The elephant in the med: Postcoloniality and European security assistance practices

ABSTRACT

This article explores an enormous elephant in the Mediterranean space: European security assistance’s impact on the continuation of a global postcolonial order. We identify three core practices of security assistance that provides for postcolonial readings: externally 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. Contrary to claims of functionalism, what we observe in contemporary European security assistance practice is consistent with postcolonial logics that produce distinct subjectivities and reproduce patterns of inequalities. European states – whether former colonial powers or not –use security assistance to structure the world in hierarchical ways. We argue that security assistance is not primarily about strategic effects but principally about signalling superiority and reproducing dependencies and colonizing/colonised mentalities. Moreover, 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 – a self-producing evidentiality that is as taken out of the colonial playbook. The paper explores constitutive processes at work by drawing on insights from British, French, Italian and Swedish approaches to security assistance in Libya and Lebanon.

KEYWORDS:

• Security Assistance
• Postcolonial
• Contestation
• Mediterranean
• Ordering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See www.securityassistancemonitor.org for reliable data on the US spending. European countries have been equally involved in security force assistance (Rolandsen et al., 2021). Data from Uppsala Conflict Data Program evidence the sharp increase in ‘internationalization’ of internal conflict, another indicator of the scale of the phenomenon, see Davies, Shawn, Therese Pettersson & Magnus Öberg (2022) Organized violence 1989–2021 and drone warfare. Journal of Peace Research 59(4).

2. https://t.co/FPHHKWzUy9’/Twitter.

3. https://t.co/FPHHKWzUy9’/Twitter.

4. Interview with UNIFIL officer from France, Zoom (Stockholm/At Tiri, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

Simone Tholens gratefully acknowledges the support received by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant number IAF-2020-027: Knowledge, Networks and Practices of Security Assistance. Chiara Ruffa thanks the Royal Swedish Academy of History, Letters and Antiquities for supporting part of this research