Building "national" armies - Building nations?: Determinants of success for postintervention integration efforts

Armed Forces and Society

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 571-590

  Simonsen, Sven Gunnar ^a  

^a PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OSLO PRIO   (Norway)

Author keywords

Ethnic conflict; Military intervention; Nationbuilding; Peacebuilding; Security sector reform

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250348111     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X06291347     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. While nationbuilding is here seen as relating directly to citizens' identity, statebuilding encompasses activities such as the building of political institutions, the strengthening of civil society, and the holding of elections.
2. See Sven Gunnar Simonsen, "Addressing Ethnic Divisions in Post-Conflict Institution-Building: Lessons from Recent Cases," Security Dialogue 36, 3 (2005): 297-318.
3. See, for example, Katharine Belmont, Scott Mainwaring, and Andrew Reynolds, "Introduction: Institutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy," in The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy, ed. Andrew Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1-11.
4. "Security sector reform" encompasses a broader range of institutions and processes than those that are examined in this article; see, for example, Nicole Ball, Enhancing Security Sector Governance: A Conceptual Framework for UNDP (New York: United Nations Development Program, 2000).
5. Kosovo does not have an army of its own, but it features in this discussion because it offers several lessons regarding security institutions and ethnic integration.
6. As regards methodology, this article rests on multiple sources of evidence, including fieldwork interviews and primary sources collected for studies the author has earlier conducted of postconflict, postintervention nationbuilding - in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and East Timor - as well as secondary sources on those and the other cases considered here.
7. This approach coincides with what has been termed "analytical generalization," by which replication may be claimed if two or more cases are shown to support the same theory. See Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research. Design and Methods, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2003), 32-33.
8. For an overview of traits seen as characterizing military institutions, see Marion J. Levy Jr., "Armed Force Organizations," in The Military and Modernization, ed. Henry S. Bienen (Chicago: Aldine Atherton, 1971), 41-78.
9. For a recent discussion of possible integrative mechanisms, see also Ronald R. Krebs, "A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build Nations, and How It Might," International Security 28, 4 (2004): 85-124.
10. Dimitri K. Simes, "The Military and Militarism in Soviet Society," International Security 6, 3 (1981/1982): 123-43, at 136.
11. Ellen Jones, Red Army and Society: A Sociology of the Soviet Military (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 203.
12. Interestingly, Dmitrii Miliutin, Alexander II's reformist war minister, wished in a similar vein to include nonethnic Russians in the Russian imperial army; he "insisted that the army was both a reflection of the broader political community and a transformative agent within it." See Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 65.
13. For a study of the position of (Russian) ethnicity in the post-Soviet Russian military, see Sven Gunnar Simonsen, "Marching to a Different Drum? Political Orientations and Nationalism in Russia's Armed Forces," Communist Studies & Transition Politics 17, 1 (2001): 41-64.
14. Lucian W. Pye, "Armies in the Process of Political Modernization," in The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries, ed. John J. Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 69-89, at 82-83.
15. Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 157.
16. Eric A. Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), 151.
17. Henry Dietz, Jerrold Elkin, and Maurice Roumani, "The Military as a Vehicle for Social Integration," in Ethnicity, Integration, and the Military, ed. Henry Dietz, Jerrold Elkin, and Maurice Roumani, IUS Special Editions of Armed Forces and Society no. 3 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 1-26, at 9. It should be noted that these authors defined social integration in fairly rigid terms, as "unifying and bringing together what might have been previously separate entities into a whole whose constituent parts have been blended so as to make subsequent separation difficult or impossible" (pp. 1-2).
18. It could be argued that it is misleading to describe Afghanistan and Iraq as "postcontlict": there is still a level of armed conflict in both countries; in addition, although (or because) their regimes were extremely repressive, neither had a high level of internal armed conflict before intervention took place.
19. See, for example, Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad. The Learning Curve (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999);
20. and Roland Paris, At War's End. Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
21. For a recent quantitative survey, see Mark Peceny and Jeffrey Pickering, "Can Liberal Intervention Build Liberal Democracy?" in Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding in Post-War Societies. Sustaining the Peace, ed. T. David Mason and James D. Meernik (New York: Routledge, 2006), 130-48.
22. An insightful contribution based on the Iraqi case is Larry Diamond, "Lessons from Iraq," Journal of Democracy 16, 1 (January 2005): 9-23.
23. Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 15.
24. See Renèe de Nevers, "Democratization and Ethnic Conflict," Survival 35, 2 (1993): 31-48, at 37-38.
25. Mats Berdal, Disarmament and Demobilisation after Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper no. 303 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], 1996), 54-55.
26. "New Afghan Defense Minister Praises Warlord Predecessor. Vows to Work to Build Strong Army," PakTribune, December 30, 2004.
27. Walter B. Slocombe, "Iraq's Special Challenge: Security Sector Reform 'Under Fire,' in Reform and Reconstruction of the Security Sector, ed. Alan Bryden and Heiner Hänggi (Geneva, Switzerland: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces [DCAF], 2004).
28. Jacques van Doom, "Armed Forces and Society: Patterns and Trends," in Armed Forces and Society: Sociological Essays, ed. Jacques van Doom (The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1968), 39-51, at 45.
29. Maury D. Feld, The Structure of Violence: Armed Forces as Social Systems (London: Sage, 1977), 145.
30. Colin Gleichmann, Michael Odenwald, Kees Steenken, and Adrian Wilkinson, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration: A Practical Field and Classroom Guide (German Technical Co-operation - Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit [GTZ], Norwegian Defence International Centre [NODEFIC], Pearson Peacekeeping Centre [PPC], Swedish National Defence College [SNDC], 2004), 73, http://www.fhs.se/upload/DDRHandbook.pdf.
31. One example here is the ethnically targeted violence perpetrated by different forces in the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s.
32. See Sven Gunnar Simonsen, "Ethnicizing Afghanistan? Inclusion and Exclusion in Post-Bonn Institution-Building," Third World Quarterly 25, 4 (2004): 707-29.
33. Mark Sedra, "Consolidating an Elusive Peace: Security Sector Reform in Afghanistan," in Bryden and Hänggi, Reform and Reconstruction, 7-8.
34. See "Lions at Bay," The Economist, August 25, 2005.
35. International Crisis Group, "Iraq: Building a New Security Structure," in Middle East Report no. 20 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, December 23, 2003).
36. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 41.
37. Johanna Mendelson Forman, "Can the Coalition Transform the Iraqi Security Sector before It's Too Late?" BICC Bulletin 29 (October 1, 2003): 1;
38. and Karin von Hippel, "Back-Pedalling in Iraq: Lessons Unlearned," Conflict, Security & Development 4, 1 (2004): 79-89, at 83.
39. Author's interview with Ahmad Fahim Hakim, Delhi, India, November 2005.
40. This point has been elaborated in Krebs, "A School for the Nation?"
41. "A Toolbox to Respond to Conflicts and Build Peace," Conflict Prevention Web, http://www.caii.com/CAIIStaff/Dashboard_GIROAdminCAIIStaff/ Dashboard_CAIIAdminDatabase/resources/ghai/toolbox7.htm (accessed January 5, 2006).
42. Marina Caparini, "Security Sector Reform and Post-Conflict Stabilisation: The Case of the Western Balkans," in Bryden and Hänggi, Reform and Reconstruction, 9.
43. See, for example, Roberto Belloni, "Peacebuilding and Consociational Electoral Engineering in Bosnia and Herzegovina," International Peacekeeping 11, 2 (2004): 336-37.
44. See "Former Bosnian Foes Find Ethnic Unity in Iraq," Agence France-Presse, September 3, 2005.
45. An ethnic mixing of units did not seem to be in the cards in the short term. Prior to the passing of the reforms, the commander of NATO headquarters in Sarajevo, General Stephen Schook, said a division of the army into regiments would allow the "entities" that make up Bosnia to preserve their military traditions and history. Ahto Lobjakas, "Bosnia-Herzegovina: NATO Aims to Merge Rival Armies into Single Bosnian Force," RFE/RL, August 18, 2005.
46. Critics pointed out that ethnic groups would have a veto over military affairs through the joint presidency and that there would be three separate brigades and command centers. RFE/RL Newsline, December 29, 2005.
47. Cynthia Enloe, "Ethnicity, Bureacracy and State-Building in Africa and Latin America," Ethnic and Racial Studies 1, 3 (1978): 336-51, at 341-42.
48. See, for example, Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
49. See, for example, William G. O'Neill, Kosovo: An Unfinished Peace, International Peace Academy Occasional Papers Series (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 110-11.
50. Author's interview with Enver Sopjani, Pristina, Kosovo, May 2005.
51. Caparini, "Security Sector Reform and Post-Conflict Stabilisation," 23.
52. Sven Gunnar Simonsen, "Nationbuilding as Peacebuilding: Racing to Define the Kosovar," International Peacekeeping 11, 2 (2004): 289-311.
53. Scores differ greatly between groups, however: a late 2005 poll found that 90.3 percent of Kosovo Albanian respondents were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the NATO Kosovo Force's (KFOR's) work, whereas the corresponding figure for the Kosovo Police Service (KPS) was 89.4 percent. Among Kosovo Serbs, satisfaction with KFOR was at 28.4 percent, and with the KPS as low as 2.5 percent. See United Nations Development Program, Early Warning Report Kosovo no. 12 (New York: United Nations Development Program, October-December 2005), 36.
54. For a discussion of the concept of cohesion and its utility in the military context, see Uzi Ben-Shalom, Zeev Lehrer, and Eyal Ben-Ari, "Cohesion during Military Operations: A Field Study on Combat Units in the Al-Aqsa Intifada," Armed Forces & Society 32, no. 1 (2005): 63-79.
55. For a discussion of the mixed loyalties within Iraq's army and police forces, see Matt Sherman, "Iraq's Little Armies," New York Times, March 8, 2006.
56. Per A. Christiansen, "Iraks indre fare" [Iraq's Danger Within], Aftenposten (Oslo, Norway), March 11, 2006.
57. See, for example, Dietz, Elkin, and Roumani, "The Military as a Vehicle."
58. J'Kayode Fayemi, "Entrenched Militarism and the Future of Democracy in Nigeria," in Political Armies. The Military and Nation Building in the Age of Democracy, ed. Kees Koonings and Dirk Krujit (London: Zed Books, 2002), 204-37, at 231.
59. For a recent comparative study of military intervention in politics in West Africa, see Patrick J. McGowan, "Coups and Conflict in West Africa, 1955-2004: Part I, Theoretical Perspectives," Armed Forces & Society 32, 1 (2005): 5-23.
60. Nicole Ball and Michael Brzoska, Voice and Accountability in the Security Sector,
61. with Kees Kingma and Herbert Wulf, BICC Paper 21 (Bonn, Germany: Bonn International Center for Conversion [BICC], 2002), 23.
62. von Hippel, "Back-Pedalling in Iraq," 83;
63. and Peter Slevin, "Wrong Turn at a Postwar Crossroads? Decision to Disband Iraqi Army Cost U.S. Time and Credibility," Washington Post, November 20, 2003.
64. Author's interview with Nils Bechmann, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, June 2005.
65. Gilbert M. Khadiagala, "Implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement on Rwanda," in Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements, ed. Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rotschild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens (London: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 463-98, at 479.
66. Sven Gunnar Simonsen, "The Authoritarian Temptation in East Timor: Nationbuilding and the Need for Inclusive Governance," Asian Survey 46, 4 (2006): n.p.
67. Author's interview with Aniceto Guterres Lopez, Dili, East Timor, February 2004.
68. Human Rights Watch, "Killing You Is a Very Easy Thing for Us": Human Rights Abuses in Southeast Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch Report 15, no. 2 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003).
69. Daniel L. Byman, Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 213.