(Re)ordering the Mediterranean: The evolution of security assistance as an international practice

ABSTRACT

Security assistance – foreign actors training and equipping security forces in another country – has proliferated in the Mediterranean over the last decades. Now, more than a decade on from the Arab Uprisings, security assistance cannot be considered merely a tool to obtain strategic objectives, but is in itself a site of competition, collusion and potential collision. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we develop a framework deploying reordering as a lens through which comparative and interdisciplinary explorations can develop comprehensive and critical views of the evolution of security assistance in the Mediterranean. We propose a theoretical framework centred on international practice and socio-material network theory, which brings different types of providers and recipients, as well as the discourse-material structures underpinning them, into a common frame. The framework conceptualizes security assistance as operating at vertical (between provider and recipient), and horizontal (between vertical blocks) levels. It can purposefully be analysed across three dimensions – knowledge, materiality and networks. In so doing, we may be able to observe how, despite the absence of formal institutions, norms or governing mechanisms, security assistance constitutes an international practice and contributes to the ordering, and continuous reordering, of the Mediterranean as a governable geospatial field of intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Security assistance
• Mediterranean
• international practices
• ordering
• knowledge
• materiality
• networks

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the participants in the online Workshop ‘Security assistance in the Middle East 2011-2021: Unpacking an international practice’, organised at the European University Institute/Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies/Middle East Directions program on 20^th April 2021. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and Christian Bueger for commenting on an early draft of this Introduction.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are interested in exploring the ‘geospatial fantasy’ (Mamadouh, 2021) which the wider Mediterranean gives rise to, but we leave the terms selected open. Aware of the challenge in matching geographical descriptors with space, this special issue uses the terms the ‘Mediterranean region’, ‘Southern Mediterranean’, ‘Mediterranean basin’, and the ‘Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’ interchangeably to encompass states that have a Mediterranean coastline. We also use the terms ‘Mashreq’ – the ‘East’ in Arabic – and ‘Maghreb’ –the ‘West’. While the term ‘Mashreq’ is commonly used in lieu of the ‘Middle East’, ‘Maghreb’ refers to lands that today correspond to Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. On the evolution and historical usage of the Mashreq-Maghreb dichotomy, see Fierro and Penelas (2021).

2. Themes which are also dealt with extensively in the vast and critical library on liberal peacebuilding.

3. Exceptions include Springborg, Williams and Zavage (2020); Alaoui and Springborg (2023.

4. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program dataset on ‘internationalized intrastate conflict’ clearly shows the trend towards increased external involvement in internal conflicts: https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/charts/. The effects of such a trend are more contested, yet the orthodoxy in conflict resolution studies and practice is that wars with the participation of external parties tend to be longer, bloodier, and more difficult to resolve through negotiated settlement (see Sawyer et al., 2017).

5. Considering the role of security assistance in the ongoing war in Ukraine, at the time of writing it remains to be seen whether escalation into direct conflict will take place. Both Syria and Iraq have so far served as examples of where direct conflict between Russia/US and between Iran/US has largely been avoided. The Syrian war has, however, brought Israel and Iran into increasingly direct confrontation.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant number IAF-2020-027: Knowledge, Networks and Practices of Security Assistance.