June 2011

Patrick Porter
Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London, and from September 2011, Reader in Strategic Studies at University of Reading.

Must strategy be named to be practiced? Nowadays we tend to look for strategy as something that folk write down and codify. We live in logocentric times, where strategy is linked to formal declaratory documents, advisory councils and institutions dedicated to thinking about how to relate our power and our commitments, our resources and our goals.

Of course, that dubious definition would disqualify all sorts of states from having a grand strategy, when the historical record suggests that in fact, their leaders were attempting to prioritise and rank effort, allocate resources to deal with competing demands, and orchestrate ends ways and means to keep the show on the road.

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Beatrice Heuser

“Bureaucratic politics theories or explanations of why particular public policy decisions got made the way they did stress the motivation by the relevant officials in the government bureaucracy to protect or promote their own agency’s special interests (in competition with other agencies) as a major motivating factor in shaping the timing and the content of government decisions. Each bureau (or other governmental sub-division) continually strives to maximize its budget and its authorized manpower, as well as to protect or extend its operating autonomy and discretion in decision-making in the area of its assigned responsibilities.”

Dr. Paul M. Johnson’s Glossary of Political Economy Terms

The great research evaluation (“REF”) that will be conducted throughout England in 2013 wants evidence that academics have “impact” on government policy.  But how much “impact” can any strategist outside government have? 

Here is an example of early impact, with considerable evidence to support it.  Read the rest of this entry »

Oisín Tansey

William Hague’s weekend mini-break to Benghazi provided him with an opportunity to show support (and put a little pressure) on Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC), while also reiterating the UK’s position that ‘there isn’t a political solution that involves Gaddafi still being at the head of Libya’. The continuing policy of insisting on Gaddafi’s departure from power as part of any resolution to the political conflict in Libya reflects the extent to which the Libyan leader has been personally held responsible for the state-led violence against civilians that prompted international intervention (not to mention the extent to which he has few friends in the international community). And while western diplomats have been reluctant to use the language of regime change, the call for Gaddafi to leave office to make way for a new government (one that would combine elements of the old regime and the TNC) is tantamount to a call for regime change in everything but name. As such, it highlights the risk that comes with humanitarian intervention in certain types of nondemocratic regime: in the context of personalistic dictatorships, it becomes harder to call for an end to violence without calling for the replacement of the regime itself.

The reluctance on the part of Hague and others to talk openly of regime change reflects not only the fact that the term has become political poison for many since the years of the Bush Doctrine, but that such transformative ambitions seem to exceed the terms of the mandate provided to authorise the intervention. The rationale for UN authorisation of the military operation in Libya as outlined in Security Council Resolution 1973 is based on the protection of Libyan citizens, with specific mention of the threat to civilians in Benghazi. In referring to the ‘ responsibility of the Libyan authorities to protect the Libyan population’, the mandate explicitly references the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) that was pioneered by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and was adopted by the UN in the outcome document of the 2005 World Summit. The doctrine holds that all states must abide by their responsibility to protect their own citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and, if they fail to do so, that the international community has a responsibility of its own to intervene to protect innocent lives.

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Dominik Zaum

Last week the former commander of the Bosnian Serb army, General Ratko Mladic, appeared for the first time in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in the Hague. He has been indicted for eleven cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, including the massacre of over 7,000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica, and the 44-month siege of Sarajevo.

His arrest after hiding – more or less publicly – in Serbia for 16 years, and the opportunity to hold him to account is without a doubt a triumph of justice for his victims, and that alone justifies full support for the Tribunal and its proceedings. Whether it is a victory for international justice, and whether his arrest will jump-start the stalling reform processes across the region, especially in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, is far from certain. What then, have been the implications of Mladic’s arrest for international justice and the rule of law, for developments in the Western Balkans, and for developments in Serbia?

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Christina Hellmich

The news of Osama bin Ladin’s death on May 2, 2011 triggered spontaneous outbursts of joy and celebration in the United States. Justice had – at last – been done as the leader of al-Qaeda and most-wanted terrorist met his rightful end. For some, it marked the end of an era, the final success in the war against terror and the beginning of the end of the most dangerous terrorist organization in history. But the moment of triumph did not last long. The joyful mood was quickly overshadowed by critical voices questioning the legitimacy of the US kill-or-capture mission. Others assert that al-Qaeda is still a force to be reckoned with, and predict a surge of attacks in revenge for bin Ladin’s death. Questions abound: Was it legal to shoot an unarmed man in his home who offered no resistance? Will the latest action in the fight against al-Qaeda succeed only in escalating its campaign of terror attacks?

Unsurprisingly, many of today’s headlines focus on the American administration’s assertion that Osama bin Ladin was still an active terrorist, the leader of al-Qaeda, and that he was effectively running the organization from his compound in Abbottabad. The assertion serves as a reminder that the War on Terror is founded upon two key assumptions: that it is somehow clear what terrorism is and that al-Qaeda is a coherent, tightly structured organization with a single leader on top. These assumptions appear to be a useful and convincing narrative in terms of establishing the legitimacy of actions taken to fight terrorism; neither assertion, however, is as clear and unqualified as the rhetoric would suggest. There is ultimately no consensus as to what terrorism is, although certain qualities are generally agreed upon. Yet the Western public’s justified sense of outrage over the casualties of 9/11 might well have been tempered had bin Ladin been caught alive and tried in a court of law. In such a setting Western democracies would, for once, have been unable to avoid engaging with the other side’s rationale that questions the “common-sense view” prevalent in the West that the casualties of 9/11 were an atrocity while the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis could be seen as acceptable collateral damage.

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