From the Editors

The idea of humanitarian intervention and the problem of how the international community should respond to the outbreak and escalation of civil wars and insurgencies have been important security concerns since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first two articles in this issue focus on the case of war-torn Somali, an early experiment in the use of armed force to achieve humanitarian ends.¹

In fact, Stefano Recchia of Southern Methodist University begins this volume by challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1992 US intervention in Somalia was a humanitarian mission. Instead, Recchia sees the intervention as prompted by US military concerns that the collapse of national governance in Somalia would create a dangerous power vacuum that would eventually demand a US response. US policy makers, therefore, framed the mission as a humanitarian one to garner international legitimacy and support to meet what were pragmatic and conventional security objectives. Although the mission failed to achieve the desired stability and security in Somalia, Recchia concludes that the US military learned valuable lessons about how to shift the long-term responsibility for interventions to the international community.

The next essay by Paul Williams of George Washington University picks up the case of Somalia with a focus on multilateral efforts to build a national army from 2008 to 2018.² Williams attempts to explain why after a decade of security assistance from more than a dozen international actors only one US-trained unit was deemed in 2017 by Somali government officials as effective. In answers that echo what happened later in Afghanistan and Iraq, Williams argues that this dire military outcome sprung from a mismatch between the goals of local elites and those of external actors: the former prioritised national unity over defeating insurgents and combating corruption. This problem was compounded by a lack of focus on institution-building and poor donor coordination. Building a national army and government after two decades of war while waging a counter-insurgency campaign continues to confound efforts to bring the conflict to a close.³

Whereas the first two essays suggest that international interventions may only solve one security problem by creating another one, the next article by Marc DeVore (St. Andrews University) and Armin Stähli (University of St. Gallen) tells us that the likelihood of revolutions causing civil wars remains high. By examining the case of Qaddafi’s Libya, they show that the way authoritarian states structure their security forces in a two-tiered system creates the mechanism for regime crises to escalate. Authoritarian states often create small ‘communally-stacked’ units to defend the dictatorship from internal foes and recruit broad-based national forces to deter foreign threats. This two-tiered structure escalates a domestic crisis into civil war because the regime’s internal security units are large enough to prevent a coup d’état and the larger national army will fragment and turn its weapons on the state when ordered to attack the civilian population.⁴

Andrea Ghiselli of the Torino World Affairs Institute looks at the idea of intervention and the case of the Libyan civil war from the perspective of the People’s Republic of China.⁵ He argues that during the 1990s and 2000s there was a divergence of views about ‘military operations other than war’ in civil–military relations.⁶ Before 2011, the People’s Liberation Army saw its core mission as defence of state and China’s sovereign territory. It was sceptical about other types of external military engagements. However, civilian officials, especially under Hu Jintao, began to express interest in deploying military in relief missions and multi-lateral operations to support foreign policy aims. The evacuation of Chinese nationals from Libya during the 2011 crisis and the stake that Chinese companies had in that disintegrating county, however, compelled the military to accept a broader definition of China’s national interest and to appreciate the utility of the armed forces as an instrument of peacetime statecraft. Since 2011, the killing of Chinese peacekeepers in Mali and Sudan has highlighted the risks of this doctrinal shift and more generally of China’s more expansive understanding of its place in the world.

In the final essay, Alexander Statiev of Waterloo University examines the strategy of the Ukrainian nationalist resistance to the Soviet Union from 1938 to 1950. In a historical case study that helps to illustrate why civil wars and national insurgencies often prove to be intractable and extremely violent conflicts, Statiev argues that the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists failed because of the negative impact of fascist ideology on its strategic choices. In the minds of the leadership, ideological thinking inflated the prospects of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists achieving Ukrainian independence by winning allies, mobilising mass public support, and defeating their primary enemy. The upshot was a protracted and hopeless struggle that took more lives than the US Army lost during the Second World War in Europe.

Notes

¹ See also Michael Woldemariam & Alden Young, ‘After the Split: Partition, Successor States, and the Dynamics of War in the Horn of Africa’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/5 (2018), 684–720; R. Kim Cragin & Susan Stipanovich, ‘Metastases: Exploring the impact of foreign fighters in conflicts abroad’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/3-4 (2019), 395–424.

² On related topics see Stephen Biddle, Julia Macdonald & Ryan Baker, ‘Small footprint, small payoff: The military effectiveness of security force assistance’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/1-2 (2018), 89–142; Alex Neads, ‘Improvise, adapt and fail to overcome? Capacity building, culture and exogenous change in Sierra Leone’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/3-4 (2019), 425–47; David H. Ucko, ‘Counterinsurgency as armed reform: The political history of the Malayan Emergency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/3-4 (2019), 448–79; Jacqueline L. Hazelton, ‘The client gets a vote: counterinsurgency warfare and the U.S. military advisory mission in South Vietnam, 1954–1965,’ The Journal of Strategic Studies, 44/1 (2020),126–53.

³ On war termination, see Chiara De Franco, Anders Engberg-Pedersen & Martin Mennecke, ‘How do wars end? A multidisciplinary enquiry’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 42/7 (2019), 889–900.

⁴ David H. Ucko, ‘“The People are Revolting”: An Anatomy of Authoritarian Counterinsurgency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/1 (2016), 29–61; Daniel Byman, ‘Death Solves All Problems’: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/1 (2016), 62–93.

⁵ Also see Hoo Tiang Boon, ‘Hardening the Hard, Softening the Soft: Assertiveness and China’s Regional Strategy’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 40/5 (2017), 639–62; Yves-Heng Lim ‘Expanding the Dragon’s Reach:The Rise of China’s Anti-access Naval Doctrine and Forces’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 40/1-2 (2017), 146–68.

⁶ For a survey on civil–military relations see Peter Feaver, ‘Civil–Military Relations and Policy: A Sampling of a New Wave of Scholarship’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 40/1-2 (2017), 325–342.