Nation Building As Necessary Effort In Fragile States

René Grotenhuis analyses policies intended to bring stability to fragile states and shows how they ignore the question of what gives people a sense of belonging to a nation-state.

Why Nation-Building Matters establishes a framework for building security forces, economic development, and political consolidation that blends soft and hard power into a deployable and effective package.

Stabilizing Fragile States: Why It Matters and What to Do About It is a masterclass on intervening to help fragile states stabilize in the face of internal challenges that threaten national security and how the United States can do better at less cost with improved chances of success. Written from the point of view of an on-the-ground practitioner after exceptional government and voluntary service abroad, Rufus C. Phillips III uses his experience to explain why US efforts to help fragile countries stabilize is important to national security. Helping stabilize fragile states has been too much of a poorly informed, impersonal, technocratic, and conflicted process that has been dominated by reactions to events and missing a more human approach tailored to various countries’ circumstances. In his book, Phillips explains why we have not been more successful and what it would take to make our stabilization efforts effective, sustainable, and less expensive. Recent US involvements have ranged in intensity and size from Colombia, which did not put US boots on the ground, to massive interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which did. The lack of success in Afghanistan and Iraq has tended to dominate the national conversation about dealing with fragile states. Stabilizing Fragile States provides a thorough analysis of what has gone wrong and what has gone right in US involvement. • Stabilizing fragile states is more of an unconventional political and psychological endeavor requiring an operational mindset rather than conventional war or normal diplomacy. • Defines the focus of counterinsurgency not as killing insurgents but as a positive effort to win local people’s support by involving them in their own self-defense and political, social, and economic development. • Americans must understand the religious, historical, political, and social context of the host country and be consistent, patient, and persistent in what they do. • Security-force training in host countries must include respect for civilians and the definition by their leadership of a national cause that the trainees believe is worth risking their lives to defend. • Recommends creating a dedicated cadre of expeditionary diplomacy and development professionals in Department of State/USAID and a special training school as an addition to the Global Fragility Act. This book is part of the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy series.

Combining rigorous academic scholarship with the experience of a senior Pentagon policymaker, Mara E. Karlin explores the key national security issue of our time: how to effectively build partner militaries. Given the complex and complicated global security environment, declining U.S. defense budgets, and an increasingly connected (and often unstable) world, the United States has an ever-deepening interest in strengthening fragile states. Particularly since World War II, it has often chosen to do so by strengthening partner militaries. It will continue to do so, Karlin predicts, given U.S. sensitivity to casualties, a constrained fiscal environment, the nature of modern nationalism, increasing transnational security threats, the proliferation of fragile states, and limits on U.S. public support for military interventions. However, its record of success is thin. While most analyses of these programs focus on training and equipment, Building Militaries in Fragile States argues that this approach is misguided. Instead, given the nature of a fragile state, Karlin homes in on the outsized roles played by two key actors: the U.S. military and unhelpful external actors. With a rich comparative case-study approach that spans Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Karlin unearths provocative findings that suggest the traditional way of working with foreign militaries needs to be rethought. Benefiting from the practical eye of an experienced national security official, her results-based exploration suggests new and meaningful findings for building partner militaries in fragile states.

Why has the US so dramatically failed in Afghanistan since 2001? Dominant explanations have ignored the bureaucratic divisions and personality conflicts inside the US state. This book rectifies this weakness in commentary on Afghanistan by exploring the significant role of these divisions in the US’s difficulties in the country that meant the battle was virtually lost before it even began. The main objective of the book is to deepen readers understanding of the impact of bureaucratic politics on nation-building in Afghanistan, focusing primarily on the Bush Administration. It rejects the ’rational actor’ model, according to which the US functions as a coherent, monolithic agent. Instead, internal divisions within the foreign policy bureaucracy are explored, to build up a picture of the internal tensions and contradictions that bedevilled US nation-building efforts. The book also contributes to the vexed issue of whether or not the US should engage in nation-building at all, and if so under what conditions.

Now, 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the global peace order is going through renewed geopolitical changes that are less dramatic than those in 1989 but probably equally important. The post-Cold War Western dominance of global affairs and the singular US superpower status are eroding, making room for a more diffuse multi-polar world with many different global and regional players. Post-Cold War hopes that the winning political system of liberal democracy would spread around the world and bring global peace have turned out an illusion. To the contrary, Western efforts and military interventions to promote liberal democracy have increasingly resulted in the destabilization of countries and whole regions. At the same time, intra-state armed conflicts have, probably for the first time in human history, replaced inter-state wars as the main threats to global peace and security. This has created a completely new global threat scenario. Now, weak and corrupt governments are challenged by powerful belligerent non-state actors, be they Islamic extremist groups, other ideologically-motivated groups, separatist movements, or even transnational crime syndicates. Globalization has turned these local intra-state armed conflicts into international security concerns.

State legitimacy matters because it transforms power into authority and provides the basis for rule by consent, rather than by coercion. In fragile situations, a lack of legitimacy undermines constructive relations between the state and society, and ...

Nach fast zwei Jahrzehnten Krieg unterzeichnete die Trump-Regierung im Februar 2020 ein Abkommen mit den Taliban, wonach die Truppen der USA und ihrer NATO-Verbündeten Afghanistan innerhalb der nächsten Monate verlassen müssen. Dieses Abkommen ebnet auch den Weg für innerafghanische Gespräche zwischen der von den USA unterstützten Islamischen Republik Afghanistan und der militanten Gruppe der Taliban. Dieses Buch bietet einen kritischen Überblick über die militärische, friedens- und staatsbildende Interventionen der USA und der NATO seit 2001 in Afghanistan. Darüber hinaus stellt es auf der Grundlage gesammelter Feldinterviews die afghanische Wahrnehmung und den afghanischen Diskurs zu Themen wie Demokratie, Islam, Frauenrechte, formelle und informelle Regierungsführung, ethnische Teilung und die staatliche demokratische Regierungsgestaltung auf nationaler und subnationaler Ebene dar.