Abstract
International border management strategies have become the favoured practice to counter global threats, notably terrorism, migration flows and ‘weak states’. This article shows how border security assistance is translated and has political consequences in contexts where sovereignty is contested. It first offers a new conceptualization of contemporary security assistance as a form of ‘statebuilding lite’. These practices are void of comprehensive strategies for broader security governance, and are decentralized, pragmatic and ad hoc. The modus operandi is one whereby each donor develops its own niche, and directly supports specific agencies in the target state. Secondly, the article demonstrates how these tendencies play out in the one of the most important contemporary cases. Assistance to Lebanon since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war is particularly revealing, since Lebanon has received large numbers of Syrian refugees crossing its borders; witnessed rekindling of sectarian violence; and harbours Hezbollah, whose military operations in support of the Assad regime in Damascus draws Lebanon directly into the Syrian conflict. The ensuing situation, where vast amounts of security assistance reach Lebanon's many security agencies in complex ways, can best be described as a security assistance ‘bonanza’. In a micro-study of how the Lebanese Army, police, intelligence and customs agencies have engaged with an EU border management project, the article analyses how discourses of ‘integration’ have encountered the hybrid Lebanese context. It asserts that in the absence of a domestic political strategy, the state reverts back to basic modes of security-driven governance, aided by the readily available security assistance by actors with primarily strategic priorities. Drawing on the case of Lebanon allows us to fundamentally re-think how contemporary security assistance is practiced, and permits conceptualizations of global–local security linkages in a post-national world.
Highlights
Simone Tholens peace’[5] and ‘hybrid security governance’[6] are proposed to capture how domestic actors borrow selectively from international assistance ‘packages’, and where mixed or ‘hybrid’ orders combine elements of domestic and external governance
This amounts to a reading of security assistance as a form of statebuilding, yet with one important difference from past iterations: whereas statebuilding as witnessed in its heyday in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Liberia and East Timor was founded on roughly coherent strategic concepts such as security sector reform (SSR), rule of law, institution-building and so forth, and whereas political commitment to these coordinated processes was considered a necessary condition, the current version of security assistance takes place without formal domestic political involvement
Lebanon is a battleground in the broader Middle East competition for influence; and security assistance, authorized under UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1701, which calls upon the international community ‘to support the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally recognized border’,10 must be seen in this geopolitical context, dominated by Iranian–Saudi/US struggles for control
Summary
Simone Tholens peace’[5] and ‘hybrid security governance’[6] are proposed to capture how domestic actors borrow selectively from international assistance ‘packages’, and where mixed or ‘hybrid’ orders combine elements of domestic and external governance.
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