(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

Introduction

Security assistance – foreign actors training and equipping security forces in another country – has emerged as a key form of external actor engagement in the Mediterranean region (Springborg et al., 2020; Davidson, 2016; see also Davies et al., 2022 for global data on ‘externalized intrastate conflict’; see also Security Assistance Monitor for data on US security assistance specifically). In this special issue, we propose to consider security assistance as an ordering practice that establishes the Mediterranean¹ – a geospatial construct that is perceived as chaotic and disorderly – as a space which can be acted on. Where the region appears rife with entrenched conflicts, security assistance produces a familiar orderliness and a sense of logic upon which policies can be meted out, relationships can be constructed, and wider geopolitics can be formulated. Security assistance, in other words, is not merely or even primarily a strategic tool to advance an agenda – it is the agenda itself.

Security assistance should not, we argue, be understood purely as an instrument to achieve strategic objectives and secure interests. It is also, and perhaps mainly, a shared site of competition, collusion, and potential collision where relationships are uneasy and interests are inherently unstable and contested, yet at the same time one where a nominal orderliness and imbued logic exist. In the broader Mediterranean context, security assistance is a variegated practice employed by actors with different objectives, including but not limited to regime change, migration management, counterterrorism, influence-seeking and disruption. It configures relationships between and among providers and recipients in polycentric and fluid ways, and has fundamental effects on the (re)ordering of the region as a whole. It would thus be misleading to consider this practice as mainly a matter of delegation or proxy, as remains the focus in studies on proxy war (Mumford, 2013), and external delegation to rebel groups (Salehyan, 2010). The practice of security assistance is itself part and parcel of a regional order constructed according to ‘competitive interaction’, rife with geopolitical contention and where national politics is considered malleable and susceptible to external ‘shaping’. In other words, without security assistance, there would not be a ‘Mediterranean’ as we know or perceive it. This perspective of a mutually constitutive process is, we argue, in need of more systematic investigation and this issue will offer fresh thinking with regard to the modes and effects of security assistance as an international practice.

This Special Issue investigates security assistance in the Mediterranean region conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. Conceptually, we build on three fields of inquiry – International Relations and Security Studies, Strategic Studies, and Middle East studies – to rearticulate the terms of the debate on security assistance. We take the Mediterranean as a particularly insightful region in which to better understand this international phenomenon. Theoretically, our starting point is that security assistance has evolved significantly over the last decade, and that we have yet to understand the effects of this intensified practice on localized conflicts, domestic sovereignty, and regional stability. Our overarching argument is that security assistance is emerging as an international practice, with specific (re)ordering effects for the Mediterranean region. We propose a new theoretical framework, inspired by research on international practices (Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Bueger & Gadinger, 2018) and socio-material networks (Latour, 2007; Law, 2009), which brings different types of providers (e.g., state and non-state actors) and different types of recipients (e.g., militaries of stable states; police in transition contexts; non-state armed groups), using different means and to different ends, into a common frame. As such, we analyse two interrelated conceptualizations of security assistance in the Mediterranean. First, its vertical practices, i.e., the multiplicity of doings, ways of saying, negotiations, technologies, and contestations that shape and are germane to the relationships between providers and recipients of security assistance. Second, its horizontal practices, referring to the interactions, negotiations and leveraging between providers, and between recipients, of security assistance. By analysing these vertical and horizontal practices we may be able to determine how, in the absence of formal international institutions, norms or governing mechanisms, security assistance hangs together as an international practice and contributes to the ordering, and continuous reordering, of the Mediterranean as a governable geospatial field of intervention.

Empirically, we highlight the emergence of security assistance as an international practice spanning ideological divides and strategic cultures, and practiced by Western states (e.g., the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, and France), global contenders (e.g., Russia, China), regional states (e.g., Turkey, Iran and the Gulf states) and international organizations (e.g., NATO, the EU). The contributions are based on qualitative methods to analyse security assistance processes across the Mediterranean. Ranging from cases of unsteady but seemingly deadlocked conflicts – such as those in Syria and Libya – to cases of stable but precarious conflicts – like Lebanon and Tunisia – case studies in this Special Issue recount processes, implications and effects of security assistance programs: on individual countries’ stability and political trajectory, on the regional order, and on the constitution of the Mediterranean region itself.

This introduction is structured as follows. The first section discusses competing conceptualizations of the term security assistance and reviews the dominant frameworks used to analyse processes adopted by external actors to train and equip foreign security forces. In particular, we highlight why Principal-Agent frameworks can only provide a partial understanding of the general practice of security assistance. In the subsequent section, we present our framework of (re)ordering practices. Next, we provide an overview of the respective contributions to the Special Issue, before concluding with reflections on the way forward for research on security assistance globally.

Towards a New Conceptual and Theoretical Approach to Security Assistance in the Mediterranean

Security assistance is an integral element of foreign and security policy. From an International Relations and Security Studies perspectives, security assistance is situated within a global decentring of war and indirect forms of interventions that have replaced large-scale state building and counterinsurgency campaigns, described as ‘shadow wars’ (Niva, 2013), ‘everywhere wars’ (Gregory, 2011), or ‘liquid war’ (Demmers & Gould, 2018). These perspectives highlight the fragmentated nature of war, and the multiple actors and processes involved in it, spanning global battlescapes and taking on ‘unending’ characteristics (Duffield, 2007). In Strategic Studies, on the other hand, the focus is mainly put on fine-tuning concepts describe the drivers of the externalization of the burden of war, limit political and economic risks, and ensure plausible deniability in ‘proxy warfare’ (Fox, 2019; Mumford, 2013), ‘covert operations’ (Aldrich and Cormac, 2018) and ‘partner force capacity building’ (Watling & Reynolds, 2020). It is this delegation aspect which elicits most interest here, where external ‘patrons’ and local ‘clients’ are seen to be locked in transactional relationships (Karlén et al., 2021; Salehyan, 2010). Area studies, notably Middle East studies, have instead considered the effects of interventions and their derivates on state-society relations, such as work on foreign intervention and revisited social contracts in MENA states (Furness & Trautner, 2020; Heydemann, 2020). Davidson’s (2016) insightful book on shadow wars, however, highlights the long durée of external support to local groups in the Middle East, pointing to the common observation that the region is a ‘playground’ for competitive global politics. By building on these three communities of research and bringing attention to the constitutive dimensions of security assistance, the Special Issue rearticulates the terms of the debate on security assistance and takes the Mediterranean as a particularly insightful site at which a better understanding of this international phenomenon can be advanced.

Security assistance is a complex and perhaps ill-defined term, with a strikingly chequered record in the region. The large-scale interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 quickly turned into fatigue, and failure to build stable and prosperous states increasingly produced discontent with the liberal interventionist playbook thus giving rise to a preference for lighter and less risk-prone intervention forms (Knowles & Watson, 2018). This sentiment was further intensified in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, which did not result in ground interventions or the holding of sovereign territory, but generally saw smaller, light-footprint missions, as well as a no-fly zone in Libya, aimed at ‘supporting local partners’. In many ‘fragile states’, security assistance has faced particularly intense challenges (Rolandsen et al., 2021), ranging from those posed by illiberal states (Von Billerbeck & Tansey, 2019) to coup-proofing strategies (Knowles & Matisek, 2019) and the creation of ‘Faberge egg armies’, i.e., expensive armies that are ‘easy to crack’ (Matisek, 2018; Reno, 2019). Overall, it remains puzzling why, despite official evaluations pointing to a lack of clarity concerning what security assistance is actually meant to achieve (e.g., US State Department, 2013), coupled with studies concluding that its track record is highly dubious – ‘small footprints means small payoff’ (Biddle et al., 2018) – it continues to be reinforced as a key strategy of states’ foreign and security policies. Our starting point is the often-heard (but rarely read) observation that security assistance makes providers appear to be ‘doing something’. This might suggest that security assistance is more than the sum of its techno-political parts. It is, in itself, a practice that produces a certain orderliness in an otherwise ‘chaotic’ world. The Mediterranean, we argue, is not only a space where this practice unfolds, but is also one which is made intelligible through this practice, and – the logic goes – would remain an ‘ungoverned’ space in its absence.

In the Mediterranean context, ordering through externalization has primarily been discussed in the context of migration management, especially in the EU ‘borderlands’ (Casas-Cortes et al., 2016; Del Sarto, 2021; Panebianco, 2020; Zaragoza-Cristiani, 2017), where Southern Mediterranean states serve as the EU’s ‘gendarme’ to police the ‘buffer zone’ (Buehler et al., 2022). Externalization is clearly also at work in broader security assistance processes, including through the training and equipping of surrogate forces, bilateral military aid and security cooperation, military education programs, stabilization, counterterrorism, capacity building or other forms of external engagement with local security forces. Recognizing the validity of Rolandsen et al. (2021, p. 566) definition of security force assistance as ‘a set of activities of an external actor (provider) equipping and training an armed unit (recipient) with a stated aim to strengthen the recipients’ operational capacity and professionalism’, in our analyses of the Mediterranean, the latter half of that definition is less helpful. We hence scale up the term to security assistance and include in it all activities involving ‘training and equipping of foreign security forces’, irrespective of the aims and context. We therefore use the term security assistance for practices for which the central purpose is to establish relationships across national security boundaries and assess what these practices ‘do’ to conceptions of order – in international relationships and in how power emerges as an effect of arrangements therein.

While recognizing the conceptual trade-offs involved, the field of security assistance in the Mediterranean requires us to include a wider range of contexts, as well as security assistance practices across the stability-war spectrum, and across the state-nonstate axis. By adopting this enlarged definition, we may therefore provide a holistic view of security assistance and disentangle the practice from the policy handles deployed. This means that our scope includes variety of contexts and actors involved:

Varieties of context:

• Stable contexts where bilateral security assistance forms part of regular political alliance building (e.g., US military cooperation with Morocco)

• Potentially unstable contexts where security assistance aims to prevent instability, whether due to domestic, regional, or international crises (e.g., British training of Lebanese Armed Forces; US security assistance to Egypt and Jordan)

• Intrastate armed conflict, where security assistance is designed to enhance the capabilities of a conflict party (e.g., French training and support to Malian armed forces; UAE’s engagement in Libya; Russia’s engagement in Syria)

Varieties of provider-recipient relationships:

• Between states or International Organisations and other state-based actors, often military or police forces (e.g., EU military aid to Ukraine)

• Between states and non-state security actors (e.g., Iranian support to Shia militias in Iraq; US train & equip of Syrian rebel groups)

• Between non-state entities and state security forces (e.g., Hezbollah’s support to Syria)

• Between non-state entities and non-state security actors (e.g., the Russian Wagner Group’s support to General Haftar in Libya and the Islamic State Hunters militia in Syria)

Theoretically, dominant frameworks for analysing these practices are still largely framed according to familiar understandings of patronage politics where patriarchal and/or transactional relationships structure the processes and outcomes of security assistance. These dynamics are notably present in certain parts of the literature based on Principal-Agent (PA), and its offshoot Patron-Client, relations. Drawing on PA frameworks, US-based perspectives in particular have sought to capture how states’ support to other states or non-state groups may offset some of the costs of large-scale troop deployments, but that this delegation implies the loss of a degree of foreign policy autonomy (Biddle et al., 2018; Salehyan, 2010). Recent efforts to overcome the divide between conflict delegation research and proxy war perspectives have accomplished the overcoming of silos but remain at the level of analysing bilateral relationships and the ‘delegation’ element herein (Karlén et al., 2021). While such studies effectively draw attention to the global practice of security assistance, this Special Issue builds and transcends the PA theory of security assistance in several ways.

We follow Rolandsen et al. (2021, p. 571) lead and emphasize how PA logics are difficult to reconcile with the heterogeneity of programmes; the varying contexts in which programs are implemented; and the lack of cohesiveness among the providers and recipients that characterize contemporary security assistance practice. We also agree with Rittinger (2017) and Burchard and Burgess (2018), who highlight the social construction of interest in security assistance programs. Interest is to a large extent constructed, and dependent on a range of historical conditions, elite experiences, identities, geopolitical configurations, lobby groups, and a host of other factors. Yet interest, as security assistance complexes show, is also constantly revised and reformulated subject to multidimensional negotiations and translations, and must be studied in context. This is what a practice approach allows for; to focus more on the actual making of security assistance than the presumed and pre-defined interest that may or may not be identifiable. By adopting a practice approach, we quickly find that the way in which security assistance translates into political outcomes is extremely non-linear, and that while states’ key national security interests are at stake, these are consistently challenged by ‘second-order’ effects, to the extent that it is difficult to discern the contours of original intent and actual interest. This therefore begs the question, why, despite these meagre outcomes, endless ‘implementation’ problems, and the significant risk of escalation and direct confrontation with near-peer competitors, do external actors pursue the path of security assistance in the Mediterranean? The answer, we suggest, lies in its ordering effects. Security assistance itself introduces ‘order’ into ‘disorder’ and, while strategic wins are few and far between, offers relief from the cognitive dissonance that such disorder elicits.

Next, we turn to an exploration of how security assistance can be conceptualized as an international practice and propose a socio-material framework that allows us to analyse specific security assistance modalities holistically to capture their wider effects in and on the Mediterranean region.

(Re)ordering the Mediterranean: a Practice Approach to Security Assistance

Seeking to capture the widespread but also variegated set of practices that we define as security assistance in a holistic framework, we draw on practice theory and socio-material network thinking to explore the (re)ordering capacities of security assistance in the Mediterranean since 2011. In a space that is perceived as complex and unruly, the provision of assistance to state and non-state actors in the region allows for the ordering of some of the most challenging ontological questions regarding how the world hangs together. Approaching security assistance as an ordering practice which stabilizes the Mediterranean, itself a geospatial construct, draws on insights from work on socio-material networks and assemblages in international life. For our purpose, we observe how socio-material security assistance networks are heterogenous and contentious, and in a constant process of stabilizing the logic of a governable Mediterranean region. In particular, we observe how security assistance in the Mediterranean (temporarily) orders the disordered in at least two key ways: (i) it produces geopolitical knowledge of a region that is unable to govern itself and is in need of external support, without which it would fall into the hands of some competing and often vaguely defined political force; and (ii) it entangles the region in international dependencies in which materiality serves to forge allegiance and reinforce subjectivity of ‘providers’ and ‘recipients’, thereby ordering the Mediterranean into international hierarchies. In this section, we first explain how we envision security assistance as an international practice, before introducing the core dimensions of this framework.

Practice Theory and Socio-Material Networks

International practice theory focuses on actual, everyday practices, that, when taken together, make up world politics (Adler & Pouliot, 2011, p. 2). A focus on practices allows for analyses of the significance of habitually doing things a certain way, rather than considering action as being determined by pre-conceived rationality, or ideational structures (norms, identities, discourses). In its application in International Relations (IR), practice theory is thus concerned with observing practical knowledge of ‘how things actually work’ and capturing how international politics ‘hang together’ in certain ways (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018; Neumann, 2012; Adler-Nissen and Pouliot, 2014;). We draw on Bueger and Gadinger’s understanding of practice theory as concerned with processes rather than static conditions (i.e., with ordering rather than order); situating knowledge in practice (rather than a priori conceptions of reality); considering the acquisition of knowledge as a collective process (learning is embedded in communities); embedding practices in materiality (including technology and tangible objects, as well as artefacts and non-tangible devices); understanding social order as always multiple, and in constant (re)making (emergent); espousing a performative understanding of world politics in which practices require performing; and finally, giving primacy to the empirical, and let us be puzzled with what we can observe rather than driven by pre-conceived conceptions of reality (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018, pp. 27–29). Practice theory, therefore, is more of an epistemological and ontological choice than a predictive theory, and offers an appealing reading of international politics as being in constant motion, producing and produced in and through social interaction that create temporality stable patterns of interaction.

For the task at hand – understanding how security assistance has emerged as a particular way of doing international politics in the Mediterranean region – practice theory can therefore be helpful. The analytical focus shifts to ‘concrete activities and enacted performances, [where] the situations are much more important than the actors themselves’ (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018, p. 22). This is similarly a theme in social theory on socio-material networks, such as in Latour’s (2007) actor-network theory. It is in and through such human-material networks that we can understand aspects of the ordering of things and how they hang together (see Law, 2009). In this case, we are looking at highly competitive interaction. We are observing a site of contention, competition, collusion and even collision, and will treat these interactions as practices that establish and produce certain ordering conditions. The interactive and heterogenous character of these practices makes for a good base upon which we can build a framework for the study of informal international socio-material practices in competitive security-political contexts. In the following section, we outline the key features of this framework through its application to the security assistance environment in the Mediterranean region. In order to unpack the ways in which relations are constituted across and between actors in security assistance complexes, and in fact pointing to situations rather than actors, our framework distinguishes between two types of practices: one set that characterizes the multiplicity of doings, ways of saying, negotiations, and contestations between providers and recipients of security assistance (vertical practices); and one set that captures the emulation, coordination, triangulation and competition between these ‘blocks’ of vertical security assistance practices (horizontal practices).

Vertical Practices

Vertical security assistance practices encompass those situations wherein an external donor provides training and equipment to a local security actor. In this framework, however, we emphasize the co-produced ontology of those situations in order to do away with the artificial distinction between ‘principal’ and ‘agent’ and consider their relationship as inherent to security assistance practices. This move respects the observation that security assistance is not about fighting or dominance, but about cooperation and partnerships (Reveron, 2010). In these vertical practices, at least three dynamics shape the security assistance ‘situation’ in distinct ways.

First, the role of knowledge is paramount in contemporary security assistance with an emphasis on training local partners and putting expertise and knowledge transfer centre stage (Bueger & Tholens, 2021). It is therefore crucial to uncover how knowledge production and diffusion serves as a vehicle to advance certain interests, while also understanding how knowledge is made in interactions and takes on a life of its own after the training has ended. Key questions to explore are: How is knowledge transmitted through training, capacity building and mentoring programs? Is knowledge a commodity that shapes local and national contexts in meaningful ways? How are practices shaped by knowledge, and how is knowledge shaped by practices? As a part of the conceptual map that we propose in this Special Issue, knowledge can be divided into three main types: technical, operational and political. While their interlinkages are indisputably important, this supports our ambition to break up some of the Gordian knots surrounding security assistance and render constituent parts distinct, before reassembling or reconsidering the way they hang together. We therefore identify technical knowledge as specialized knowledge about the functioning of specific equipment or the workings of security units; we describe operational knowledge as pertaining to the operational environment, where tactical and strategic decisions are negotiated; and we define political knowledge as relating to exogenous positions of relevant actors in the vicinity.

Second, the key role of materiality in external interventions, with its emphasis on ‘train and equip’ approaches and ‘capacity building’ of foreign security forces, indicates that this is not an external, objective and static force – a hard currency that can be converted into outcomes – but is rather at work in and through social forces. Materiality – in the form of weapons, infrastructure, surveillance technologies, but also artefacts such as databases, maps, framework agreements, and needs assessments – is inherent to interventions, and particularly active in the constitution of subjectivities (Walters, 2014, p. 101). It is in the provision of arms and equipment that the ‘provider’ is constituted. Such a perspective allows for analyses of the interaction between human actors and non-human materials (Amicelle et al., 2015, p. 318), and therefore of how security technologies and security assistance are mutually constitutive. This may range from the provision of selected types of weapons to selected non-state groups (e.g., US support to Syrian rebels, cf. Selvik and Rolandsen this issue), or to selected units of military or police forces (e.g., European support to policing units emphasizing counter-terrorism capabilities in Tunisia, cf. Maryon this issue), to full-scale military industrial complex (e.g., Iran’s provision of selected weapons to its partners in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, see Divsallar and Azizi, this issue; and US Security assistance to Israel and Egypt more generally).

Material factors make the practice visible and are in turn made intelligible through the existence of discourses in a mutually reinforcing set of (in)security practices (Doucet, 2016). This builds on recent work on the importance of materiality in interventions (Bachmann & Schouten, 2018; Jacobsen, 2020), and centres on the role of weapons and equipment as central features of security assistance. Core questions include: How do weapons, infrastructure and artefacts enter into and shape local contexts? How do they alter subjectivities of the ‘recipients’, and their role in competitive domestic security orders? What role does equipment play in mediating knowledge and networks of security assistance? Material factors profoundly shape and constitute relationships in security assistance contexts due to their capacities to foster trust, loyalty and dependency between provider and recipient. In their review of the UK’s ‘Partner Force Capacity Building’ approaches, Watling and Reynolds (2020) devote a full chapter to the question ‘What Equipment should be Provided’. Their reflections are in line with current analyses on the subject, which are concerned with how relationships’ core nodes – trust, loyalty and dependency – are affected by the provision of different forms of equipment. They highlight how the amount, the quality and the timing of weapons’ supply can deeply affect the control that the ‘principal’ wields over the ‘agent’, as well as the mutual dependencies this may induce (Watling & Reynolds, 2020, pp. 84–86). Rather than being concerned with materiality only as leverage, in our understanding of the role of materiality in security assistance, we consider the making of relationships as a practice that is manifested and produced in and through weapons, equipment and artefacts. Consequently, material factors are more than static or extant forces, but are central to how we can recognize security assistance as a social practice that navigates and produces relationships ‘vertically’. Their scrutiny must give agency to material matter, and show it to be ontologically integral to security assistance as an international practice.

Third, key to security assistance as a particular way of indirect intervention is the way in which it relies on networks, both socio-material, as per the above account of material-discursive practices, as well as in and through communities of practice, i.e., ‘groups of people knit together by a common passion or endeavour, who enjoy doing it well and develop a set of tools to continue doing it well’ (Bicchi, 2022, p. 24). Similar to what Bigo (2016) calls a ‘transnational guild’ of security practitioners, the role of ‘securocratic elites’, who draw on experience based on ‘local knowledge’ of global ‘hotspots’ to claim expertise in the field (Moe & Müller, 2017), can arguably also be observed in security assistance contexts. Work on ‘niche approaches’ and their effects on areas of ‘limited statehood’ corroborates evidence of a fragmented and securocratic approach to security assistance (Santini & Tholens, 2018; Tholens, 2017). In this context, securocratic elites are often external experts coming in to ‘do’ a particular program whilst being dependent on a host of domestic actors needed to make the program ‘take off’, and their dual role is to translate and make global and local scripts compatible with a shared vision for the security assistance program. Members of these networks navigate reinterpretations of often-implicit political expectations (see political knowledge, above). They are custodians of context specific knowledge and priorities, and responsible for ensuring that a wider set of interests is maintained.

Sustained networks may offer political – and economic – benefits. In some ways, this is considered the holy grail by security assistance providers, who often view support to ‘our man in Beirut’ – i.e., to a preferred political contender – as the main avenue of influence in contested geopolitical contexts (Karlin, 2018, p. 65). This is the main theme in PA literature, which, as highlighted above, generally finds that small footprints means small payoffs (Biddle et al., 2018), not least because of misaligned interests between the ‘principal’ and the ‘agent’. Many challenges have been identified, including the frequent turnaround of international trainers and advisors and the low status of such roles (in the US military in particular) (Matisek & Reno, 2019, p. 6), as well as a lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of external advisors.² In our framework, we treat long-term security assistance networks as entanglements that harbour enduring capacities for shaping the economic and political landscape of opportunities. In the Mediterranean, European providers are cultivating their post-colonial relationship with political and security elites (see Tholens and Ruffa, this issue), while the US patronage of Israel and Egypt, in particular, are embedded in a series of bilateral ties that go beyond the security realm. Iran’s support of Hezbollah and other non-state groups in the Middle East also has long-term characteristics that are cultivated in such a way that, despite the negative effects in terms of international reputation, it appears enduring and robustly defended at home, anchored as it is in constitutive narratives of essence to Iran’s ontological security (see Divsallar and Azizi, this issue). The many international actors seeking to build relationships with factions in Libya and Lebanon might be anticipating future benefits of such an approach by showing commitment and willingness to remain (see Al-Jabassini and Badi, this issue). Moreover, the consolidation of elite networks takes place via a range of practices which aim to consolidate personal-professional relationships. Enduring relationships are highlighted as a success in many programs of security assistance: Iran’s approach of having liaison officers and ‘shadow commanders’ stationed with recipients over long time periods, for example, is often cited as one of the reasons for its ‘success’ (Watling & Reynolds, 2020, p. 64). These relationships can range from formal training networks where officers participate in training at military colleges abroad, acquiring both knowledge and networks, to building personal relationships over time and on a day-to-day basis (Tholens, 2021). Finally, vertical security assistance networks also include corporate deal making – or the anticipations thereof. This includes allowing participants in the security assistance program to benefit from contracts, such as catering, technical maintenance, construction or other support structures needed to run security assistance operations, which has been widely reported in the context of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq but less explored in Mediterranean security assistance contexts. More broadly, it involves engaging individual middlemen to facilitate contact and interact with both government providers and recipients, such as in the case of Turkey in Libya. In our framework, navigating business opportunities is treated as a practice integral to security assistance, and not as an extant or ‘second order’ factor.

Horizontal Practices

The Mediterranean region offers a pertinent site for analysing how specific security assistance engagements interact, become entangled, and connect to global processes. To date, there have been few attempts to consider the totality of widespread security assistance with the aim to analyse it collectively.³ We identify three such interactions in the form of horizontal practices corresponding to the dimensions of knowledge, materiality and networks, as outlined in the section on vertical practices above:

First, when considering how security assistance has emerged as an informal international practice, we are immediately drawn to the knowledge producing or learning processes operating between formal competitors. The Mediterranean is a space where this is particularly visible and perhaps inevitable. Security assistance networks learn from each other through emulation, borrowing and adaptation, but we know little about how this works in the murky field of international security or how lessons are learned. However, if we take seriously the publication of pamphlets, manuals, and handbooks stipulating the state of the art, we can spot references to historical examples and experiences of security assistance providers (cf. Watling and Reynolds’ references to imperial commanders and recognition of Iran’s ‘successful’ security assistance). This is indicative of practices of learning that suggest a ‘field’ in which security assistance is delivered and received, and where ‘things are repeatedly done a certain way’. By drawing on the practice approach, for security assistance in the Mediterranean we see a looser ‘assemblage’ rather than a stable field, yet there is still a temporary stability in its character, so much so that while new actors enter the scene, they seem to be emulating or borrowing from the community of security assistance practice rather than building on their own approach to security in other contexts. The UAE, for instance, arguably replicates the US playbook for counter-insurgency in its operations in Libya and Yemen, operating at once as a US surrogate and as a provider of security assistance (see Krieg, this issue). A shared understanding of the security assistance ‘playbook’ shapes the way providers conceive of their options and approaches and can even inspire recipients to turn into providers.

Second, horizontal practices include informal coordination and ‘damage proofing’ in dense security assistance environments, where carving out niches and managing material circulation are fundamental in preventing direct confrontation and escalation. Managing the ‘security dilemma’ and risk of escalation due to perceptions of strategic weapons systems is indeed a major preoccupation for security assistance practitioners. Yet, it is remarkable how security assistance ‘hotspots’ in the Mediterranean region, including Libya, Lebanon and Syria, consistently avoid escalations between competitors that would heighten the risk of all-out war. This gets much more complicated once there is ongoing conflict between contenders to the sovereign state. In fact, two of the main effects of security assistance appear to be the fuelling of domestic fragmentation and the longevity of conflict, both of which have adverse effects on conflict resolution prospects.⁴ The fact that security assistance competition has not produced direct armed conflict between regional powers⁵ supports the claim that security assistance is a global practice with some in-built processes of damage proofing and informal coordination, or even cooperation (see Al-Jabassini and Badi, this issue). Furthermore, material dynamics also shape relationships between the ‘recipients’ of security assistance and the rest of the society/context in which it is deployed, such as through the (de)legitimization of their socio-political standing or the reputation gained from these international partnerships.

These situated, informal coordination patterns are related to the third and final horizontal practice that we identify, i.e., the way in which localized security assistance is translated into political currencies at a global level. In most security assistance literature, this is referred to as ‘leverage’. In our framework, we seek to deconstruct this term and show how leverage is a patterned social practice whose main function is the ordering of international relationships. We suggest treating strategic conversions about what is obtained through security assistance as practices of translation which require experience and knowledge of the fault lines and ‘currency rates’. We know that smaller states participate in delivering security assistance in order to be ‘a good ally’, and gain recognition and access to important global policy processes (Berdal & Suhrke, 2018). The big providers, on the other hand, like the US, UK, Russia, France and Iran, for instance, translate their gains in other ways. In the absence of a Cold War-like contention over ideology, this now consists primarily of rapport building and political influence over domestic elites, which can in turn – or so the thinking goes – shape global politics by means of adherence to particular agendas. Other regional security assistance providers, such as Turkey, the UAE, Egypt and Italy, may use their involvement in conflict complexes as bargaining chips, even in settings where ideological narratives have directed support towards particular sets of recipients, such as for – or against – the Muslim Brotherhood inspired groups in Libya. By treating these as horizontal practices of security assistance, we encourage analyses of how these engagements are not in themselves competing, but rather how they render the region intelligible and ‘transactionable’, weaving security assistance at a localized level together with global politics. The security assistance field is global, and we need more, improved global visions to capture it.

Having laid out the basic framework through which this Special Issue will explore security assistance in the Mediterranean, the next section outlines the contributions to the Issue, before briefly reflecting on the reordering effects in the Conclusions to this Introduction.

The Contributions

Since 2011, security assistance in the Mediterranean Middle East has significantly evolved. The region has witnessed diversification of providers, expansion of repertoires, intensification of competition, and fragmentation of armed actors and prolonged conflicts. In this Special Issue, the contributors tackle the reordering capacities of this evolution, and offer detailed analyses of a multifaceted issue in need of further scrutiny.

Andreas Krieg explores how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have emerged as a key partner for the US in the MENA region despite the city state’s chronic capacity shortages. The article demonstrates how the UAE shapes the practice of security assistance to implement its strategic objectives in the region through delegation, effectively outsourcing warfare to local surrogates from Yemen all the way to Libya. The complex networks of surrogates in the region are difficult to control, but the UAE has succeeded in utilizing security assistance as an effective lever to engage with competitors and partners in the Mediterranean, Krieg argues.

Rosa Maryon challenges the narrative of Tunisia as a success story of security assistance. Adopting an approach that theorizes security assistance as a complex, fluid and context driven practice, she argues that it has acted to reconfigure Tunisia’s volatile political landscape. First, by reinforcing the coercive capacities of the security forces vis-à-vis the general population and second, because vertical security assistance practices have acted to reconfigure power dynamics between different actors in Tunisia’s security sector, consolidating power in the increasingly authoritarian hands of the executive and the Ministry of the Interior.

Abdullah al-Jabassini and Emadeddin Badi propose a typology that distinguishes between formal, informal and semi-formal processes of wartime security assistance across the state-non-state dimension. Drawing on rare access to state, former and active rebels, as well as mercenaries in Syria and Libya, al-Jabassini and Badi describe patterns of security assistance provided by Russia and Turkey to opposing parties in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars. They show how the two foreign powers have created a nexus between these conflicts by capitalizing on pre-existing security assistance frameworks in Syria to recruit and deploy fighters in Libya. Although security assistance has emerged as a site of competition between Russia and Turkey, the authors demonstrate how mutual recognition of security interests has created a margin for negotiation and agreements in the two theatres of civil war.

Kjetil Selvik and Øystein Rolandsen highlight a key-concern of states using irregular forces to achieve foreign policy objectives: control. Based on the observation that rather than effectiveness, control is at the centre of provider-recipent relations, the authors discuss the shifting objectives and approaches to security assistance provided by the US to Syrian rebel groups. They demonstrate how the US provision of security assistance was deliberately designed to make control a top priority at the expense of rebel effectiveness, autonomy and legitimacy. They conclude by reflecting on how Western military aid channelled to Syrian rebels has contributed to cementing rebel fragmentation and resulted in further disintegration of the state.

Abdolrasool Divsallar and Hamidreza Azizi discuss the evolution of Iran’s security assistance into a strategy for building regional networks and supporting its state and non-state allies, enhancing deterrence capability, and countering the US-led security architecture in the region. In their contribution, Divsallar and Azizi move beyond the Western-dominated views of security assistance and propose a framework for understanding Iran’s practice based on four interconnected elements: a narrative of anti-imperialism and religious indoctrination, informal networks and personal loyalty, technical asymmetry and sustained force projection, and a centralized assistance delivery process with minimum public exposure.

Simone Tholens and Chiara Ruffa explore enduring postcolonial hierarchies and a ‘colonial present’ in European security assistance practice. Drawing on examples from British, French, Italian and Swedish security assistance, they highlight how producing ‘the problem’ and designing ‘the solutions’ to be tackled; linking the ‘provider’ and ‘recipients’ in material dependencies; and contestation as ‘thin’ adjustments rather than ‘thick’ resistance are core practices of security assistance that reproduce postcolonial logics and patterns of global inequalities. As they observe that security assistance practices reveal the need for security assistance – i.e., European SA presence often gets entangled with insecurity, and as such, security assistance practice makes the need for security assistance visible – it highlights the proverbial elephant in the room, where Europe and the Mediterranean are locked in an enduring and hierarchical postcolonial relationship.

Robert Springborg analyses the relationships between securitization, security assistance and regional security systems (SS) in his contribution, asking whether security assistance and SS can be made to contribute to ‘de-securitizing’ the MENA region. Through reviews of the history of securitization, security assistance and SS in the MENA region; analyses of contemporary contexts intended to identify current driving forces behind the three phenomena; and an exploration of scenarios related to the paradox of democratic states being the primary providers of security assistance to their authoritarian counterparts, Springborg provides critical reflections on the track record of security assistance as an international practice.

Conclusion: (Re)ordering the Mediterranean

Security assistance represents a zeitgeist of international relations in the 21^st century, a century in which warfare has spatially fragmented; threats have become dispersed and complex; and the response to these changes focus on shaping local politico-economic and security environments rather than assuming direct control and responsibility. The consequence is a decentred and networked melee of interventions, in which security assistance features prominently, with a poorly understood ontological core. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Mediterranean over the last decade, where security assistance has driven many of the region’s conflicts, as well as the ‘solutions’ to these conflicts. The Mediterranean region is a security assistance ‘vortex’ where relationships are arguably dependent on external support and domestic tradeoffs. It is therefore high time to better understand the processes and implications of this practice with improved theoretical building blocks. This Special Issue contributes to that end with a collection from key experts in the field who highlight some of the multifaceted (re)ordering practices at play and emphasize the ordering effects of security assistance knowledge, materiality and networks. Collectively, they evidence that security assistance is not a politico-technical strategy seeking to advance pre-defined interests. Instead, the practice itself produces a certain ordering of the Mediterranean region based on geopolitical competition and unequal power relations. Meanwhile, the messiness of this practice is far from creating order and harmony in the Mediterranean. Instead, multi-dyad foreign interventions and very diverse forms of assistance to local allies have contributed to politico-military fragmentation and thereby exacerbated humanitarian suffering, stoked chaos, worsened violence, and prolonged, and altered, the course of conflicts. This Issue thus makes a small contribution to visibilising the violence that this ‘elephant in the Med’ (Tholens and Ruffa, this issue) produced and continues to reproduce.

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.

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.

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.