Possible Policy Responses

Shifts in the Balance of Global Power

Following the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the United States was the dominant power in the international system. Since about 2005, some scholars have argued, the international system has been shifting toward multipolarity. Several powers have emerged to challenge U.S. leadership. Moreover, the United States under President Donald Trump seems to be accelerating its diplomatic and military disengagement globally, save for the Indo-Pacific region. This trend may be slowed but likely not reversed by subsequent American administrations. Moreover, the rise of more ambitious regional powers moving into vacuums created by the waning U.S. influence and physical presence further complicates the geopolitical landscape.

Barry Posen observes that this shift in the distribution of power “seems likely to magnify disagreements about how states suffering civil wars should be stabilized, limit preventive diplomacy, produce external intervention that will make for longer and more destructive wars, and render settlements more difficult to police.”19 This leads to more complicated interventions, negotiated settlements, and an increased likelihood of proxy wars. Agreement among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council is elusive, making the “standard treatment” or PKO-plus regime less accessible as a solution to civil conflict.20 We have seen this in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Rising multipolarity also increases the likelihood that external spoilers will be present and will make peace processes more complex.21

Fearon points out that not only are civil wars lasting longer, but the average duration of UN peacekeeping operations is also increasing.22 During a series of outreach conversations that the Academy’s project on Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses conducted with the UN in New York, experts there expressed concern about the UN’s limited logistical capabilities and capacity to respond to conflict. UN PKOs have worked very successfully under certain circumstances, but we are hearing more frequently that they might not be a sustainable solution going forward.

First, because American military interventions during the post–World War II era have often transformed what in reality are excruciatingly complex, intractable sociopolitical problems into binary armed struggles between the forces of good and evil, UN decisions to commit forces to maintain peace often serve to delay, indefinitely, the harder task of negotiating a lasting end to the violence. Second, there is no consensus regarding what models of political and economic development are appropriate. The United States, Canada, and the West European democratic states have traditionally employed classic liberal approaches emphasizing the establishment of inclusive political and open-market systems, whereas China and other donors focus on infrastructure and economic growth. During conversations between our project members and experts in Beijing and Geneva, practitioners and scholars reinforced the notion that the current model of humanitarianism (developed during the Cold War) no longer works as it was intended. They argued for the adoption of more limited objectives.23
 

Ruling Coalitions and Elites’ Goals and Interests

Lacking language skills and cultural awareness, and often unwilling or unable to create needed expertise over time, outsiders have great difficulty truly understanding the political realities in poorly governed states ruled by factions driven to retain and not share power. Moreover, elites have every reason to prevaricate, especially if they believe this will benefit them financially or politically. In his Dædalus essay, William Reno writes, “state failure is rooted in decades of personalist rule, as leaders have sought to fragment and disorganize institutions and social groups that they thought would be possible bases of opposition.” Reno adds that personalist authoritarian regimes in states with histories of political violence differ from traditional authoritarian regimes because personalist regimes “rely upon capable institutions to suppress political challenges.”24 This makes outside attempts at system-level transformation particularly difficult.

Typically, at least some amount of foreign aid comes with running a government. However, Steven Heydemann remarks that patterns of economic governance during civil wars do not vary significantly from prewar patterns of economic governance, as seen with Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Further, “parties to conflict compete to capture and monopolize the benefits that flow from international recognition.” Violent conflict does not necessarily allow for postconflict institutional reform and, as with civil wars in the Middle East, does not easily yield to negotiated solutions.25

While negotiated settlements and power-sharing agreements are viable avenues through which to end a civil war, they can be difficult to construct, especially when both sides are vying for control at the national level.26 External checks such as election monitors can be manipulated. In Iraq, the United States attempted to install a government that shared power among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish parties. Elections, however, gave power to the majority Shia sect, which preferred “exclusion, peripheral Sunni insurgency, and reliance on Iranian-allied militias to the more risky course of power-sharing at the center.”27

Aila Matanock and Miguel García-Sánchez do not argue against elections but caution that referendums can “amplify elite divisions” and thus “should not be employed to overcome elite opposition in order to strengthen peace processes.”28 Instead, elite-led negotiations that “seek to satisfy each faction” may have a better chance of resulting in a signed agreement. As efforts in Colombia demonstrated, “including representatives of the voters . . . may be a way to achieve some degree of inclusivity without the same risk of amplifying elite divisions.”29

Other factors can also hamper efforts to impose change from the outside. Corruption is hard to eradicate. Rent-seeking practices designed to increase profit for politicians and other elites can easily be moved from one part of the government to another. Existing institutional frameworks are used to maintain corrupt systems even after ruling powers are removed. Reno calls attention to the fact that the recession of formal state institutions does not leave ungoverned spaces in their wake; rather, “the dense networks of personalist political systems occupy that social space: ungovernable in a conventional sense, but an important element of a political system that is based upon using indirect means of domination to limit peoples’ capacities to organize politically.”30

Citing West Africa as an example, Felbab-Brown highlights the fact that many ruling elites, fearing coups, allow their militaries and political institutions to crumble, leaving states susceptible to dangerous criminal flows.31 External pressure to reform can lead to internal collapse and greater, prolonged violence.32 This, in turn, can lead to regional instability and international criminal networks that are nearly impossible to contain.

Even countries such as Brazil and Turkey, with relatively high per capita incomes, have elected individuals whose commitment to democracy is shaky. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party in Turkey, the AKP, recently lost elections in the country’s four largest cities, including Istanbul, where the initial election was negated by the election commission on flimsy grounds (the AKP candidate then lost even more decisively in the rerun held in late June 2019). Whether Erdoğan will go quietly if he loses reelection in 2023 remains to be seen.

In some cases, especially where significant external motivations are present, these challenges can be overcome, as with Croatia and Serbia.33 However, norms and institutions usually take decades or even centuries to take shape and become entrenched. Great Britain, as Fukuyama reminds us, struggled thorough centuries of bloody civil wars and domestic turmoil before a commitment to nationhood and rule of law took hold.34 Foreign interveners, eager to declare an early victory, often have unrealistic expectations about the pace of political and social change that can be imposed from the outside. Even when norms do appear to shift, it is not always clear how external actors can help sustain the momentum and avoid reversals. A misalignment of interests internally or externally, as well as clashing norms, can mean the quick failure of any well-intentioned efforts aimed at successful state-building or governance-building.35
 

Conflicts Involving Actors Who Do Not Seek Traditional State Sovereignty

Conflicts associated with jihadi rebels are particularly challenging. Fazal categorizes those who use religious justification for their cause and reject the current Westphalian notion of the state as “religionist rebels.” For these rebels, including members of ISIS and other groups across the MENA region, sovereignty derives not from the state but from the divine. As such, these groups are unlikely to engage in formal state relations or negotiations and do not accept territorial limits on their sovereignty claims.36

Hendrik Spruyt reinforces the notion that civil wars involving groups that reject the Westphalian system pose a unique challenge and argues that “the degree to which the combatants challenge Westphalian principles should guide policy responses.”37 While groups with local grievances should be differentiated from those with international agendas, Fazal concludes that history shows religionist rebels, while brutal in their methods, face natural limits and “do not, ultimately, present a long-term threat to the state system.”38 From this stems policy options for addressing international terrorism, the main threat to emanate from these conflicts.39

Seyoum Mesfin and Abdeta Beyene provide a concrete example of how varying degrees of sovereignty—actual and aspirational—can influence policy responses.40 In the Horn of Africa, the “buffer zone” has emerged as a key security strategy for ensuring security and relative stability for a state and its population. Through buffer-zone areas such as the “Republic of Somaliland” and the “Puntland State of Somalia,” Ethiopia both insulates itself from the violence and instability present in Somalia and ensures relatively stability and security for people living in these zones.41 This is particularly significant given the presence of Al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist group that threatens the region’s security and stability.
 

(Mis)alignment of Information and Interests

Following nearly two decades of military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American public holds a deep skepticism of large-scale military or foreign assistance interventions, especially those not linked to a clear and present danger (and despite the fact that such interventions can be more effective for mitigating and preventing violence over the long term).42 Obama’s and Trump’s approaches to national security and foreign involvement reflect this. Stephen Biddle posits that “many now see ‘small-footprint’ security force assistance (SFA)—training, advising, and equipping allied militaries—as an alternative to large U.S. ground-force commitments to stabilize weak states.”43 However, he argues that small footprints usually mean small payoffs, and SFA is not a substitute for large unilateral troop deployments. This is largely due to interest misalignments between the provider (or principal—e.g., the United States in the case of Iraq) and the recipient (or agent—e.g., the Iraqi Shia political elite). While U.S. security assistance conspicuously rewards the efforts of those states that profess themselves to be at war with the most prominent international terrorist groups, these same states—consumed by a daunting array of other security threats—may elect to use this assistance in unforeseen ways. Diverging interests, information asymmetry, and moral hazard all lead to outcomes that are other than those initially desired.44 Fearon suggests that “for many civil war–torn or ‘postconflict’ societies, third parties do not know how to help locals build a self-governing, self-financing state within UN-recognized borders or, in some cases, any borders.”45

Clare Lockhart advocates for an approach that falls between those that have been implemented most heavily over the last two decades, namely, military forces and large-scale civilian assistance (Afghanistan and Iraq), minimal involvement (Syria), or removing a dictator and hoping a short-term peace deal will lead to long-term success (Libya). Lockhart offers a “sovereignty strategy” that involves carefully sequencing and establishing key state functions over an extended period to gain public trust and meet international obligations.46 Risse and Stollenwerk alternatively argue that engaging in governance-building in weak states is essential for effectively and efficiently preventing conflict, whereas strategies today frequently overstate the importance of state-building.47 Fearon and Biddle point out that, whatever the degree of statehood, the challenges to making sure external and internal interests are aligned, which is essential for successful conflict prevention over both the short and long term, are significant.48