“Defence Diplomacy” in North-South Relations

Abstract

In their introduction to this issue of International Journal, Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver B. Neumann draw a distinction between diplomacy as a category of practice and as a category of analysis. Inquiry cannot remain at the level of the self-understanding of diplomats and officials if it is to achieve clarity. This is especially the case in matters of and security. Even though these terms are regularly used both in the world of practice and in the policy-oriented academy, they are essentially political and bureaucratic euphemisms. Ministries of war (and of the army and the navy) were renamed defence ministries just before and after World War II. The name change had to do with the politics of legitimating the use of force in the western world. Similarly, the political utility of the term is that it can be articulated with any value - anything can be made into a issue to give it greater salience.1 Together, defence and became the bywords for policies concerned with the threat, use, and organization of armed force in world politics. So whue there are defence attaches in embassies involved in relations, these terms of practice are not sufficient for an analytic understanding of what they do. How might we begin to understand military-to-military contacts in north-south relations in such a way that we account for the activities and self-understandings of defence attaches, but also place them and the institutions they represent in a broader theoretical and historical context?Momentarily setting aside efforts to widen the agenda, defence and are most strongly associated with the world of sovereign states and their anarchic relations with one another. Each state maintains a military establishment to serve national interests, counter threats, and project armed force internationally. So close is the association between the sovereign state and armed force that the monopoly on legitimate violence within a given territory is taken to be definitive of the state. Traditionally, diplomacy was about managing relations between sovereign entities in such a way as to balance power and avoid war. Military officers were useful adjuncts in this task. Not only was their expertise necessary for the military dimensions of any negotiations under way, but they could also communicate information and intentions in respect of maneuvers and of troop and fleet movements. The personal relations military delegations established with their counterparts could be called upon in a crisis to avoid unintended clashes. Military attaches also served as sources of intelligence on the armed forces of host nations and could help facilitate arms sales. These are the classic categories of practice for defence diplomacy.The wider agenda, the rise of the UN system, and developments often referred to under the rubric of globalization have added new categories of practice, many of which are more pertinent to north-south relations. These revolve in large measure around peacekeeping, peacesupport operations, and other forms of humanitarian intervention. Military officers have had to deal with a range of new actors, including militias, local leaders, and political groupings in wartorn as well as those who work for nongovernment organizations in the field and in metropolitan headquarters. Since the 1990s, armed forces and defence ministries have taken on a growing range of peacetime cooperative tasks.2 These include ceasefire and peace negotiations, sector reform, training, and advice, as well as strengthening regional peacekeeping capacity. To simply name these new activities, as Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann also remind us, is not to explain them. Indeed, they heap new diplomatic euphemisms - peace, the security sector, and developing countries - upon older ones like cooperation.The traditional and more recent categories of practice do, however, allow some preliminary bearings to be taken. …