlikely cause of war);

CASE STUDY: CHINA’S RISE AND SECURITY

The security dilemma in the 21st century

I. Prospect of a new cold war (tensions between US and China);

II. Dynamics of new arms competitions;
III. Towards a world of many nuclear powers;
IV. Terrorism and the spread of mistrust.

Tensions between the US and China

• Chinese cyber attacks in pursuit of the trade secrets of US rms (end to Xi-Obama cyber
cease re);
• Trade “war”: US tari s on Chinese imports; China retaliates;
• China asserts control on South China Sea over strategic sea lanes and creates military outposts
on disputed islands;
• Taiwan;
|
If both governments make fatalistic assumptions about each other’s intentions on these various
issues they will feel compelled to seek security at the expense of each other, resulting in strategic
dynamics that will lead to the construction of their relationship as a Cold War narrative.

China as a possible threat to the liberal (capitalism + democracy) world order

• Power transitions may lead to international con ict;

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• As a rising power, China threatens US hegemony by seeking to redesign rules of post-WW2
international system and by constructing a security threat to the US.
• However, today’s western order is hard to overturn and easy to join.

Realism
|
|—> China rise has economic, political and security implications for US-China relations;
|—> Current tensions mean that con ict is escalating;
|—> O ensive realism believes that a military confrontation is likely, while defensive realism thinks
that this can be prevented.

Liberalism
|
|—> The risks of an anarchic international system can be overcome;
|—> Trade, international institutions and democratic regimes as important pillars of peace;
|—> China’s integration into the liberal order is possible and likely.

Thucydides Trap: inexorable, structural stress caused by a rapid shift in the balance of power
between two rivals (e.g.: inevitable war between the rising Athenians and the fearful Sparta).

Alliances, coercion and diplomacy

ALLIANCES

“There is at least one thing worse than ghting with allies, and that is to ght without them” -
Winston Churchill

Alliance: a formal or informal relationship of security cooperation between two or more sovereign
| states (Walt) - intended to enhance the security of their members and external parties
| (what has traditionally distinguished alliances from other security arrangements between
| states, however, is the emphasis that they place on military forms of assistance).
|
|
Wide variety of alliance relationships covered by the de nition:
|
|—> Defensive alliances (tend to last longer);
|—> O ensive alliances;
|—> Non-aggression pacts; Multiple times often mixed together.
|—> Neutrality pacts;
|—> Consultation agreements.

The autonomy-security tradeo

• States balance the political bene ts of additional capabilities

against the political costs of acquiring them when choosing
between arms and allies;

• Arming produces a more reliable improvement in security

slowly at the political cost of diverting resources to the
military;

• Alliances produce additional security quickly but with less

reliability and at the political cost of moderating con icting
interests with the prospective ally.
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• When entering into an alliance…
- Powerful states gain autonomy at the expense of security;
- Weak states gain security at the expense of autonomy.
• Asymmetric alliances:
- All allies better o than without the alliance;
- Some allies achieve security gains, others gains autonomy;
- More stable than symmetric alliances (on average last several years longer).
• Symmetric alliances:
- Allies gain on the same dimension;
- Less stable than asymmetric alliances (on average last several years later).

Alliances from the state’s perspective

Useful as a part of many kinds of strategies (e.g.: total war, containment, deterrence);
|
|BUT
|
Come with dangers
|—> Chain-ganging: state(s) dragged into war in order to save reckless allies;
|—> Buck-passing: state(s) allow others to bear the burden of halting the rise of a state that
threatens to gain hegemony.

Theories of alliance formation

International determinants:

I. Balance of power: states ally to confront a more powerful state and if no possible alliances
exists that can balance a very powerful state, states “bandwagon” by allying with that
powerful state (shifts in the international distribution of power may threaten the existence of
established alliances);

II. Balance of threat: raw power per se does not endanger states’ security, but rather threats
(due to geographic proximity, ideology, etc.) —> therefore, states ally to balance against
threat and not just power (e.g.: Germany and France have similar power but they don’t
endanger instead each other because there is no threat perceived between them);

Domestic determinants:

III. Domestic a nity (cultural, ideological, political/institutional): states will tend to ally with
states whose political orientations are similar to their own (alliances among liberal
democratic states are likely to be especially strong and resilient);

Why do some alliances last longer than others?

I. Shifts in distribution of power;

II. Changes in threat posed by a state/states;

III. Regime type

|—> How stable are public preferences?
|—> To what extent is there continuity of national leadership? Alliances among liberal
democracies, may be especially strong and resilient.

IV. Institutionalisation;

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|—> Creation of organizations, bureaucracies, which on their own try to survive into the
| future, lobby, manage change, and facilitate cooperation between members;
|—> Institutional capacity allows alliance to shift to address new threats, when the original
| reason for the alliance is no longer present, and take di erent tasks.
|
Alliances characterised by high levels of institutionalisation will last longer on average.

V. Socialisation
|—> Contact between elites (regular summits, conferences, etc.);
|—> Formal cooperation between personnel from member government (secondment, etc);
|—> Attempt to create sense of community among elites and across the public of alliance;
|—> Engage in trade and exchange of capital, technology, information, ideas and people.

Stability and longevity produced by external factors (e.g.: persistence of threat), domestic factors
(e.g.: regime type), and institutional/social features of the alliance itself.

Evaluating success/e ects of is tricky;

|
|—> In theory, only unreliable alliances should be challenged;
|—> Result is selection bias in the historical record - if an alliance is reliable, it will deter attacks,
and therefore we are less likely to observe any attacks on it.

CASE STUDY: NATO

NATO is one of the longest-lived alliances. Although the treaty does not refer to any particular
adversary, it was clearly a response to the growing threat that appeared to be posed by the
hostile ideology and military power of the Soviet Union and to manage/control a possible
resurgent Germany;

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, some IR scholars argued that the alliance’s time
would soon be over;
|
|—BUT—> NATO has thrived since 1990 (it has been transformed into a regional collective
security arrangement).

Factors for NATO longevity

• Residual threat posed by the remnants of the Soviet Union, notably Russia;
• Emergence of new types of threats that were shared to a signi cant extent by NATO members
(Balkans, Libya and Syria);
• Intra-alliance function that it has played in ensuring friendly relations among its members;
• Its acquisition of a substantial organisational structure;
• The substantial movement of goods, investments, ideas and people has created close societal
ties between the two sides of the Atlantic;
• Promote liberal democratic practices and institutions;
• Usefulness as an enforcement arm of UN Security Council;

NATO’s challenges:

A. Greater divergence in the principal security concerns facing NATO members;

B. Existence of institutional alternatives, especially for the European members of NATO;
|
|—> These two sets of challenges may be exacerbated by developments within the NATO
countries themselves.

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COERCION

Strategy: ability to produce intended e ects (closely related to the concept of power)
|
|—> It takes strategy to unleash the power inherent in this capacity and to direct it towards
speci c purposes (creative element in any exercise of power).

Coercion: the activity of causing someone to do something against his will, or of bringing about
| his doing what he does against his will (the latent use of force).
|
|
|—> A coercive strategy involves the deliberate and purposive use
of overt threats of force to in uence another’s strategic
choices.

Whether a threat succeeds in in uencing the target’s strategic choices will depend on the target’s
perception of the threat and on the other factors that go into its decision calculus.

Coercion goals (threat-based)

A. Deterrence;
|
|—> Aims to persuade an opponent not to initiate action (threats aim to preserve).
|
|—> Involves making clear what the coercer considers undesirable and then waiting, leaving
| the overt act to the adversary (once the threat has been made the coercer would need
| to act only if the adversary makes the for- bidden move);
|
|—> Has no necessary time limit;
|
|—> Compliance is literally a non-event, it doesn’t require any special rationalisation by the
target;

B. Compellence;
|
|—> Aims to persuade an opponent to change (its) behaviour (threats aim to change);
|
|—> Involves initiating an action that stops or becomes harmless only if the target responds
| (might require the coercer to use force until the target acts);
|
|—> Requires a clear deadline;
|
|—> Compliance will be blatant and will carry with it the added repetitional signi cance of
| humiliation (thus being harder to achieve);
|
|—> The behavioural change can be a stop short of completion, undo of an action or a
change in policy (by changing government).

Strategies/Methods

• Punishment (impose costs to deter);

|
|—>When the target can take what is desired without risk of denial then deterrence has to
| rely on punishment;
|
|—>The resistance and compliance costs of the target are uncouples (even if resistance
| fails, the target still has the option of choosing whether or not to comply);
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|
|—>The choice remains even after the battle is nished, for the coercer still has not got
direct access to what he is after.

• Denial (take actions that create di culty for target to successfully undertake the action that
you hope to deter);
|
|—>The target is presented with resistance and compliance costs together (coercer
| threatens the target that if its resistance fails compliance costs will automatically follow).
|
|—>The opponent only retains choice over whether or not to engage in battle;
|
Denial is preferable to punishment.

Denial and punishment may not necessarily lead to altogether di erent use of force.

Costs

• Faced by target (assuming that the target is a voluntary agent)

|
|—> Resistance costs (costs due to punishment imposed by the coercer and/or steps taken to
| prevent coercer from imposing punishment —> costs involved in trying to prevent the
| coercer from executing the threat + pain imposed by the coercer’s action);
|
|—> Compliance costs (costs associated with forgoing bene ts or accepting losses by
| acquiescing in the coercer’s demands - what does target give up?);
|
Coercion is likely to succeed if B is convinced that the resistance costs exceed the compliance
costs .

• Faced by coercer
|
|—> Enforcement costs (costs of punishing the target or implementing denial strategy - the
| target will try to increase the coercer’s enforcement costs).
|
A threat will be credible only if resistance costs for the target exceed enforcement costs for the
coercer.

Coercion in practice

• Di cult to implement since the outcome is not fully in the coercer’s hands (depends on the
target’s perceptions of the threat);

• Construction of e ective military threats depends on:

|
|—> Clarity of communication - because military signals are notoriously ambiguous, they need
| to be supplemented by some more direct forms of communication to ensure that the
| opponent receives the message being sent without distortion;
|
|—> Credibility of the threats - will depend on the costs associated with implementing this
threats, which might simply re ect the amount of resources and e ort entailed;

• May involve multiple audiences: target; domestic audiences in target; international audiences;

• In most con icts, mutual coercion, even somewhat one-sided, is much more likely than a wholly
asymmetric relationship;

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• Reputation costs: if compliance is humiliating and requires acknowledging submission, this can
have long-term consequences;

• How one coerces now will have an impact on how much one might have to coerce in the future
(the coercion costs might need to be viewed in short and long term);

• Internalised deterrence is possible (only on occasion is it necessary to resort to the explicit

threats related to speci c prospective acts that we commonly associate with a deterrent
strategy).

• Success is di cult to observe due to selection bias.

CASE STUDY: THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

Coercive diplomacy: reactive strategy that aims at persuading through threats and not the use of
force based on an endowment e ect (meaning that individuals value objects
they have signi cantly more than objects they do not possess).
|
|—> Many variables can in uence the outcome of this.

Iran has had a civilian nuclear program since 1959, but only in 2002, when it was announced that
the country had started developing a new nuclear enrichment plant and heavy water reactor, did
this become a concern for the rest of the world.

European engagement and US belligerence

• US refused to take part in diplomatic discussions and the Bush Administration pushed this issue
to the UN Security Council;
• EU3 produced the Tehran and Paris Agreements which required Iran to suspend its enrichment
activities and sign an NPT additional protocol giving the IAEA wider inspection powers -
ultimately failed;
• The election of Ahmadinejad in 2005 brought a bigger anti-Western rhetoric and an acceleration
of the nuclear program;
• The UN Resolutions from 2006 to 2008 were put out with the main objective of bringing unity
against Iran’s nuclear program
• The EU-Iran negotiations did not work out because the EU didn’t secure compliance from Iran
due to the trade relations they have and Iran wanted the US to also make concessions.

The election of Obama

• Obama allowed Iran the opportunity to negotiate without preconditions;
• The US, Russia and France proposed an agreement where Iran would ship out the majority of its
stockpile of low enriched uranium, which would under further enrichment and transformation
into fuel pads, in Russia and France, before being sent back to Iran;
• Even though being more open to compromises, Iran ended up refusing the agreements because
it restricted its uranium enrichment rights (which they considered a priority).
• Russia and China were not happy with the idea of putting out UNSC resolutions since they
wanted to preserve their trade links and their image of non-intervention in internal a airs;
• A new UNSC resolution was put out in 2010 that banned against trade in the conventional
military space and sanctioned several transactions against Iranian banks (because Russia and
China did not want to go on the o cial record for the sanctions, the resolution gave permission
for states to adopt coercive measures unilaterally as well as cover for the states who don’t want
to be associated).
|
|—> Lowest common denominator outcome: rule/proposal/opinion that is deliberately
simpli ed so as to appeal to the largest number of people - countries will only coerce in
measures all of them agree on (even though its expected that with more coalitional
partners, the coercive potential available to the coercer increases).
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Unilateral sanctions and the road to agreement

• US and EU kept imposing unilateral sanctions (especially to oil) that had a quick and
devastating impact;
• By late 2011, the US launched attacks to Iran’s nancial sector (by using SWIFT);
• The extreme consequences the SWIFT ban made Iran announce that they would be open to
talks;

Geneva Interim Agreement (November 2013)

• Restrictions placed on Iran mainly about whether it was allowed to stockpile enriched uranium;
• If Iran complied, P5+1 o ering to relive sanction;
• Obama realised that insisting in the abolishment of the enrichment was futile;
• New president Rouhani vouched and seemed open to better the economic state of the country
(he is bound to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah);

JCPOA (October 2015)

• Restrictions on Iran’s program and an inspections system, for a 15 year period;
• In exchange, P5+1 to relive sanctions, incrementally over the 15-year period;
• The Obama administration knew that this deal weans perfect but they still went trough with it
because it would save 10-15 years to analyse Iran’s intentions better.
• Trump removed the US from this deal in 2018;

From “maximum pressure” (Trump administration) to “maximum diplomacy” (Biden

administration).

The cumulative pressure through economic sanctions and implicit threats of force in combination
with well-calibrated incentives created the conditions for the success of coercive diplomacy.
|
|—> Iran reached a point where the bene ts of complying with the P5+1 demands and
associated with incentives outweighed any potential bene t that might come from
continuing their nuclear program.

DIPLOMACY

Diplomacy: profession, which traditionally has been learned by practicing the art, by
apprenticeship rather than through science (starts with, but goes beyond diplomats and foreign
ministries).
|
|—> Plays a central role in coercive strategies.

Diplomacy as an international institution

|—> An institution of international societies rather than individual states or other entities;
|—> Structure(s) relations among policies rather than states.

Functions of diplomacy:
• Communication;
• Representation;
• Reproduction of international society.

Diplomacy in action
• Conveys messages (therefore linked to coercion);
• Provides framework for “normal” relationships against which signals cam be better understood;
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• Creates and maintains relationships between countries/leaders/bureaucracies, etc.
• Face-to-face interaction has qualitatively di erent impact than other forms;
• Form of intelligence collection.

Soft power: when one country gets other countries to want what it wants (in contrast with the
hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants).

Foreign Military Interventions

WHAT IS A FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTION?

Foreign military intervention: the use of military force to intervene in the domestic a airs of
another state (coercive tactic used to manipulate a country into
taking certain path that would not otherwise have been chosen);

Important dimensions of intervention

A. Type of military force (air strikes; special operations; arming proxy forces; own ground troops);

B. Extent of involvement in domestic a airs (support minority; peacekeeping; counterinsurgency;

regime change);

C. Presence of alliance (unilateral; multilateral).

WHY DO STATES INTERVENE MILITARY?

To improve national security;

|
BUT
|
|—> What is security? Territorial integrity; Human security; etc.
|—> What counts as security issue? Military threat; State and non-state threats;
|—> Whose security? States; allies; citizens in tarter country;
|—> How can security be achieved? Use of force;

Potential goals of military intervention

• (Geo-)Political: resolve (territorial) disputes; foreign policy reversal; regime change;

democratization; support ally;
• Strategic: show resolve; demonstrates capability;
• Humanitarian: protect civilians and human rights;

Factors enabling intervention

• System-level (e.g.: power transition theory, power cycles);
• State’s international environment (e.g.: proximity, territorial disputes, capabilities, alliances,
economic interdependence, IO membership, and colonial history);
• Domestic politics (e.g.: regime type, checks on leader’s power, diversionary force,
characteristics of the target state);
• Leadership (e.g.: how leaders perceive threats, the location of the source of insecurity).

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NATIONAL INTERESTS

Varieties of national interests:

- Vital interests (of broad, overriding importance to survival,
security, territorial integrity);
- Important interests (survival not at stake, but a ect national
well-being and character of the world in which we live);
- Humanitarian interests (linked to promoting national values
around the world);

Sources of interests - realist approach

• Anarchic structure of the international system;

• Uncertainty and security dilemma logic;
• Security competition between states;
• States seeking to maximize power/ensure survival.
|
|—> Interests shaped by distribution of material capabilities.

Sources of (socially constructed) interests - constructivist approach

• Interests are not simply the result of the structure of the international system;
• States shape the content of structure through the way they act;
• For example, it is possible to transform interstate relationships from security dilemma to security
community (Britain-US and France-Germany);
|
|—> State’s interactions under anarchy create threats and interests (these interests are not
xed, but socially constructed);

Sources of interests - liberal approaches

States as such do not have interests.

|
|—> States are political institutions;
|—> Political institutions “represent” (some) political actors;
|—> States de ne their interests based on the preferences of individuals and interest groups.
|
States (or other political institutions) represent some subset of domestic society, on the basis of
whose interests state o cials de ne state preferences and act purposively in world politics.

US FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTION

Principle of non-intervention (UN Charter): nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise
the United Nations to intervene in matters which are
essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any state (has
been present in international law since the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648).

Conditionalities for US’ use of force (Lake)

1. To defend against direct attacks on the United States, its citizens, and its allies;
2. To counter aggression [e.g., Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait];
3. To defend our key economic interests, which is where most Americans see their most
immediate stake in our international engagement [e.g., Kuwait];

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4. To preserve, promote and defend democracy, which enhances our security and the spread of
our values [e.g., Panama and Haiti];
5. To prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, international crime and drug
tra cking [e.g., Panama for the last];
6. To maintain our reliability, because when our partnerships are strong and con dence in our
leadership is high, it is easier to get others to work with us, and to share the burdens of
leadership [e.g., Bosnia];
7. And for humanitarian purposes, to combat famines, natural disasters and gross abuses of
human rights with, occasionally, our military forces [e.g., Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia].
|
|—> These guidelines are vague, which gives the US the freedom to choose whether to use force
or not.

Nation-building and democratisation

After military intervening in a state, the US/UN are expected to conduct a peace support
operation.
|
|two goals
|
|—> Nation-building;
|—> Democratisation.

I. Post-WW2: Demilitarisation, denazi cation, and re-education of an entire country’s

population,;
II. Cold War - Vietnam and later in Central America: Fight against communism;
III. Cold War - After the Vietnam War: Attention was placed more on challenging communist
advances than on actually implementing democratic reforms;
IV. After Cold War: Enhancement of international peace and security (trough promotion of
democracy).

Post-WW2

Germany and Japan: testimony that it is possible for outsiders to establish relatively benign
| governments which locals will support for at least half a century.|
|
3 factors facilitated this:
I. Unconditional surrender after WW2 (gave the allies freedom to do
what they wanted);
II. Level of development and education in both countries (both
countries were highly industrialised societies);
III. Serious commitment on behalf of the allies to create democratic
states.
|
|
|—>Germany: assistance in the construction of a democratic political system, that prevents
| the country to become a future threat to international peace; devolution of political
| powers to germans; decentralised political institutions;
|
|—>Japan: autocratic imposer of a democratic political and economical system; hunger forced
the Japanese governments to embrace democracy.

Cold War

- Increase of civil con icts have led the international community – particularly the United States –
to respond to some, but signi cantly not all, situations that would have been overlooked during
the Cold War.
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|
|—> In these areas, the Soviet Union intervened to spread communist ideology (and/or counter
US advances), while the Americans did the same, ostensibly to spread democracy (and/or
contain communism) - E.g.: Vietnam War, Invasion of Grenada and the covert activity of
Central America.

Vietnam War

- President John F. Kennedy saw in South Vietnam his opportunity to prove to the international
community that the U.S. could prevent communism and build a democracy in another part of
south-east Asia (after China had fallen to communism);
- Many of the democratisation programmes were overly concentrated in the cities, even though
90 per cent of Vietnamese lived in rural areas.;
- The danger of an external power promoting half-hearted reforms, while ignoring the
undemocratic methods pursued by the US-backed leader, is that it often causes the population
to revolt against that government;
- The US defeat in Vietnam damaged an American psyche that had become arrogant in its belief
that it could change the world.

The defeat on the Vietnam war meant a retreat in intervention overseas (not a full retreat);
|
Attempts at actually building democratic states virtually stopped;
|
BUT
|
|—> Both the US government and the UN bene t enormously by an increase in democratic
governments world-wide.

After the Cold War

- Sudden disappearance of Superpower competition and consequent threat of the Security

Council veto;
- Increase in civil con icts;
- Humanitarian concern (related to the big amount of deaths from civil con icts);
|
|—> Allowed (or compelled) the US government and the UN to put humanitarian concerns high
on the agenda, e ectively ignoring state sovereignty when so desired by labelling the
crises threats to international peace and security.

• Panama (1989): rst attempt to apply the democracy rationale without the corresponding threat
of communism;

• Somalia (1992): intervention in a purely humanitarian crisis that did not a ect the developed
| world (ended up failing);
|
|—> Somalia obliged the US government and the UN to re-evaluate their roles in international
crises.

• Haiti (1994): became the rst case in which the aims of the military intervention and the nation-
building attempt were the same - to establish a democratic state (proximity to the
United States and problems associated with the increase in refugee ows to
Florida);

• Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995): humanitarian grounds, although maintaining the credibility of
NATO and US leadership in Europe was factored in as well.

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US’ Foreign Policy - “America now solves problems with troops,
not diplomats”

• U.S. advanced from a position of isolationism, to intervenor, to

a global policemen (or bully);
• U.S. is considered a belligerent bully in foreign policy since it
intimidates and harms those it perceives vulnerable;
• Foreign policy in the U.S. is exercised primarily by military
means (Department of Defense), rather than diplomatic;
• The U.S. is now seen globally as a bigger threat to global
prosperity and peace than China and Russia (being a bully has
not helped);
• The U.S. has lost its moral high ground.

CASE STUDY: THE IRAQ WAR

Context of the Iraq War

After the terrorist attacks in 9/11/2001, the US decided to attack Al-Qaida and the Taliban
immediately.
|
US Foreign Policy Department tried to asses what went wrong;
|
|—> Intelligence failures? Airline security? Intelligence cooperation with others? Broad policies?
|
They decided to go after regimes that might support terrorism in the future: “Axis of Evil” - Iran,
Iraq, North Korea.
|
|———> Develop doctrine of preventive war (which di ers from preemptive war).

Which explanations for the war are most compelling?

Criteria to consider:
1. Logic of the case;
2. Strength of the link to US national security;
3. Evidence supporting the case;
4. Regional implications of action/inaction based on the case.

Multiple rationales:
- WMD (prevent terrorist groups of acquiring them);
- Terrorism;
- Human rights;
- Democratization;
- Deterrence;
- Oil;
Multiple motivations:
- 9/11 changed everything;
- Regional balance of power;
- Because we can (the “Revolutionary in Military A airs”);
- Because we should (neoconservative theory);
Multiple audiences:
- International coalition partners;
- UN as international legal cover;
- US Congress;
- The American public;
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Operation Iraqi freedom begins - March 19, 2003

• Motivated by US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s desire to show US

military could be e ective with smaller numbers of ground troops,
reliance on technology;

• Coalition invasion strategy:

- Leadership decapitation;
- Relatively small military force;
- Iraqi army and republican guard failed to materialise as signi cant
opponents;

• Baghdad fell on the 9th of April of 2003;

• Spurred greater anti-americanism in the Middle East.

The occupation of Iraq

• The coalition provisional authority as government;

• Transforming the Iraq’s political landscape;

|
|—> De-Ba’thi cation (policy undertaken in Iraq by the CPA and subsequent Iraqi governments
| to remove the Ba’ath party’s in uence in the new Iraq political system);
|
|—> New political structures through a new constitution;
|
|—> Elections.

• Reconstruction;

• Insurgency and sectarian war;

Bargaining theory: directs attention to the inherently strategic nature of all wars and implies that
| war is always a failure due to its an ine ciency to settle disputes (rationalist
| approach);
|
War occurs when…
- Commitments are not credible;
- States possess private
information about their costs of
ghting and incentives to
misrepresent that information;
- States are uncertain over their
probability of victory.

|
|—> Inadequate to explain the Iraq War

Why is the bargaining theory inadequate to explain the Iraq war and war in general?

A. States are unitary actors;

|
IW: Popular discourse often implied that oil companies or the military-industrial complex in
the United States was a major cause of the turn to violence.
|

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|—> Domestic politics and political actors are important to study war (countries can be more
or less belligerent depending on their internal characteristics and the pressure of domestic
actors).

B. Con icts are modelled as a two-player game (intervenor and target);

|
IW: Saddam Hussein didnt want to clearly signal that he did not have WMD because of
concerns about threats posed by regional rival states and threats from Shi’a and Kurdish
population within Iraq.
|
|—> Most con icts involve more than two parties;
|—> Di erent signals may communicate more or less clearly with di erent audiences;
|—> States can try to separate their multiple audiences by sending di erent signals.

C. War is over once a settlement is reached;

|
IW: The con ict process extended long past the declaration of “mission accomplished and
continued into the postwar peace.
|
|—> Postwar governance costs of imposing one's will on the defeated enemy must be
incorporated into the victor's cost of ghting and, thereby, into the larger con ict
process

D. States act rationally (information problems to lead to war if one side has private information
about how costly war will be for it and an incentive to “intentionally misrepresent” that cost to
its enemy);
|
IW: These were not the types of information problems that led to war, instead…
- US did not correctly assess its own costs of ghting;
- Iraq did not correctly assess the Bush Administration’s resolve and military strategy;
|
|—> Cognitive and decision-making biases a ect governments’ behaviour.

Behavioral theory: integrates human decision making biases into the strategic interactions that,
through bargaining failures, produce war.
|
|—> A marriage of behavioral and bargaining theory promises to be more powerful than either
alone (this theory complements rather than substitute the bargaining theory).

Counterterrorism and military technology

WHAT IS TERRORISM?

Terrorism is contentious/controversial;
|
|Examples
|
|—> IRA in Northern Ireland: British government —> terrorists; Supporters of Irish unity —>
| freedom ghters;
|
|—> ANC in South Africa: Apartheid governments —> terrorists; Supporters of South African
liberation —> freedom ghters; Nelson Mandela becomes president
of South Africa in 1994.
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Terrorism: the use of violence against civilians by non state
actors to attain political goals (often de ned popularly or
legally);
|
|—> Term without any legal signi cance - it is merely a
convenient way of alluding to activities, whether of
states or of individuals, widely disapproved of and in
which either the methods used are unlawful, or the
targets protected, or both.

Terror, terrorist, terrorism - Conceptual critique by Charles Tilly, sociologist:

• Political and normative connotations (no di erence made between terror, terrorist, terrorism);
• Many di erent groups (organized/unorganised; durable campaigns/ad-hoc) - only very small
number of groups focused on terrorist activities;
• Many di erent contexts (domestic/transnational);
• Not useful to cover distinct phenomena under the category of terrorism (doesn’t have “causal
coherence” - di erent explanations for di erent types);

Terrorism as a tactic of political violence (behaviour-speci c)

- Tactic in asymmetric warfare - carefully planed;

- Indiscriminate (vs. Selective) violence, usually directed at noncombatants;
- Punishment of past behaviour and deterrence of future behaviour (Kalyvas);
|—> Victims and targets of violence are distinct;
|—> Sends signals to di erent audiences.

Terrorism as tactic of armed groups that operate underground (actor-speci c)

- Groups that lack territorial control;

How to deal with contested de nitions?

Most de nitions agree that instrumental political killing of civilians in peacetime is terrorism;
|
Beyond that, terrorism remains a contested terrain of diverse political and moral opinion;
|
How to move forward?
|—> Terrorism as modus operandi (its a way of operating, a tactic) and not inherently
attached to a group.

Working analytical de nition

Communicative violence directed against non-combatants undertaken by a politically oriented

group;
|
|—> Does not include a goal;
|—> Includes an audience and a target;
|—> Terrorism may be carried out by a wide range of agents.

Types of terrorism

• State terrorism (repression);

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• Domestic terrorism:
|—> Leftist - 1970s Italy, Germany;
|—> Ethno-national - PIRA in Northern Ireland, ETA in Basque region in Spain;

• Transnational terrorism after 1998 - regio-political:

|—> Bombing at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania;
|—> 9/11 in NYC and Washington D.C.;
|—> ISIS-inspired/coordinated attacks in Europe.

Example: The Islamic State

• Islamist ideology;
• Terrorist activity internationally and in main countries of operation;
|
However
|—> Also held territorial control;
|—> Engaged in other forms of political violence (guerrilla warfare, direct battles with armed
groups/armies, disciplining people living under their control);

How should we analyse IS? Just another revolutionary movement? (Kalyvas)

Does terrorism work?

• Ine ective in achieving “outcome goals” (compared to guerrilla attacks on military targets for
example) - Abrahms;

• Does not work as a communication strategy with respect to terrorists’ goals:

|—> Public focuses on civilian su ering;
|—> Terrorists come across as unable to agree on political compromise.

• But may achieve other (process) goals:

|—> Demonstrate illegitimacy of the state (repressive response);
|—> Achieve unity and commitment within the organisation;
|—> Violence lead to social polarisation, greater support for the organization.

WHY DOES TERRORISM OCCUR?

The causes of terrorism (Crenshaw)

I. Situational factors: Facilitating conditions; speci c triggers.

II. Strategic aims: Long-term; Short-term - turn weakness into strength;
III. Individual motivations: high risk acceptance; In-group dynamics; vengeance;

Individual mobilisation and recruitment

Process of mobilisation - “Gradual growth of commitment and opposition”;

|
|—> Ideological indoctrination (common cause);
|—> In-group dynamics (isolation);
|—> Importance of political repression for mobilisation (revenge).
Process of escalation in which context matters (not just individual predispositions).

COUNTERTERRORISM

Counterterrorism: reduce the motivation for individuals to join terrorist groups.

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|
|—> With the decline over the past 30 years of state-perpetrated terrorism, counterterrorism has
become primarily an e ort directed against non-state terrorist groups.

Incident management (includes anything done, once a terrorist incident occurs, to mitigate its
| e ects).
|
|Employed through…
|
|
|—> Attacks in which hostages are seized and their lives are kept in jeopardy;
|—> Communication with the public and the role of the press;
|—> Possible use of force to rescue the hostages (successful rescue operation avoids the di cult
| choices of whether to make concessions to terrorists, as well as constituting a dramatic blow
| against terrorism and immediate punishment of terrorists);
|
Has acquired a new meaning;
|
|—> In recent years, most major terrorist incidents have involved not the seizure of hostages and
the threat of in icting harm on them but instead the direct and unprovoked killing of innocent
people.

Defensive/Static measures

A. Tools:
- Protection of individual sites that could become a target of terrorist attacks (o ce
buildings, military bases, embassies, etc.);
- f short-term protection provided to high-pro le events;
- Personal security given to governmental leaders or other prominent persons;
- Security provided to entire systems - a breach in one part of the system can a ect the
safety of all of it and its multilayered (aviation security measures);
- Protection of an entire country and its boarders - most general level (US, following the
9/11 attacks focused on homeland security);

B. Advantages:
- May deter terrorists from attacking;
- Complicating terrorists’ planning slows them down, providing more time in which they
might be detected;
- By forcing terrorists to prepare their operation in ways they might not otherwise have
used may increase the chance they will be caught;

C. Disadvantages:
- Expensive;
- Not everything can be protected, even though everything is a potential target (terrorists
always have the advantage of choosing where to attack, which will re ect where security
is weaker);
- Openness of free, Western societies (always will be say to nd crowds in public places);

O ensive/Active counterterrorism measures

• Tools:
- Diplomacy - for operations that cross international boundaries;
|—> Multilateral: most useful in creating a worldwide climate that recognises terrorism
| as a shared problem and that is supportive of counterterrorist e orts;
|—> Bilateral: most practical international cooperation on terrorism;

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- Financial control in the form of freezing or seizing of terrorist assets (hardly done since
much of the money associated with terrorism ows through channels that are extremely
hard to detect and intercept and most terrorism is cheap);

- Targeting of terrorist leaders (decapitation, drone killing);

- Intelligence;
|—> Uncover enough details of the next major terrorist plot to enable authorities to roll
| the post up before it can be executed;
|—> Provide a more strategic sense of terrorist threats;
|—> Provide detailed support to all the other tools;
|—> Collection and analysis of information on terrorist organisations and
| infrastructures, enabling them to be disrupted;
|
Intelligence services themselves might not accomplish the actual disruption, but the
information they provide enables police or internal security services to conduct raids,
arrest suspects and con scate material (such actions often provide leads for collecting
more information).

O ensive and defensive operations are complementary parts of a comprehensive

counterterrorism programme that usually di erent types or organisations.

A common but misleading frame of reference often invoked in discussion of counterterrorism is to

ask whether the problem should be considered one of ‘crime’ or ‘war’.
|
|—> Terrorists clearly commit crimes;
|—> Terrorists political objectives give them something in common with warfare and distinguish
| their actions from non-political crimes motivated by greed or passion.
|
The response to this question determines if the counterterrorist tool that is employed is criminal
prosecutions or military force.

Prosecution in a criminal court

A. Advantages:
- Prevents him from committing further attacks;
- Demonstrates governmental resolve;
- Strengthens deterrence of other terrorists apprehensive about getting
caught;
- Impede or restrict their operations;
- Satisfy the public’s appetite for punishment of wrongdoers;
B. Disadvantages:
- A terrorist rst must be caught (the senior leaders who plan and direct the
attacks are less likely to be caught);
- In state-directed terrorism, the leaders most responsible are unlikely ever to
be arrested;
- Deterrence may be ine ective (leaders tend to go free and for suicide
bombers it is irrelevant);
- Accused terrorists may use a public trial as a platform for propaganda;
- Incarceration of convicted terrorists may stimulate further attacks (perhaps
in the form of hostage-taking aimed at bargaining for the prisoners’
release);
- Operating across international boundaries, jurisdictional issues also
complicate the application of criminal justice;
- Disagreements over the death penalty (has complicated extradition and
information sharing cases);

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Military force

Employed in the US intervention in the civil war in Afghanistan following al-Qaida’s attacks in the
US.
|
|—> This success helped to raise expectations, especially in the US, about how a more
aggressive use of military force might be used e ectively to combat terrorism.

A. Advantages:
- Immediately disrupts or destroys terrorist capabilities;
- May have deterrent e ects not just on terrorist groups, but also on states;
- Doesn’t involve the administrative and legal complications that legal
prosecution does;

B. Disadvantages:
- Most international terrorism simply does not present very many good military
targets;
- A military attack may serve more to provoke than to deter;
- Inherently destructive nature of military force (collateral damage, including the
loss of innocent lives is almost inevitable);

Why leadership decapitation?

• Target those responsible for leadership, guidance and experience;

|—> Create confusion among followers and deter potential successors;
|—> Divert organisation from pursuing its goals (limit militant attacks - e.g.: partially successful
against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan; trigger the demise of the organisation);

• Less risky than sending on ground troops (in unstable countries);

• No need to detain suspects;

• Limited consequences for civilians (e.g.: in comparison to bombings).

Security vs. Liberty in Counterterrorism

There is unavoidable con ict especially with two values: liberty (absence of restrictions on daily
life) and privacy (avoiding governmental scrutiny of personal matters).

• Border security —> limitation on migration;

• Intelligence —> surveillance;
• Targeted killings —> violence against civilians;

Origins of some counterterrorism technology: The revolution in military a airs?

• Make use of information technologies for military e ectiveness (control trough information);
• Publics in US/Europe more risk averse (compared to constrain political leaders and fewer
recruits for militaries);
• Use technology to transfer risk - minimise fatalities by transferring the risk to enemy
combatants: Predator drones; Precision guided munitions; Stealth bombers;

DRONES

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): remotely piloted or self-piloted aircraft that can carry cameras,
| sensors, communications equipment or other payloads.
|
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|—> Used for intelligence gathering since 1950s;
|—> US rst used weaponised drone in Afghanistan in 2001;

Advantages

- Better and timely intelligence (longer tracking of targets);

- Precise targeting;
- Avoid capture or loss of manned vehicles and pilots (drones allow you to project power without
projecting vulnerability).

Legal framework
|—> Clear in battle zones (e.g.: Afghanistan);
|—> Problematic in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia (not at war with US);

Drone warfare by the Obama Administration

• Obama vowed to ght terrorism with greater e ectiveness (targeted killing through drones) and
moral rectitude (end of torture by US agencies and close the detention facility at Guantanamo
Bay) than his predecessor.

• Obama has increasingly turned to a more deadly and permanent method of dealing with
individuals suspected of terrorism in the use of unmanned drones for targeted killing.

• The Obama administration did little to publicly acknowledge its policy on targeted killings during
its rst three years in o ce;

• Administration announces that it takes signi cant steps to ensure that all drone attacks are
consistent with ‘law of war principles’;
|
|—> Principle of distinction (requires that attacks be limited to military objectives and that
| civilians or civilian objects shall not be the object of the attack);
|
|—> Principle of proportionality (prohibits attacks that may be expected to cause incidental
| loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof,
| that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and military advantage anticipated);
|
Despite the reassurances of administration o cials that all targeted killings were conducted
within strict legal limits, it was largely unclear who was involved in targeting decisions, what
criteria were being applied and whether the discussions considered the merits of killing rather
than capturing targets.

The US drone war in Pakistan

• Targeted “active terrorists” who seek to harm American targets;

• The nal decision to carry out the majority of attacks appeared to rest with the CIA’s general
counsel (Obama only has a nal say on complex and risky operations);

• Washington obviously wants to avoid using ground troops in Pakistan due to the political
consequences of violating national sovereignty;

• Followed principles of “distinction” and “proportionality”;

|
BUT
|—> Limited transparency on strikes and consequences;
|—> CIA much leeway.

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• Highly criticised:
- Concern about the programme’s lack of transparency has led to criticism
from high-level gures.
- The strikes generate anger about US forces operating in a sovereign
country that it is not at war with, and the human cost of attacks on highly
populated areas (only 12% of Pakistan respondents had a favourable view
on the US);
- Targeted-killing is the least popular Obama policy by the international
community (however, 62% of Americans support it);
- While the targeted-killing programme may be operationally e ective, it
remains a deeply problematic approach to counter-terrorism in that it
prevents intelligence-gathering through the capture and interrogation of
targets and creates more enemies to the US;

• CIA’s mission changed from “watch and wait” to “capture and kill” (even though this was denied
by the White House);
|
|—> By killing rather than capture:
- Eradicate potential terrorist threats in a less risky way;
- Limit or prevent collateral e ects on civilian populations;
- Avoid the di culties associated with where to hold and
how to interrogate captured terrorist suspects;

Why are drone strikes contested?

A. Moral considerations: civilian deaths; “playstation mentality” (the ease and anonymity with
which drone strikes are carried out in which there is a big distance between the killer and the
killed);
|
|—> Drones follow a trend of increasingly remote weapons that distance both their operations
from the physical act of killing and the public from their humans costs;

B. Strategic considerations: recruitment of new militants;

|
|—> You kill one son and you create 9 more enemies;

C. Ine ectiveness:
|
|—> By 2010, only 2% of combatants killed were leaders of militant groups;
|—> Prevents collection of intelligence from captives;

D. Long-term strategic concerns;

|
|—> Strikes carried out with such minimal risk to the attack arguably create the opportunity of
waging perpetual war;

“Confessions of a drone warrior”

• Brandon Bryant was one of the rst recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and
machines merge (he commanded drones used for belligerent purposes);
• The use of drones for military means is generally accepted by the American public (61%);
• Over time, he found that the job putted him in “zombie mode” where he killed people casually;
• The drone operators are as close to the deaths they cause as people might think (they are
emotionally disturbed);

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Civil War
DEFINITION OF CIVIL WAR

Popular understandings of Civil War

• Terminology as controversial (signi es a political stance);

|
|—> US in 1861-1865:
1. The Rebellion - in favour of the North and delegitimise the South;
2. The War of Northern Aggression - delegitimise the North and favour
the South;
3. War between states - favoured by the South because they explained
their rights as state rights;
4. Civil War - neutral term;

• Possible ambiguities (government repression, coups, revolution, terrorism, foreign involvement

and colonisation can all get confused with a Civil War);

• Popular use of the term “civil war”, or alternatives to it, can have normative undertones.

Historical understandings of Civil War

• Armitage (2017):
- We remain so confused about civil war and refuse to look it in the face;
- Under-theorised;
- Contested meaning (controversial);
- Has political implications (reinterpreted and redeployed in multiple contexts for multiple
purposes);
- Has implication of being backwards looking and destructive (contrary to fertile revolution);

Civil War: armed con ict within the boundaries of a sovereign entity between parties subject to a
| common authority at the outset of the hostilities (Kalyvas);
|
|—> The parties to the con ict: are political and military organized and have publicly stated
| political goals (e.g.: cartels are not a group with political goals);
|
|—> The main organizations recruit locally;
|
|—> Con ict is large-scale (the gravity of the con ict challenges the state’s sovereignty);
|
|—> Violence is sustained (doesn’t include social con icts);

What constitutes a Civil War?

• The Bush Administration is reluctant to call the Iraq con ict a Civil War because it would require
a justi cation for the US intervention in the region and an admission of failure of Iraq policy;
• In many civil wars since 1945, such as the one in Iraq, there are irregular units and militias
ghting the war;
• In the Iraq con ict, the Shia Islam group is highly fractioned and the goals of the groups ghting
the war are clear (which makes it more similar to a Civil War);
• By calling it an insurgency rather than civil war, it downplays the gravity of the incident and
doesn’t highlight the possible big costs that the US will have;
• An analytical de nition of civil war allows us to de ne a meaningful phenomenon, which centres
on large-scale, violent internal challenges to the sovereign authority of governments;

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TYPES OF CIVIL WAR

This can be categorised based on…

- Individual motives;
- Causes of war;
- Organisation of violence, politics;
- Outcomes;

Macro-level cleavage: the principal national-level dispute separating the warring parties;

Belligerent war aims: embodied in macro-level cleavage, but potentially distinct from it (questions
of timing, evolution);

Archetypes: Ideological; Secessionist; Ethnic.

Others: Irredentist wars; “New” Wars.

FORMS OF CIVIL WAR

This categorisation that started as an attempt to understand perceived di erences between

con ict during and after the Cold War, continues to be used to understand forms of con ict that
look “unusual”.

This can be categorised based on…

- Historical similarities;
- Tactics;
- Technology of warfare;
- Belligerents’ operational focus;
- Balances of power;

No archetypes per se, but: Insurgency, Conventional and Internationalised.

Other possibilities: Transnational; Criminal; Revolutionary; New vs. Old;

ETHNIC VS. NON-ETHNIC WARS

The issues that a war is fought over and the organisation of the warring parties are meaningful
ways of distinguishing between an ethnic type of civil war and non-ethnic wars;

Ethnic war: con ict between tow or more contending ethnic groups (characteristics transcend to
| sectarian/religious/ideological wars);
|
|—> Ethnic wars are not caused by deep, popular hatreds - social polarisation is the result of
| violence;
|—> During ethnic wars, violence tends to be perpetrated by “specialists in violence” rather than
| ordinary individuals;
|—> The category is political - foreign leaders use it to justify non-intervention;
|—> Create extremely violent con icts - US decided not to intervene in the Sectarian (religion) war
in Syria because the divisions are to meaningful.

Ethnic wars are based on two dimensions:

I. Parties to the con ict - what is the basis of recruitment and alliance practices of all
organisations involved?
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II. Issues - what are the stated goals of armed groups?

The Banality of Ethnic War - Mueller (2000):

Widespread notion of “ethnic war”:

- Ethnic wars are caused by deep-seated “hatred”;
- Violence of “all against all and neighbour against
neighbour” (Hobbesian view);
|
|Misguided concept (by analysing the Yugoslavia and Rwanda wars)
|
Warfare in so-called ethnic wars is similar to warfare in non-ethnic wars;
|
|—> Self-interested politicians (bigger entity) use small numbers of “armed thugs” to carry out
| violence;
|—> Ordinary citizens are not involved;
|—> Ethnicity is important as an ordering device rather than a motivating force;
|—> Violence during war generates the identity group-based polarisation that the ethnic war
| notion claims caused the war
|—> Due to the lack of organisation of the participants of this wars, one could say that a large,
| impressively armed, and well-disciplined international policing force could be e ective in
| pacifying the thug-dominated con icts;
|
|
This kind of war can happen anywhere (there are civil and non-civil people everywhere and this
con icts did not emerge out of inevitable historic necessities);
|
|—> The all-against-all image can discourage policing because it implies that the entire ethnic
group—rather than just a small, opportunistic, and often cowardly subgroup—must be
brought under control.

A. Con icts in former Yugoslavia;

• Con icts between Bosniaks (supported from Muslim countries), Serbs (supported from
Eastern Orthodox countries), and Croats (supported from Catholic countries);

• Ethnic division in Yugoslavia were not that preponderant (support for militant nationalist in
Yugoslavia was not signi cant and 61% answered in a referendum that they do not agree
that every Yugoslav nation should have a national state of their own);
|—> Great divide within Yugoslav society was between rural and urban communities;

• Politicians started the wars, by contracting hooligan groups, gangsters, mobsters, prison
inmates, mercenaries, violent opportunists, etc.;
|—> Paramilitary groups are strongly correlated with the killing of civilians, rape, torture,
destruction of property, looting, detention facilities, and mass graves;

• These war had far less to do with nationalism than with criminal opportunism and sadistic
cruelty;

• Four stages of the process:

1. Takeover (group of well-armed thugs would emerge in an area, where the former civil
order had ceased to exist or where the police actually or e ectively were in alliance with
them, and, as the only group willing to take force, take control - because there were no
police to protect them, people ed from their areas);
2. Carnival (thugs often exercised absolute power, in which looting and destruction would
take place, as would orgies of rape, arbitrary violence and murder, and roaring
drunkenness - conducted sometimes with enjoyment);

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3. Revenge (some that ed with their fellow ethnics, then joined like-minded armed bands
in more hospitable parts of the country to defend their group);
4. Occupation and desertion (thugs stayed in the areas they took and political aims of the
war became hopelessly intertwined on a day-to-day level with pro teering and black
market activities - the protected groups emigrated);

B. Rwanda’s genocide;

• Almost con rms the Hobbesian view due to the amount of casualties;

• Genocidal process had been planned for years by Hutu extremists who were substantially in
charge of the ruling party, the government bureaucracy, and the police;

• The Hutu army recruited militia bands (Interahamwe), poor people, criminals, landless
peasants, the urban unemployed, and foreign drifters who had chie y signed up not for
ideological reasons but for the guaranteed food and drink and the opportunity to loot;

• The massacre was mainly due to the violent participants of the con ict rather than an all
against all situation (more than 90 percent of the over-13 Hutu population did not participate
in killings);

We have entered a “new era,” in which “war will not be waged by armies but by groups whom we
today call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits, and robbers.

“NEW” AND “OLD” CIVIL WARS

The decline of interstate war and the rise of

the number of Civil Wars since the end of Cold
War, has led scholars to research the latter.

The tendency to see fundamental di erences between “new” (criminal) and “old” (political) Civil
Wars is based on an uncritical adoption of categories and labels grounded in a double
mischaracterisation:
|—> Information about recent or ongoing wars is typically incomplete and biased;
|—> Historical research on early wars tends to be disregarded;

Causes and motivations: Collective vs. Private

I. Its false that new Civil Wars don’t have (collective) purpose;
|
|—> Based on biased and incomplete data that focuses on city-dwellers and members of pro-
| governmental organisations;
|—> Looting is an analytically problematic concept to associate with new Civil Wars (not always
| clear who is doing the looting; linkage between looting and grievance/revenge is uid;
| oversimpli cation of this con icts; do people wage in war to loot or the other way around?);
|—> Rebel motivations are diverse and go beyond mere banditry (their ideological motivations are
just not visible from a perspective based on western patterns on allegiance and discourse -
warlords’ aim is rule, rather than looting);

II. The typical picture of ideologically oriented actors in old Civil Wars is misrepresented;
|—> Such actors have often engaged in criminal activities, large-scale looting, and the
| pronounced coercion of the populations whose grievances they claimed to represent);
|—> The importance of ideological motivations in old civil wars has been greatly overstated
(academics tend to attribute an ideological motivation to actors of a con ict; a lot of the
ideological claims were super cial; local considerations tended to trump ideological ones);

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Support: Broad Vs. Lack

I. Statements based on incomplete or biased information;

II. Perception that rebellions in old Civil Wars were based on widespread popular support has
been called into question;
|
|—> Informed by uid, shifting and often locally based cleavages;
|—> Because elites code rebellions on the national level, they erroneously imply that they have
| popular support;
|—> Locally segmented cleavages often aggregate in misleading ways (e.g.: wealthy peasants
| may support one political actor in one region and its rival in a di erent one);
|—> Group interests are often localist;
|
In old Civil Wars, support was shaped, won, and lost during the war, often by means of coercion
and violence and along lines of kinship and locality;

Violence: Controlled Vs. Gratuitous

I. Perception that Civil Wars are particularly cruel predates new Civil Wars (violence is in fact the
central component of all kinds of civil war);

II. Today’s Civil Wars are not as violent as we may think;

|
|—> Our understanding of violence is culturally de ned;
|—> “Senseless” violence of new Civil Wars is often not as gratuitous as it appears (a lot of
attacks are still selective and strategic);

Flawed categories and the assumptions derived from them undermine even the most
sophisticated modelling exercises.

Insurgency and counterinsurgency

INSURGENCY

Insurgency: an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through

| the use of subversion and armed con ict (violent opposition to the rule by a stronger
| force);
|
|—> Insurgents try to turn their weakness into strength (by choosing particular strategies that
| strike government’s vulnerabilities);
|—> Not a conventional form of warfare;
|—> The government usually doesn't know who is an insurgent (people can make it seem like
| someone who would not be seen as a threat).
|—> Insurgency is a type of warfare in which rebel forces try to blend in the population;
|—> Tactics employed by insurgents were – and still are – necessitated by their military weakness;
|—> Today insurgency follows state failure, and is not directed at taking over a functioning political
| body, but at dismembering or scavenging its carcass, or contesting an “ungoverned space”
| (sometimes provide resources to the local population in exchange for services);
|
Examples: El Salvador; Algeria

Terrorism is a strategy/tactic of warfare, while insurgency is a type of warfare (insurgents can

conduct to terrorist attacks).

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Who is ghting the Islamic State?

• In many con icts such as the Iraqi army vs. Islamic State, there are groups called militias that
operate alongside regular security forces or work independently of the state to shield the local
population from insurgents;
• Cases like this one (guerrilla war) need special ghting groups and skills, no regular army can
ght such a war;
• In this region, this civil defense forces often manage to re-establish some form of political
stability with surprising success (leading too a drop of violence);

Militia: military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an
emergency.

➡Even though having many reasons to collaborate with them, states rarely control what
this armed groups are doing;
➡Governments often take advantage of militias by strategically encouraging or
restraining their use of violence against civilians (especially when they are weak
democracies or receive aid from other democracies);
➡Not all governments collude with militias because of purely military incentives (states
sometimes sponsor the militias that support their ideological project);
➡Militias aren’t simply submissive agents fully controlled by the state (there can be
militias formed by the state or militias mobilised by communities and independent of
state forces);
➡How militias recruit and socialise their members has an enormous e ect on how they
behave—as is true for any other armed group in civil wars (combatants who joined the
insurgents for ideological reasons are less likely to side-switch and join paramilitaries
than economically-motivated combatants);
➡Almost every report about militias includes a story about their brutal tactics (it
frequently increases violence on civilians);
➡Studying all types of armed groups alongside each other is the most promising
approach to understanding militias;

GUERRILLA WARFARE

Guerrilla warfare: type of insurgency in which small groups of combatants, such as paramilitary
personnel, armed civilians, or irregulars, use military tactics to ghts a larger
and less-mobile traditional military;

A. Mao Tsé-tung theory

• The people are like water and the army is like sh;

• Revolutionary war is 80% political and 20% military;

• Stages of warfare:
(1) Organisation, consolidation and preservation (political education,
clandestine action in rural areas);
(2) Progressive expansion (guerrilla warfare, liberated areas, attack on
towns);
(3) Destruction of the enemy (mobile warfare/conventional war, capture
cities).

B. Che Guevara theory

• Guerrilla warfare is a means to an end (political power);

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• Importance of popular support;

• Foco theory of guerrilla warfare: small vanguard can replace initial mobilisation of peasants;
|—> Fighting vanguard creates conditions for revolution;
|—> Countryside is the battle ground;
|—> Adapted into urban warfare doctrine by later thinkers/insurgents.

Regarding Insurgency in general:

|
|—> Maoist people’s war focuses on building insurgent strength over the long term, taking
| territory from the government, and defeating it;
|—> Foco-based insurgency aims to inspire the people to rebel against the government in a
| revolution, over a shorter term;
|
Both Mao and Guevara argue that to win insurgencies, you need to treat the population well;

COUNTERINSURGENCY

Counterinsurgency: those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic

| actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency;
|
|—> Old strategy that has come and gone from the military limelight;
|—> There is a strong percentage of scholars that are also practitioners of COIN;
|—> Counterinsurgency includes political, economic, psychological and military measures;
|—> Counterinsurgency doctrine aims to win the hears and minds of the people;
|—> Military measures targeting the enemy depend on good intelligence - inducing the population
| to provide information helps to solve this “identi cation problem”;
|—> Clear victories in counterinsurgency are rare (this operations are costly and long-lasting);
|—> COIN operations can sow the seeds for future challenges to peace;
|—> Media is an essential factor in a counterinsurgency campaign (it has become an arena of
| competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents);
|—> Similar to peacebuilding operations;
|
Insurgents start with nothing but a cause and grow to strength, while the counterinsurgents start
with everything but a cause and gradually decline in strength and grow to weakness (time is often
on the insurgent’s side because the stakes are higher for them);

5 principles of counterinsurgency (Robert Thompson):

1. Government must have a clear political aim (to establish and maintain a free, independent and
united country that is politically and economically stable and viable);
2. Government must function in accordance with the law;
3. Government must have an overall plan;
4. Government must give priority to defeating the political subversion, not the guerrillas;
5. In the guerrilla phase of insurgency, a government must secure its base areas rst.

Counterinsurgents’ strategy:
I. Separate insurgents from civilians;
II. Protect civilians against insurgents;
III. Provide public goods to civilians.
|
“Clear-hold-build” operations: operations aim rst to destroy insurgents’ military capabilities
through o ensive action and to separate them from the population
so that the civilians can feel secure, then to defend population
from insurgents using military means, and nally to assist them in
improving economic and human development and help institute
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political reforms (all of this without the use of force - improves the
liveability of its success);
|
|2 assumptions
|—> Majority of civilians can be induced to support the government if their security is guaranteed ;
|—> That insurgents and their civilian sympathizers can be “ ipped” if given su cient incentives;

Counterinsurgent goals:
• Eliminate key insurgents and establish population control;
• Then pursue political objectivities;

British counterinsurgency against communist insurgency in Malaya, 1948-1960

• Win the hearts and minds of the Malayan people;

• Village police and local militias for civilian protection;
• Doctrine of “minimum force”;
• Carefully targeted violence;
|
BUT—> In practice, many civilian deaths and atrocities.

French counterinsurgency in Indochina and Algeria, as theorised by David Galula

|
|4 laws of COIN
|—> Insurgency - competition for people’s support; Counterinsurgency - 80% political and 20%
| military;
|—> Need to separate active minority supporting insurgency from population;
|—> Need to provide security to population;
|—> Intensive e orts and massive resources applied area by area;

WHAT CHALLENGES DO COUNTERINSURGENCY EFFORTS FACE?

General challenges

I. Slow and costly process (need to commit massive human and material resources);
II. Success depends on targeted attacks against militants and provision of services to civilians
(indiscriminate violence may create “accidental guerrillas”);
III. Good intelligence necessary (not necessarily available to the counterinsurgency, particularly
when operations begin in a given area).

Additionally, Kilcullen warns of the dangers of applying wholesale lessons from classical
counterinsurgency to contemporary situations as the nature of the insurgents, the complexity of
local environments and the globalization of the international system require a careful adaptation of
counterinsurgency to the contemporary era (one key aspect has not changed however - battle for
the support of the people).

Individual behaviour in counterinsurgency

• Policy relies on a particular set of assumptions about individual behaviour;

|—> Material bene ts motivate compliance;
|—> Coercion deters opposition.

• Body of research in behavioral economics and social psychology shows otherwise;

|—> Parochial altruism - individual sacri ce to bene t in-group, harm out-group;
|—> Implications:
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- Individuals willing to incur costs on behalf of cause, identity groups;
- Violence inherent to counterinsurgency hardens dividing lines, reinforcing
parochial behaviour.

Alliances with local forces to overcome challenges?

• Goal: ip allegiance and/or build broad-based popular support (only by getting the population to
side with the government can counterinsurgents achieve victory);

• Local forces/militias provide counterinsurgents with key advantages:

|—> Access to local information;
|—> Multiplication of armed forces;
|—> Plausible deniability of responsibility for violence against civilians;

• Dilemmas of alliances with local forces:

|—> Allies may not share counterinsurgent’s goals;
|—> Counterinsurgents gives up control;
|—> May create conditions of corruption and violence.

Parochialism: a central challenge in counterinsurgency

• Counterinsurgency doctrine overlooks the challenges posed by parochialism.

|
|—> Parochialism: individuals do not automatically care about—or identify with—every group
they belong to, rather identi cation is sensitive to factors shaping the
salience of group boundaries, intra- and intergroup interactions, and group
status (narrow-minded outlook over a region).

• Parochialism can be manifested…

- In enhanced intragroup cooperation;
- In competitiveness and anti-social behaviour toward rival
outgroups;

• Any identity-based boundary that can plausibly de ne the government and counterinsurgent
forces as belonging to an outgroup in reference to the target population can activate
parochialism;

• Alliances with local armed groups can temporarily overcome the challenge of parochialism, but
may exacerbate other group tensions;

• Conditions, including institutions, which increase the salience of group membership or divisions,
tend to increase parochialism;

• Indiscriminate violence and “collateral damage” polarise the population;

|—> Positive correlation between ethnic polarisation (few large groups rather than many small
ones) and con ict;

• Ethnicity made salient by violent con ict that leads to a vicious cycle in which violence and
parochialism reinforce each other;

• Group loyalty is often cultivated in war;

• Material incentives alone are unlikely to be su cient to guarantee the support of a population
where ethnic or sectarian identi cation is entrenched and the government is part of the
outgroup (material inducements to key social groups might even be counterproductive);

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• Short-term, strategic alliances across group boundaries are no indicator of parochialism’s
absence;

• In the presence of social divisions, COIN as currently practiced can both compound the
di culty of defeating the armed challenge and make nation-building even harder.

US INSURGENCY AND COUNTERINSURGENCY

US military COIN doctrine

• US military developed new counterinsurgency doctrine after failures in Iraq in 2003-2004;

Population-centric/defense of population (and not enemy-centric/o ensive action against
enemy);
• Use of small commando detachments (not large conventional force);
• Focus on ground action (not AirPower);
• Contribution of civilian agencies;
• “Winning hearts and minds”, not coercive violence;

Reasons why the US military was fast to return to the traditional mission of preparing for interstate
con ict, after their counterinsurgency attempt:

• COIN is not a mission that the military necessary likes due to its messiness and
inconclusiveness, which can cost a lot of lives and are “post-heroic”;
• Military culture of e ciency, organization, and clear mission is somewhat at odds with what it
takes to do successful COIN (which includes empowering locals, minimally use of force, letting
civilian agencies to take the lead and taking on non-scienti c functions such as economic
development);
• COIN gives the lead to the Army and Marines, rather then the Air Force and the Navy;
• COIN does not require any major advanced weapons platform;
• US record in COIN does not encourage making it a core mission;
• There are also concerns that ghting “wars of choice” in Iraq and Afghanistan has led to the
neglect of more fundamental security problems (such as nuclear proliferation in North Korea and
Iran or Chinese and Russian adventurism).
|
|—> In Afghanistan, there was not a strong insurgency initially;
|—> In Iraq, the Bush Administration had no expectation that they would need to ght insurgents;

Afghan Counterinsurgency: The Runway General - The pro le that brought down McChrystal

• Obama chose McChrystal to lead the Afghan war without knowing much about him;

• McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a

laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency;

• COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live
among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s
government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not
decades, to achieve;
|
|—> By publicly saying that Afghanistan requires a counterinsurgency with the deployment of
more troops, McChrystal pisses of and ends up pressuring Obama to send the biggest
number of troops;

• Despite the tragedies and issues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to
avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone;

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• McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men
weren’t buying it;

• Even though the outcomes of the counterinsurgency weren’t great, the Obama administration
employed a rather positive rhetoric to not make it seem that the US got run o ;

• There are quite a few reasons why Obama doesn’t use the word “victory” when speaking about
the Afghanistan COIN:
|—> Taliban still remains too strongly entrenched for the US military to openly attack;
|—> The very people that COIN seeks to win over - the Afghan people - do not want them
| there;
|—> Their ally - president Karzai - used his in uence to delay the o ensive;
|—> Massive in ux of aid is likely to make things even worse;

The War in Ukraine

REALISM: WHY THE UKRAINE CRISIS IS THE WEST’S FAULT? - JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER

Perspective of the West: President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to
resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of
Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe (based on the
shared understanding that realism holds little relevance in the 21st
century);
|
|
This is wrong
|
|
Mearsheimer: The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the
crisis - due to their strategy to integrate Ukraine in the Western world (based on the
idea that realpolitik/realist logic still remains relevant);

Cause 1: NATO expansion eastward

NATO has been expanding eastward since the Clinton Administration start pushing for it in
mid-1990s:
I. 1999 - Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland;

II. 2004 - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia;

III. April 2008 - alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine;

|—> Putin saw as a “direct threat” and invaded Georgia in August 2008 and,
after that, sought to keep it weak and divided;

IV. 2009 - Albania and Croatia;

Academic views:
A. A few realists also favoured the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be
contained;
B. Most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging
population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained;
C. Most liberals favoured enlargement because the end of the Cold War had fundamentally
transformed international politics (view of Clinton administration);
|—> Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting ac- cording to realist
dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas
about international politics.
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Cause 2: EU expansion

May 2008 - unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such
| countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy;
|
|—> Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of
in uence”;

Cause 3: West’s support for the di usion of democratic and liberal values in Ukraine

Russia’s position

• For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president —
which he rightly labeled a “coup”— was the nal straw (this happened after separatist
movements in Ukraine after the pro-Russia president rejected an economic deal with the EU
and decided to accept a 15$ billion by Russian countero er).
|
|—> He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base,
and working to destabilise Ukraine until it abandoned its e orts to join the West (this
seemed easy to Russia due to the naval base and the ethnic majority that Russians have
in that region).

• Great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory (Imagine the
outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada
and Mexico in it);

• The argument that this war was cause by Putin’s autocratic and imperialist essence is wrong.
|
|—> There is virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other
| territory in Ukraine, before that date
|—> Even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern
Ukraine, much less the entire country

Way out (win-win situation)

Neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine, the
West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia (history shows that countries will
absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests);
|
Solution: The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernise Ukraine and
| instead aim to make it a neutral bu er between NATO and Russia.
|
|—> Requires the West to think about politics in a fundamentally di erent way;
|—> The US and its allies should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and
| Ukraine;
|—> The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the
| EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States;
|—> West should limit its social-engineering e orts inside Ukraine;
|
US will need Russia in the future to contain China.

REALIST FAILURES IN EXPLAINING THE WAR IN UKRAINE - DREZNER

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Realism is the school of taught that gets more pleasure from seeing other theoretical views fall
short to explain new phenomenon, while they can say they were right all along. However, there are
some problems of their explanation of the war.

• Realists claimed that when opening the door for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, the US
triggered a security dilemma with Russia that led to the invasions of Georgia in 2008 and
Ukraine in 2014 and 2022;
|
|—> The realist argument rests on the false premise that, in the absence of NATO expansion,
Russia did not aim to expand its sphere of in uence;

• From a realpolitik perspective, the war in Ukraine has gone extremely well for the United States
and extremely poorly for Russia (which undermines Mearsheimer’s argument);
|
|—> This lose-lose situation is worst for Russia than the US.

• This con ict violates the principles of balance of power politics (which expects the US to ally
with Russia to counteract the emerging power of China);

• Realists understate the importance of Europe and overestimate the importance of Russia;

• War is unpredictable;

CONSTRUCTIVISM: HOW WE GOT PUTIN SO WRONG - KALYVAS

Even though ignored, Putin meant what he said in an essay he wrote about the historical unity of
Ukraine and Russia (where he states that Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are one);
|
Conventional wisdom was that Putin could win just by threatening to attack, not by attacking;
|
|He invaded because…
|—> Leader’s preferences;
|—> People’s demands;
|
Constructivism (leaders share their goals and actions based not just on balance of power
calculation, but also on their own understandings of who they are and what their goals are)
|
|—> Putin sees himself as the restorer of the Soviet Union and saw that the Western states were
distracted by other bigger worries so decided to strike (China);

RESEARCH ON RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR - DR. JONAS J. DREDGER

Mearsheimer
|—> The person: o ensive realism; approach to research/policy;
|—> The argument: NATO policy pushed Russia to the attack; “liberal delusions”;
|
Mearsheimer’s argument doesn’t have as much rigour as academic articles;

No Russia imperialism toward Ukraine?

A. Mearsheimer:
- Russia didn’t want conquest or domination;
- No need for heightened support of Ukraine;
B. Problems:
- Policy before 2014;
- Policy 2014-2022;
- Invasion;
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2005-2010: Various con icts between the two

countries when Ukraine is having its presidential
elections (which Russia interfered in);
|
|won by…
|—> Yanukovych (2010-2014): Pro-russia;

What happened in Kyiv in 2014?

A. Mearsheimer:
- Illegitimate coup, sponsored by West, including Ukrainian fascists;
B. Problems:
- Yanukovych’s policies;
- Broad, centrist support;
- Elections;
- Western policy.

What’s the role of NATO?

A. Mearsheimer:
- Needless and avoidable NATO policies render Russian policy strategically sound;
B. Problems:
- Stabilising Eastern Europe;
- Bucharest summit/War vs. Georgia 2008;
- Policy vs. Perception;

Western failure at deterrence?

• Germany tried to nd a middle-ground between the German elites who didn’t want to be
involved in the con ict and the Ukrainian elites who required support;

• Germany never committed to cancel the Nordstream pipeline if Russia invaded;

Paths to peace
|
|—> Military victory (unlikely);
|—> Moderation of policies (not likely in Ukraine due to the nationalist sentiments);
|—> Both sides need to feel a decrease in their regime support due to the economic impacts;
|—> Long, rocky and a lot of things need to happen at the same time for peace to be achieved.

Gender dimensions of peace and security

FEMINISMS

The workings of security have long been presented as though they are gender-neutral when in
fact international security is infused with gendered assumptions and representations
|
Women have been marginalised in the study of security due to dominance of realist focus on
(male) elites.
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|
|—> Feminist approaches call for including women and/or deconstructing gender conceptions.

Gender ‘generally refers to the socially learned behaviours, repeated performances, and idealised
expectations that are associated with and distinguish between the proscribed gender roles of
masculinity and femininity’
|—> The ‘power of gender’ is that it shapes individuals as well as social, political and economic
systems and, in turn, those systems shape identities and institutions.

Liberal feminists (Cynthia Enloe)

• Where are the women in security?

• Goal: make women more visible in security;

• Privilege notions of equality and have tended to focus on questions of women’s representation
within the public sphere;

• Many liberal feminists focus on the ways in which, within governments and international
institutions, women remain highly under-represented (this needs to be identi ed so it can be
resolved);

• “Bananas, Beaches and Bases” (Cynthia Enloe);

|
Core argument: The functioning of the international relies on the private division of labour;
|
|—> Mid-1980s - about 3000 military bases around the world;
|—> Unpaid domestic work of wives of military men contributed to assimilation of the base and
| furtherance of diplomatic interests and careers;
|
Limitations to this approach:
- No critique of positivist foundation of realist theories;
- Add women and stir?
- Essentialness women’s identities;

Standpoint feminism (Tickner)

• What are the experiences of women in security?

• Core argument: the distinction between the international and the domestic relies on gendered
assumptions, tropes and metaphors;
|—> International - strength, power, autonomy, independence and rationality;
|—> Domestic - weakness, naïveté, irrationality;

• Main goals: Include women’s experiences to transform global politics; Understand the history of
exclusion and devalorization of women in global politics;

• Implications for studying security:

- Behaviour in the domestic and the international sphere are inseparable (the “brave citizen-
soldier abroad” depends on the idea of a vulnerable woman at home in need of protection);
- Identity is important (inclusion of women’s views might lead to a less militarise state identity
and more peaceful relations between states);
- Gender equality is important (human insecurities often have gendered origins, only gender
equality and a non-gendered discipline can address them);

• Limitations of this approach:

- Are there authentic female views and experiences across time, space and culture?
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- Can there truly be a non-gendered discipline?
- Can lead to an arti cial increase in the study of women in IR, which might reinforce the
gendered discourse/bias;

Post-Structuralist feminism (Peterson and Shepherd)

• How are “women” and “men” social constructed?

• Core argument: our viewpoints are never “neutral” and always “gendered” - we always speak
from dominant assumptions about what is masculine or feminine;

• Gendering: assigning characteristics of masculinity and femininity to certain phenomena —>

sex is di erent than gender;

• Main goals:
|—> Break down (deconstruct) gender categories - show how gender AND sex are socially
| constructed;
|—> Critically engage with the consequences of gendered global politics (show how “national
security” reproduces hierarchies and structural violence against which it claims to
provide protection);

• Limits of this approach:

- How can we pursue change if we can’t speak for “women”?
- To be unable to speak for women only further reinforces the voices of those who have
constructed approaches to international relations out of the experiences of men;

Radical feminists

• Women and men are essentially quite di erent from one another and essentially quite similar to
one another;

• Believe that politics is everywhere;

• Tend to agree that men as a group are less able to express emotion, are more aggressive and
more competitive while women as a group are more nurturing, more holistic and less abstract.

“Post-positivist” approaches to feminist theory: focusing on how gender draws our attention to
the prevailing ideas and meanings associated
with masculinity and femininity, how they di er
across time, place and culture, and the ways in
which power operates through gender.
|
|—> Feminist critical theory: examines pre- vailing assumptions about both women and men;
|—> Feminist postmodernists: any de nition or standpoint will necessarily be partial and any
| attempt to posit a single or universal truth needs to be deconstructed;
|—> Postcolonial feminist theories: the partial truths in circulation around gender, imperialism
constitutes one of the crucial moments, or processes, through which modern identities in all
of their guises become established (make colonised voices be heard in the eld);

FEMINISM IN WARFARE

Where some analysts do focus on people a ected by war, the tendency has been to focus on the
experiences of men.

Feminist accounts of armed con ict do not focus only on the ‘impacts’ of war on women (and
men), they also explore the ways in which women are actors in armed con ict.
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|—> Both women and men can be victims of con ict and political violence;
|—> Both women and men can be active agents in armed con ict;

Because women are seldom viewed as having served as

combatants they may experience greater freedom in
organising informal peace campaigns.
|
|
|—>However, at the same time that women have been
documented as being actively involved in informal
campaigns, they are usually ignored when formal
peace processes begin, they are rarely invited to
formal ‘peace tables’ and are normally excluded
from disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration
(DDR) programmes that give former combatants
access to educational, training and employment
opportunities.
|
When women are included in peace processes, there is a 35% increase in the probability of
an agreement lasting at least 15 years;

Women as peace makers:

- Work across lines (coalitions across cultural and sectarian divides);
- Act as honest brokers (seen as outsider existing power structures);
- Stage mass action (women’s groups);
- Access critical information (women’s groups);
- Access critical information (community networks);
- Broaden the agenda (political, social, economic and legal reforms);
- Aid post con ict recovery (monitoring the peace process, reconciliation);

Some critics point out that the assumption of men as combatants – or at the very least ‘able to
take care of themselves’ – has resulted in their exposure to greater dangers and levels of violence
during armed con ict.

THE WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY AGENDA

Historically, the Security Council was much less open to engaging with human rights-related
issues and its adoption of resolutions was limited to a very narrow agenda of state-focused
issues.
|
Relevant steps:
1. Growing recognition of the violations of women’s rights in the armed con icts of the
mid-1990s, particularly in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda
2. Adoption of the human security agenda by the UN system (in essence, malleable yo interests
of women and girls);
3. Security Council began more readily adopting ‘thematic’ resolutions, focused on broader
human rights-related concerns
4. From 1999 the Security Council began holding thematic ‘open debates’;
5. Women’s organizations intensively and successfully lobbied the council for a response to
women’s experiences of con ict and peace- building;
6. Mark the occasion of International Women’s Day, the Security Council;
7. The UN Secretary-General and several rotating presidencies of the UN Security Council have
also called for member states to adopt ‘National Action Plans on women, peace and
security’ (only 32% of states have adopted);

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Since 2000, the UN Security Council has adopted a
series of resolutions focused on ‘women, peace and
security’ (WPS) that aim to overcome the historical
exclusion of women and women’s rights from
international approaches to peace and security.

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000);

- Groundbreaking, setting out a path for the establishment of norms on women and con ict;
- Increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and
international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of
con ict’ and attention to gender issues across UN peace operations and humanitarian
response;
- First resolution that noted both that women and girls are a ected by armed con ict in ways that
di er from the impact on men and boys, and the importance of incorporating a ‘gender
perspective’ into peace operations

Resolution 1820 (2008)

- Tackle ‘sexual violence when used or commissioned as a tactic of war in order to deliberately
target civilians or as a part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilian populations;
- A lot of resolutions further the points made on the previous two;

Resolution 2122 (2013);

Resolution 2242 (2015);

- First interlinkages between WPS and the Security Council’s work on countering violent
extremism;
- Prevention - ensuring that women are involved in con ict prevention and resolution processes;
- Participation - ensuring the full participation of women in decision-making processes that
impact them;
- Protection - ensuring that women and girls’ human rights are protected in times of con ict and
peacebuilding;
- Relief and recovery - ensuring that women and girls’ rights and needs are addressed.
- The Security Council now holds two annual open debates, one on sexual violence in con ict
(usually mid-year), the other on WPS broadly;

Four pillars: Prevention; Participation; Protection; Relief and recovery.

Theoretical origins of the agenda: Liberal standpoint feminism; Where are the women?; Improve
representation of women; Women’s experiences can contribute to more peace;

Challenges

I. Securitising women’s rights;

|—> Securitization: taking a particular topic and, through discourse, turning it into a security
issue so that is implied that it should be resolved through security
means;

II. Test case: wartime sexual violence;

III. The enduring gaps are still diverse and complex

- Gaining entry as a ‘thematic’ concern, the WPS resolutions are characterised by relatively
weak compliance-promoting language where the Security Council ‘recommends’ and
‘requests’ rather than compels actions

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- The WPS resolutions are considered to be ‘soft-law’, as they are not adopted under the
Security Council’s Chapter VII enforcement provisions;

IV. Post-structuralist critique: By making the resolution about women, and not gender, we
reproduce the sources of inequality, hierarchy, and male dominance.

WARTIME SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Violence against civilians in warfare as increased, including sexual violence (which most of the
victims are women).
|
|—>Policy initiatives against sexual violence during
war provide mechanisms to persecute these
crimes and analyse out sexual violence is a
security issue.

Wartime sexual violence

• Sexual violence is not inevitable;
• Feminists criticise the “rape as a weapon of war”
discourse as it limits our understanding of sexual
violence in war;
• Various factors may account for sexual violence, from individual opportunity, to group interests,
to combatant socialisation.

Causes of sexual violence during war

A. Essentialist position - war increases men’s

opportunity for rape;
|—> War can give vent to “men’s contempt for
| women” (Brownmiller);
|—> Inequality, discrimination, and male domination
| and aggression in war and peace.
|
Limits of this explanation:
- Overestimates the occurrence of rape;
- Criminalizes all men;
B. Structuralist position - rape is used to shame male relatives and the wider social/ethnic group
who failed to protect the women (Bastick, Grimm and Kunz);
|—> Masculinity and militarisation - men have to prove their masculinity in war.
|—> E.g.: ethnic civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), in which 20000 girls and
| women su ered systematic (ordered) rape in 1992 alone (mostly perpetrated by
| Bosnian Serbs);
|
Limits of this explanation:
- Overlooks sexual violence against men;
- Limits occurrence of sexual violence to ethnic wars.
C. Social-constructivist position - women and men can be victims of sexual violence, which
masculinises the identity of the perpetrator and feminizes the identity of the victim;
|—> Occurs due to the social construction of the feminine as inferior and the masculine as
| superior;
|—> Sexual violence as an expression of power relations;
|—> E.g.: Civil War in Sierra Leone (1991-2002) which had over 200000 women exposed to
| sexual violence (women of higher status have lower chances of being a victim of sexual
| violence);
|
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Limits of the explanation:
- Underestimates special vulnerable position of women in con ict;
D. Con ict-research position: much variation between and within civil war across space and time
(Wood);
|—> Opportunistic individual interests (e.g.: desire, prestige);
|—> Strategic group interests (e.g.: deter civilians from supporting rebels; ethnic cleansing);
|—> Rape as a practice - Wood 2018 (e.g.: combatant socialisation, social pressure;
| tolerated, not ordered, by commanders);
|
Limits of this explanation:
- Does not account for continuities between war and peace (e.g.: increase in rape after
war ends);

All this positions have aws because they don’t take in consideration the points of the other ones.

Feminist critique of the policy agenda

• Too narrow focus on women as victims (both women and men can be perpetrators and victims
of sexual violence);
• Rape as a weapon of war (implies problem can be solved with legal prosecution of commanders
and the logic of deterrence);
• Causes and dynamics of violence against women are not limited to wartime processes
(continuum between war - and peacetime violence);
• The Security Council has framed its approach as a focus on ‘sexual violence, when used or
commissioned as a tactic of war’
|—> This sets up a predominant narrative that sexual violence during wartime is (always)
strategic in nature and is performed only for the purposes of strategic ends, which can
in uence whether and how di erent forms of violence are recognised, documented and
responded to.

Why the Nobel Peace Prize went to 2 people ghting sexual violence in war?

• As Islamic State forces swept through northern Iraq in 2014, they captured the city of Mosul and
then attacked the nearby Yazidi people (3000 girls and women were kidnapped and most were
sexually enslaved);

• The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winners are a survivor of this attack called (Nadia Murray) and a
genycologist that founded the Panzi Hospital which treats and supports girls and women
brutalised by sexual violence in Congo (Denis Mukwege).

• Wartime sexual violence, which includes sexual torture and forced marriage, as well as rape and
sexual slavery, in icts excruciatingly painful, sometimes mortal injuries and su ering on victims,
their families and their communities;

• These crimes are not inevitable and unavoidable collateral damage;

• Armies, rebels and even forces of democratic regimes abuse civilians during war;

• Among those armed organizations that do engage in wartime sexual violence, some victimise
particular ethnic groups and target gender and sexual minorities;

• Sexual violence is a “weapon”;

• Rape is a practice (social pressures to conform violent forms of masculinity can drive
combatants to commit these crimes);

• Organizations that do adopt sexual violence as organisational policy may use it as a military
strategy, as in some cases of ethnic cleansing or genocide (for example, the Islamic

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State authorises its combatants to hold sexual slaves under conditions it outlines in formal
regulations, but does not order them to do so).

When rape is frequent as a practice, liability for the crime of rape goes beyond ordering, planning
or instigating (e.g.: the International Criminal Court can prosecute commanders if such crimes
were a foreseeable consequence of a common criminal purpose);

Peacebuilding and its critics

PEACEBUILDING

Peacebuilding: action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify
| peace in order to avoid a relapse into con ict.
|
How can you overall strengthen things that will avoid con ict from returning?
|
Peacebuilding involves a range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into
con ict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for con ict management, and laying the
foundations for sustainable peace and development.

Varieties of peacebuilding
• Actor-based: single state, coalition, regional international governmental organisation, UN, NGOs
and civil society;
• Intention-based: Biased vs. Impartial;
• Content based: diplomatic, political, economic, military.

Tradition version of peacekeeping missions (during Cold War): typically involved deploying lightly
armed military forces to monitor cease res or patrol neutral bu er zones between former
combatants, in which troops usually stayed out of the domestic politics of the host state of the
mission;

Ambitious new missions (after the Cold War): including some that aimed to help reconstruct the
political, economic, and social foundations of countries that were just emerging from civil wars—a
much more intrusive role than traditional peacekeeping.
|
|—> Rise in the number of peacekeeping operations;
|—> Number and variety of international actors involved in peacebuilding expanded (private
| military companies were also employed);
|—>Emerged as a kind of ‘life support’ to fragile states just emerging from con ict —a
| decentralised (and at times chaotic) system for reconstituting a peaceful civil society, e ective
| governance, and economic life in war-torn states;
|
After 9/11, two overlapping styles of modes of peacebuilding coexisted: post-conquest
peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq, deeply connected to US national security objectives and
managed largely by the United States; and post-settlement peacebuilding, run mainly by the UN
and regional organizations, and deployed with the consent of local parties.
|
Distinction between peacebuilding and war- ghting has blurred recently.
|
Context for peacebuilding is now quite di erent and more complex.

• Many countries emerging from Civil War remain teetering on the brink between war and peace,
with their inhabitants divided by mutual animosities and fears.

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|—> Peacebuilders should plan for successive missions over an extended period, with a
signi cant initial presence giving way to a series of less intrusive missions, ideally
ending with a monitoring role and ‘normal’ development programming (fragile peace
may be the more realistic outcome).

• Most peacebuilding mission are premised on the liberal agenda.

|—> The solution for practitioners, therefore, is not to reject liberal approaches to
peacebuilding outright but be conscious of their limits and potential pitfalls.

• Inclusion of local-parties contributes to the legitimacy of governing institutions;

• Peacebuilding agencies have often been criticised for neglecting local-level peacebuilding.
|—> Peacebuilders have overlooked the local sources of broader societal con icts such as
| disputes over land rights;
|—> They have also failed to recognize the value of peacebuilding in local communities as a
| solution to violence.
|
For peacebuilders to work e ectively at both the national and community levels and with
hybrid forms of governance, they must have extensive knowledge of local dynamics in the host
society, supplementing the technical and thematic expertise that peacebuilding agencies have
tended to prioritise.

• Although studies indicate that the presence of peacekeepers reduces the overall level of
violence against non-combatants, there have also been glaring failures to provide such
protection.
|—> Greater clarity on the relationship between ‘robust peacekeeping’ and the objectives of
peacebuilding would be a useful step forward.

• Higher levels of income and economic growth signi cantly reduce the risk of post-con ict
societies slipping back into war (even with an agreement on priorities, however, international aid
can still work against the goals of peacebuilding);

• There is a di culty in coordinating the activities of the plurality and diversity of international
agencies involved in these operations.

Peacebuilding appears to be entering a more di cult phase

Many of the ‘easier’ con icts have been already resolved or are in abeyance, leaving some of the
most di cult and tenacious cases for the UN and other peacebuilding organizations to manage.

PEACEKEEPING

Peacekeeping: subset of peace operations focusing on the traditional task of observing

cease res;

Robust peacekeeping: involves the use of force at the tactical level with the authorisation of the
Security Council and consent of the host nation and/or the main parties to
the con ict;

The history of peacekeeping

I. First generation (directly after there WW2) - traditional peacekeeping (military observation and
inter-positional);
II. Multidimensional position of peacekeeping (1990s) - Zahir, UN demobilise ghters, protecting
troops - signi cantly improves chances of stable peace;

Mandates
• Legal framework for peace operation’s activities;
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• Written in Security Council Resolutions;
• Reported on by the UN Secretary General;

Phases of International Peace-Promoting Intervention in Civil Wars

I. Inter-positional peacekeeping;
II. Multidimensional peacekeeping;
III. Traditional peacekeeping;
IV. Multidimensional peacekeeping and peace enforcement;
V. The Brahimi Report and Reform;
VI. Human Security;
VII. The Responsibility to Protect.

OTHER TYPES OF MISSIONS

Peace enforcement: comprised more heavily armed missions authorised to use force to achieve
purposes other than self- protection;

Preventive diplomacy: diplomatic e orts to ease tensions before they result in con ict.

The UN was moving in the direction of more complex, multifunctional operations that sometimes
displayed a mixture of all these mission types, leading to persistent de nitional ambiguities.
|
|—> There has been a gap between these expansive statements and the UN’s peacebuilding
programs, which have continued to focus on post-con ict activities;

CASE STUDY: THE UN ASSISTANCE MISSION OPERATION IN RWANDA (UNAMIR)

Mandate 1 (before the genocide): assist in ensuring the security and monitor the cease re
agreement;

Mandate 2: Act as intermediary, assist in the resumption of humanitarian relief operations and
monitor development.

Mandate 3: Contribute to the security and protection of refugees and civilians at risk and provision
of security for relief operations to the degree possible.

UNAMIR Strength:
1. 5 October - 20 April 1994: 2548 military personnel, including 2217 troops and 331 military
observers, and 60 civilian police;
2. 21 April - 16 May personnel: 270 military personnel;
3. 17 May 1994 - 8 June 1995: Some 5500 military personnel, including approximately 5200
troops and military support personnel and 320 military observers, and 90 civilian police (in
February 1995, the authorised strength of the civilian police was increased to 120)-

“The Genocide Fax”

• The fax, headed “Request for Protection for Informant,” was sent by Major General Roméo
Dallaire, the U.N. force commander in Rwanda, to peacekeeping headquarters in New York, and
it reported in startling detail the preparations that were under way to carry out precisely such an
extermination campaign (advised by the major’s informant);
|
|—> The response from the UN, was to not escalate the peacekeeping mission because the
| mandate imposed by the UNSC didnt allow for ir, but it told Dallaire to share the info with
| the president and the ambassadors of France, Belgium and US;
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|
How could such a fax not be passed on immediately to the Security Council and all the member state? And possibly not be seen by
the Secretary-General?
|
It was true that the Clinton Administration had lost its appetite for peacekeeping operations
after Somalia.

• The peace that this U.N. blue helmets were in Rwanda to keep was a ction;

• The informant of Major Dallaire discovered that the Habyarimana’s government planned to incite
a civil war to force the withdrawal of Belgian troops in their country;

• Habyarimana was assassinated—a move that created a pretext for the most radical elements of
Hutu Power to seize control of the state and implement their program;

• One day after, Rwandan troops captured, tortured, murdered, and mutilated ten Belgian blue
helmets, which forced the end of this U.N. mission;

• The informant had o ered to assist the U.N. force in raiding interahamwe weapons caches, and
all he asked in return was U.N. protection for himself, his wife, and their four children.

• When the violence in Rwanda was at its peak, Ko Anna said that the peacekeeprs have the
right to defend themselves, and we de ne self-defense in a manner that includes preemptive
military action to remove those armed elements who are preventing you from doing your work;

• Dallaire considers himself the person to blame in the Rwandan mission failure;

• Dallaire shames the international community, concerned primarily about Western states, for not
caring about the Rwandan people.

WAR TO PEACE TRANSITIONS

Success can be seen by:

- Stopping war;
- Supporting the war to peace transition;
- Investing in political, social infrastructure to prevent future war.

Operationalising peacebuilding
A. Negative peace - sovereignty (absence of con ict/
violence);
B. Positive peace - participation (sets higher standard,
does the political system allow for participation so
that challenges goes through the political system);

An ecological theory of peacebuilding (Doyle and

Sambanis)

• Space for peace is de ned along three dimensions: Local

capabilities; Hostilities within the country; International capacity.

• Peace operations prevent the return to war when they are

matched to the con ict “ecology”;

• Con ict “ecology” can be understood through the concept of

coordination vs. cooperation.

• Sharing information and traditional peacekeeping can facilitate

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this by getting the warning side on the same page;

• Two side do not have incentives to do the same thing - prisoners dilemma;

UN peace operations more likely than non-UN operations to prevent recurrence - capabilities vs.
Impartiality;
|—> Criticism: By only looking at cases where there was a peacebuilding e ort, the results might
be bias;

THE EFFECTS OF PEACEBUILDING INTERVENTIONS

The e ects of peacebuilding

• Evaluating peacebuilding can be quite challenging due to threats to inference and disagreement
over concepts;
• How does the international environment in which peacebuilding takes place di er in today as
compared to, for example, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s?
• When we study a given case (a country, peace operation, etc.), it is particularly important to be
able explain what is this case an example of?
• When failures occur, are they due to the nature of peacebuilding e orts of lack of resources?

Methodological challenges in evaluating peacebuilding outcomes:

I. Diversity of international actors engaged in a mission—and the fact that they may not all be
pursuing the same goals;
II. Distinguishing the e ects of the peacebuilding activities from other local and international
factors is di cult given how many in uences are at work and variations across cases;
III. The more time that passes after the conclusion of an operation, the harder it becomes to
isolate these causal e ects;
IV. The relatively small number of cases further complicates the task of drawing general
conclusions.
|
Any full assessment of peacebuilding operations must consider whether the resulting peace is
likely to be durable, which in turn requires some attention to the societal conditions that fueled
con ict in the rst place.
|
|—>If the test of peacebuilding success is simply whether large-scale violence has not resumed
| then the record of peacebuilding has been reasonably positive.
|—>If, however, we consider the broader question of whether peacebuilding missions have
created the conditions for durable peace, the record is more mixed (in many cases the
conditions that gave rise to the con ict have not yet been resolved).

Why dependence on post-con ict elites causes peacebuilding failures?

• The international community’s conventional approach to peacebuilding in post-con ict states
has fallen short of expectations despite the enormous resources devoted to the endeavour.
• The problem is the underlying theory of peacebuilding;
• Only if we recognize how post-con ict elites use peace operations to build their own preferred
version of political order can we overhaul the way we think about and pursue interventions to
achieve more e ective and legitimate government;
• The international community’s approach to building sustainable post-con ict peace rests on the
notion that a well-planned process of institutional engineering can transplant a modern political
order into war-torn states;
• These states (such as Cambodia) are certainly better o than they were before—but they are still
burdened with middling measures of rule of law, state capacity, and democratization.
• International community’s failure to fully achieve its goals of establishing a rationalised
bureaucracy and electoral democracy in war-torn states;
• Peacebuilding should have more modest goals.

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• Capacity-building programs are more likely to succeed if elites support them for their own
purposes.
• Peacebuilders should also look for ways to reduce their dependence on post-con ict leaders
and include more non-elite sources of authority.

Changes in the nature of war and UN responses

- The UN’s mechanisms to prevent and confront armed con ict were conceived in the aftermath
of two large-scale wars involving world powers;
- Intra-state con icts have become commonplace and lethal;
- With the end of Cold War, there was no geostrategic reason for superpowers to provide
nancial and military aid to the fragile regimes in the Third World that they helped sustain;
- Globalization which has undermined borders;
- In contrast to hierarchically organized standing armies, a variety of actors participate directly in
warfare – including such entities as criminal gangs and militias – via decentralised networks;
- Peace enforcement operations were a key UN response to the actual and potential international
instability emanating from war-torn societies;
- Prevention of con icts is becoming a new focus of the UN, through systemic prevention for
instance (rather than solely solve issues once they occur);
- Post-con ict peacebuilding missions aim to assist countries to make the transition from
violence to peace and prevent the recurrence of warfare;
- Long-term commitments are required.

Climate change and Human security

WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY?

• “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act. I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if
the house was on re. Because it is” - Greta Thunberg.
• “Turning out more solar panels and wind turbines may not sound like warfare, but it’s exactly
what won World War 2” - Bill Mckibben
|
|—> Both of these people, used security discourse to describe the climate change crises.

Criticism of the crises and war narrative:

|
Crisis narrative creates a sense of urgency, sacri ce, solidarity.
|
BUT
|—> Who is the enemy? Physics? All of us who emit carbon? The fossil fuel industry?
|—> Is everyone a ected similarly by climate change?
|—> Can technological advances (in the West) help to address environmental injustice?
|—> Can the state (in the West) save us from climate change?

Anthropocene (the age of man)

• Humanity’s impact on the earths ecology;

• Too many natural scientists embrace the comforting
assumption that nature can be studied, indeed should be
studied, in isolation from the human world, with people as
mere observers;
• Many environmentalists believe that in wilderness is the
preservation of the world —BUT— the wilderness, for good or
ill, is increasingly irrelevant;
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• Climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’, a phenomenon that would in future crises make violence
more likely (however, the military isn’t an agency well suited to dealing with environmental
issues);
• As ecological systems are pushed across the Earth system boundaries humanity will be riven by
con ict as political elites struggle to control increasingly scarce resources
|
|—>Erecting fences and militarising frontiers to deal with migrants displaced by environmental
change just aggravates the violence of rapid change, rendering those forced to move
doubly vulnerable.

Human security: provide for essential needs of vulnerable people, it is a concern with human life
and dignity (the idea that not just survival is ensured, but also that people live a
good life) —> Human security is achieved when individuals and/or multiple
actors have the freedom to identify risks and threats to their well-being and
values
|subset
|—> Environmental security: risks from environmental
change (such as armed
c o n i c t ) - re s o u rc e s
m a n a g e m e n t ,
conservation techniques,
pollution prevention.

Ecological security: integrity of natural systems;

Climate security: key to ecological security;

Throughout the twentieth century, the idea of the state as the sole security actor became
increasingly prevalent, especially during the Cold War. However, attempts to widen and deepen
the concept of security continued throughout this period, with the focus broadening, for example,
to include environmental issues and a vision for society/nation as opposed to solely security for
the state.
|—> States have never been the only ‘security’ providers, particularly where human security is
concerned.

Human security must be used to interrogate and problematise the values and institutions which
currently exist as they relate to human welfare and more thoroughly question the interests that are
served by these institutions.
|— Some criticise it for being nothing more than a tool to further state and international agendas.

Origins of human security

• Four developments:
1. Economic growth no longer main indicator of development (“human development” as
empowerment of people);
2. Increase in Civil Wars;
3. Globalization spreading transnational dangers such as terrorism and pandemics;
4. Post-Cold War emphasis on human rights and humanitarian intervention.

• UNDP Human Development Report 1994:

- Universal, interdependent, preventative, people-centered;
- Contested realist and state-centred approach to security;:
- Revolutionary because it contributed to deepening and widening of the concept of security
(from the Cold War focus on military defence of the state to include a much broader and
comprehensive set of concerns);
- 7 components of threats against human security: economic, food, health, environmental,
personal, community, and political security;

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- Human security as “freedom from fear and freedom from want” (some criticise by being too
vague or too encompassing);
|—> In contrast to the focus on direct, physical violence in the dimensions outlined above,
the categories of food, health, economic and environmental security might be said to
align with ‘freedom from want’.
- State security is not the same as security of citizens;
- Individuals as referent objects, but also security actors.
• The CHS report:
- Claimed that human security included the ‘interrelated building blocks’ of freedom from fear,
freedom from want and ‘the freedom of future generations to inherit a healthy natural
environment’;
- Human security also ‘reinforces human dignity’.

Criticism of the concept of human security

I. Lack of precision (everyone is for it, but few people have a clear idea of what it means);

II. Absence of clear theoretical foundation or de nition;

III. Human security fails to provide a resource for either understanding global security politics or
the processes through which political communities give meaning to security

IV. Securitization of poverty, ill-health, and poor education (in the vast majority of cases,
securitization will not lead to any signi cant improvement in the lives of individuals);

V. Role of the state in human security (viewed from a human security perspective, states are
more often part of the problem than the source of the solution);

VI. From prevention to intervention (R2P risks over-emphasising military means and prioritises a
“top-down”, statist, and interventionist approach to security).

WHICH SECURITY THREATS DOES ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE POSE?

Areas of concern in environmental security

• Rates at which the earth is in decay (carbon emissions, acidic oceans, depletion of the ozone
layer, pollution of land and water, threats to biodiversity and climate change);

• Levels of consumption of natural energy resources;

|—> Consumption culture: rates of consumption are up to 40 times higher in most
industrialised states including the US, Western Europe, Russia and China;

• An increase in the global population is likely to further exacerbate trends.

Environmental change as a security issue

I. UN World Commission on Environment and Development:

- Environment as a development issue;
- Consumption levels of industrialised North a threat;
- Idea of sustainable development - development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

II. Roberth Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy”

- Environment as a security threat (for the Global North);

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- Environmental degradation and resource scarcity in the Global South (lead to refugee,
migration, erosion of nation states, empowerment of private armies, security rms and
international drug cartels);

III. Michael T. Klare’s “Resource Wars”:

- Struggles over resources along interethnic lines have already begun on a global scale;
- Resource wars are “interstate con icts that revolve, to a signi cant degree, over the
pursuit or possession of critical materials”;
- In some cases, the materials at stake will be viewed as so essential to national survival or
economic well-being that compromise is unthinkable;
- National security considerations will always prevail over negotiated settlements.

The link between environmental change and con ict

|
Sensationalist claims about “water wars”, “food wars”, and “environmental refugees” in the
popular literature are - almost without exception - simplistic and awed.
|
|—> E ects of environmental scarcity are indirect and interact with other social, political and
| economic stresses;
|—> Some states are better equipped to respond to e ects - its a governance issue.

The case against environmental change as a security issue

• Environmental change is a governance challenge, not a security challenge;

|—> Development policy more adequate than militarisation;
|—> Territorial conquest to ensure resources is too costly.

• Environmental change needs global responses, not national ones;

|—> Prioritising national security concerns prevents international cooperation.

• Global market allows access to su cient resources;

|—> Technological innovation has mitigated challenges from resource scarcity;

• Di erent concept of security needed;

|—> Not protection of status quo, but facilitation of ecologically inspired innovations (including
change of economy focused on fossil fuels and growth).

Environmental change + Population growth

|
|may lead to…
|—> Resource scarcity (has (indirect) e ect on security and the likelihood of inter-state wars).
|
However, as environmental change requires global responses, it has also led to cooperation
between states.

CLIMATE CHANGE, DISASTERS AND VIOLENCE

Armed con ict is not an inevitable consequences of climate change —> likelihood of collective
violence depends on the vulnerability to climate-induced changes to livelihoods and government
policies to adapt to and mitigate e ects.

When does climate change lead to collective violence?

One e ect of climate change - extreme weather events;

|
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|—> Physical damage, destroy livelihoods, a ect human mobility, and lead to the death of people
| (disasters);
|—> Link between extreme weather events and collective violence.
|
|—> More consequences for escalation and prolongation of collective violence than their initiation
| and termination;
|
|—> Do not cause but amplify pre-existing con ict dynamics (e.g.: droughts with a history of
| ethno-political con ict are likely to intensify con ict);
|
|—> Lower-level violence is more likely to be related to climate extremes than armed con ict (e.g.:
grain price increases following heatwaves and wild res in the Global North prior to the Arab
Spring in 2011);

Need to distinguish conditions from mechanisms

A. Pre-disaster conditions;
|
|—> Livelihoods dependent on agriculture;
|—> Poverty;
|—> Political exclusion of minority groups;
|—> Weakness of state instituions (for con ict resolution);
|
Increase in vulnerability;

B. Post-disaster mechanisms
|
|—> Increase likelihood of collective violence;
- Spikes in food prices;
- Increased competition over scarce resources;
- Reduction in state policing.
|
|—> Decrease likelihood of collective violence;
- Reduction in rebel resources;
- Disaster diplomacy (windows of opportunity for de-escalation);

Case study: Arab uprisings 2011: The Arab Spring protests in 2011 were in part about rising food
prices, caused by international market conditions following the summer droughts in Russia in
2010 in particular, rather than about local shortages.

Case study: Climate change and the Syrian Civil War

• Link between climate change and drought (not enough evidence that there was drying trend);

• Link between drought and migration;

|
Area of drought was vulnerable to climate shocks because of overuse of water;
|BUT
|—> Struggles not only related to drought - turn to market economy lead to end of fuel
subsidies for irrigation pumps.

• Link between migration and con ict (mixed evidence of impact of demographic change on
armed con ict).

Syria has become, like Darfur before it, the go-to example of a con ict fueled by climate change.
|

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Dominant narrative: climate change contributes to a historic drought (2007-2010), which leads to
crop and livestock failure, which leads to rural hardship and migration to
urban centres, which leads to dissatisfaction with the government and
employment prospects, which leads to protest and violent repression, which
leads to dissidents taking up arms.
|
|—> The climate-change-contributing-to-con ict narrative is now being hotly contested:
I. There is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor
in Syria’s pre-civil war drought;
II. This drought did not cause truly mass migration;
III. There is no solid evidence linking in-migration with the grievances that brought Syrians
into the streets in 2011;
IV. Arguing any particular con ict was “caused” by climate change is exceedingly di cult
V. Climate shocks have probabilistic, rather than deterministic, e ects;
|
|Instead
|—> In the Syrian case, we might look to long-standing issues like authoritarian rule, human rights
abuses, exclusionary patronage networks built around religious identity, proximate “sparks”
like surging food and fuel prices, weak safety nets and employment prospects, and the
demonstration e ect of Arab Spring uprisings in neighbouring countries.
|
Environmental conditions may have exacerbated some of these problems (food prices in
particular), but they did not create them and were not primarily responsible for them.

Case study: The Tsunami and the Aceh Con ict: “All of a sudden the eyes of the world were on
Aceh so the government had to engage with us”;

Preventive measures

Suggest that more than resilience thinking will be needed. Humanity may have no choice but to
experiment with such extreme measures if time is to be gained to allow other innovations to
eventually deal with the climate crisis.

• There is a need for intelligent development strategies that facilitate the ability to adapt to climate
changes in particular as well as other Anthropocene disruptions;
• Another solution is to think more imaginatively about international institutions and the
possibilities of using United Nations agencies in more imaginative ways that build on human
rights and development ideas related explicitly to its mandate of promoting peace;
• Importance of fragile states being aided to improve their governance capacity to deal with risk
compounded by climate change

Cyberwarfare
RUSSIA INFORMATION WAR AND CYBER THREATS

The type of information that countries like Russia try to achieve through warfare are extremely
powerful because it can undermine democratic countries’ governments without using any real
force.

Former UK Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt: “the soul of the enemy army, the soul of the
enemy people, have become the most
important strategic targets, mobilizing the
spirit of one’s own people became the most
important task of the supreme strategist. To
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disintegrate the spirit of the enemy and
protect your spirit from corruption - this is the
meaning of the struggle in the fourth
dimension, which has become more
important than the other three dimensions.”

The idea of a “sticky path” — The Soviet Union was well known for its propaganda campaigns;
|
|—> 1998: Cold War paradigm shift? New Russia?
|—> 2000: Information Security Doctrine;
|—> Russia (or the Putin regime) sees itself under threat and is targeted for a “color revolution”;
|—> The last two decades saw an increase in publications related to information wars (not
“warfare”);

Russia wants to engage in what they regard as a quid pro quo

• This undermine adversaries and prevent a victory by diverting their attention;

• Concept laid out in the Russian doctrine of “strategic containment” in the National Security
Strategy of 2009 and 2015;
• The idea, in peacetime, is to weaken adversaries internally through “indirect” (non-kinetic)
means - Russians call it “defensive pre-emption”;
• The so-called Gerasimov doctrine?
• Hybrid warfare? Sub-threshold?
|
|—> In war time, however, Information War continues, thought it encompasses the military
domain, too;

National Security Strategy (approved in July 2021): the need to prevent the use of information and
comms tech from interfering in internal a airs
( S o v e r e i g n t y ? Te r r i t o r i a l i n t e g r i t y ?
International peace?);
|
|—> Strategic aim: create a safe information space and defend Russia population against
informational-psychological in uence;
|
The internet has simply transferred these information wars to a qualitatively
new level of intensity, scale and e ectiveness;

Russia’s use of cyber tools is closely linked to the so-called information warfare and as for
recently “war of consciousness”;
|
Cyber tools o er ideal means for this purpose;
|—> These actions, of course, also strengthen Russia’s own international position (zero-sum
game);
|—> Cyber activity ts into Russian/Soviet traditional psyche of peacetime use of non-kinetic
tools/asymmetric means to weaken adversaries (aktivnost —> “active measures”);

Doctrinally, pressure needs to be continuously applied;

|
Russian talent with cyber and AI - will utilise own strength and target weakness (Asymmetric
idea);
|
|—> From Russia’s perspective, cyberwar is about complex e ect on the adversary in the
| information realm;
|YET

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|
Russia will use cyber warfare in two operational spheres - cyber-technical and cyber-
psychological (overlap and synergies);
|
The cyber psychological would involve attempts to in uence electoral outcomes, hack-and-leak
activities (kompromat), doxing, encouraging societal divisions, etc. to disorient the adversary and
adversary’s society;

Intermediate and long-term aims

• To weaken adversaries politically and societally (sow division, create “controlled chaos”);
• To gather information/intelligence on adversaries;
• To probe for vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of later;
• Not necessarily destructive (they can generate a psychological e ect);
• Konyshev and Sergunin: Cyber tools have strategic importance - control of information and
information superiority;

Means
I. GRU, FSB, SVR, Spetssviaz;
II. Internet Research Agency aka the “troll farm”;
III. Wagner?
IV. “Patriotic hackers”;
V. Social media “celebrities”;
VI. Integrating AI (Russian ChatGPT);
VII. RuNET/RuTube;

Example
• Ukraine - after Euromaidan (2014) onwards;
• Cyber-psychological ops vs. Cyber-technical ops;
• Multi-domain coordination?;

Attribution problems
• “Cyber obfuscation” - Moscow can say:
• Could be any state/non-state actor;
• Could be false- ag operation;
• Could be some loose-cannon “patriot hackers”;
• Attribution is thus problematic;

COUNTERING THE RUSSIAN CYBER THREAT

Use of International Law to guide response:

- General international agreement that the UN Charter, even though conceived around kinetic
use of force, also applies to cyber;
- Thus any physical damage, injury, or loss of life caused by cyber activity can constitute a
use of force under UN Article;
- In theory, this gives any state under such cyber attack in peacetime the right, in reply, to use
not only its own cyber capabilities but also kinetic force.
|
BUT
|
Also means that the likes of UK thus also have to abide by the Law of Armed Con ict in its own
use of cyber in response to Russian use of cyber that caused destruction;
|—> Issue is that Russia is conducting probing, info ops, and espionage with cyber rather than
destructive attacks - how does International Law deal with this?

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THE PERCEPTION OF THE RUSSIAN THREAT

Russia is blamed - “attribution” by a government (but getting international agreement for any
| action the victim might take?);
|
Understanding that Russian cyber attacks have been more “disruptive” than “destructive” but
carry the threat of destruction;
|
For instance, the UK considers it is clear that cyber operations that result in or present an
imminent threat of death and destruction on an equivalent scale to an armed attack will give rise
to an inherent right to take action in self-defence;
|
|—> But how to judge what is an imminent threat?

The perception of the Russian threat in the UK

- Moreover, the UK is that even if Russia cyber attacks are not “destructive” they are still,
according to Wright, “illegal” under International Law because they amount to “intrusions”
on sovereignty under Article 2(7) of UN Charter;
- Therefore, the UK also has the right to take action to spot such intrusions.

RESPONSE OPTIONS FOR RUSSIA CYBERWARFARE

Deterrence by denial

Issues
|—> Capability to prevent Russian cyber attacks having e ect?
|—> Communication/counteracting disinformation? (Beyond rhetoric);
|—>Credibility? What’s really going to stop Russia from conducting cyber probing/info
| operations/espionage anyway? Where’s the jeopardy?
|—> So, is deterrence-by-denial practical?

Deterrence by punishment

“If you don’t stop doing what you are doing we will take action.”

Issues:
|—> Involves threatened use of o ensive cyber to deter Russia from doing what it is doing;
|—> Usually, deterrence in conventional terms is conducted by sober-rattling or nuclear “rocket-
| rattling” —BUT—How do you “cyber-rattle”? Capability and communication? How do you
| establish credibility?
|—> Give away capabilities?
|—> Escalation dominance?
|—> Is it practical? (interesting US approach - signaling through a credible threat to the Russian
electoral grid);

Legal and ethical issues: Jeremy Hunt as Foreign Secretary accused Russians of operating
without regard to International Law or established norms and of
engaging in cyber activity that is reckless and indiscriminate —> so,
incumbent on UK not to do the same and thereby keep to IL/MLAC
—> But, not easy.

Issues with deterrence by punishment: “without clearly identifying who is responsible for the
hostile cyber activity, it is impossible to take responsible action in response”;
|
|—> Deterrence by punishment cyber activity can only be used to: make attacker desist; convince
| them not to carry out future attacks.
|
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Example: UK
- UK must also remember that, under the UK’s MLAC (2004), UK cyber cannot be used to
“retaliate” (its illegal according to the MLAC na yet this world is used in o cial UK
documentation, including in parliamentary reports and the National Security Capability Review);
- The word “reprisal” can be used —BUT AGAIN—> Only for deterrence purposes, to make
Russia stop.
- In any cyber “reprisals” designed to deter, the UK cannot target any civilian infrastructure
because it is forbidden by laws of armed con ict;
- Also problem of reciprocity (Russian winter vs. UK winter);
- General problem of “discrimination” with cyber ( rst-order, second-order, n-order e ects);

Problem of proportionality - cannot use weapon “the e ects of which cannot be limited”; —> Can
| cyber attacks be limited?
|
Problem of halting e ects of UK reprisal cyber once/if Russia desists from its own attacks —>
Controllable?
|
Can really use kinetic reprisal for a cyber attack? Starting a “hot” war?

Both options
|—> Require capability, communication and credibility.
|
Is cyber deterrence possible at all? (Cold War/Nuclear Deterrence being outdated concepts).

CONCLUSIONS TAKEN FROM THE RUSSIAN CYBERWARFARE

• Russia is exploiting the asymmetry and operating, as Col. A. Bartosh (2021) would say “in
shadows”;

• How to detect and deter information/disinformation?

• The current legal framework not applicable if it comes to disinformation - What options do we
have?

• Russia cyber attacks can bring down the UK’s national infrastructure;

• In the push to deter any such attacks, countries (mostly NATO) will have to move away from
International Law regarding responding to cyber-attacks;
|
|—Already, happening—> Under UK MLAC, acts of reprisal have to be “publicised” beforehand
(but the UK now departs from International Law in that it would not
agree that we are always legally obliged to give prior noti cation to
the hostile state before taking cyber countermeasures against it;

• Here is the thin end of the wedge (International Law and the Law of Armed Con ict were not
designed to cope with the Information War and, by extension, cyber issues - there may need to
be a complete rethink about both as they relate to cyber warfare);
|
|—> This is especially so as cyber warfare increases in scope and intensify - as it surely must
(with AI playing a more signi cant part in its evolution).

FROM BLITZKRIEG TO BLITZKRIEG: THE MILITARY ENCOUNTER WITH COMPUTERS

Militaries have been greatly empowered by a range of advanced information systems but are so
dependent on them, their disruption would have crippling e ects;

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Traditional military strategies, such as the use of overwhelming force and the concentration of
resources, may not be e ective in the realm of cyberwarfare.
|
|—> This is because cyber attacks can be launched from virtually anywhere in the world, and it
| can be di cult to determine the source of the attack.
|—> Traditional military resources, such as aircraft carriers and tanks, are not particularly useful in
the context of cyberwarfare.

Blitzkrieg era (period of warfare during WW2);

• When the German military employed a highly mobile and coordinated approach to quickly
overwhelm their opponents;
• Characterised by highly networked and decentralised forms of combat;
• Tactics relied on a combination of fast-moving tanks, aircraft, and infantry to quickly penetrate
enemy lines and create confusion and disarray.
• Contrasts the traditional approach to warfare with the emerging era of computer-based warfare,
or "Bitskrieg."
• In this new era, military forces rely on advanced computing technologies to collect and process
vast amounts of information, enabling them to make more informed decisions and respond
more quickly to changing conditions on the battle eld.

Bitskrieg era (present)

• Computers are not only guide and break codes but also they are useful to winnow vast amount
of battle related information in the search for insight;
• Computers are transforming the nature of warfare, enabling new forms of attack and defense
that were previously unimaginable.
• For example, Bitskrieg tactics may involve the use of cyberattacks to disable or disrupt enemy
communications systems, or the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to conduct
surveillance or carry out targeted strikes.
• Re ects the idea that digital technologies are increasingly becoming an integral part of modern
military operations, and are likely to continue to shape the future of warfare in ways that are still
being explored and understood.

The rise of cyberwarfare should impel a reexamination of classical just war ethics, given its
relative ease of use as a rst restore and the tempting prospect of being able to achieve national
aims with less bloody use of force.

Limitations:
|—> Computers are vulnerable to attacks
|—> Maintain a balance between technology warfare and traditional form
|
Key problem for cyber deterrence is that attacking nation may keep their identities secret and not
all attacks emanate from other nations

“THE CONVERGENCE OF INFORMATION WARFARE” - MARTIN C. LIBICKI

Discusses how information warfare has evolved over time and how it has converged with other
forms of warfare.

Information warfare: the use of information and information technology to gain an advantage over
| an opponent;
|

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|—> Information warfare is no longer a separate category of warfare, but has become integrated
| with other forms of warfare such as cyberwarfare, economic warfare and psychological
| warfare;
|
|—> Information warfare is now a part of almost every aspect of modern warfare and is used to
gain an advantage in areas such as military operations, diplomacy and propaganda;

New technologies, such as social media, have enabled new forms of information warfare, such as
disinformation campaigns;

Challenges of addressing information warfare:

I. Di culty o identifying the source of disinformation;
II. Lack of e ective countermeasures.

In conclusion, the article emphasises the need for a better understanding of the nature of
information warfare and the development of new strategies to counter it.
|
|—> This will require collaboration between government, the private sector and civil society.

“WINNING FUTURE WARS: RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CYBER AND ITS VITAL IMPORTANCE IN
MOSCOW’S STRATEGIC THINKING” - ROD THORNTON AND MARINA MIRON

• Examines Russia’s strategic use of o ensive cyber capabilities in modern warfare;

• Russia sees o ensive cyber operations as a crucial component of its military doctrine and a way
to achieve strategic goals;
|
|—> Russian military planners view cyber operations as a means of achieving tactical
advantages, disrupting enemy decision-making processes, and creating confusion and
chaos on the battle eld;

• Russia’s o ensive cyber capabilities:

- Sophisticated malware;
- Highly skilled cyber operatives;
- Integration of cyber operations with other military
activities.

• Russia has used o ensive cyber capabilities in multiple con icts, including in Ukraine and Syria.

• O ensive cyber capabilities are crucial in Russia’s military planning and this will likely become
more critical in the future;
|—> Countries should pay more attention to this and invest in cyber defense and deterrence.

• Understanding Russia’s o ensive cyber capabilities is crucial for policymakers and military
planners in developing e ective strategies for countering Russian aggression;

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