Civil-Military Relations in Peace Support Operations: hegemony or emancipation ?

Civil-military relations in peace support operations can be represented in several dimensions: relations between external military forces and internal civilian authorities/society; between internal regular/irregular forces and external civilian agencies; and between the external military and civilian components of interventions. It is the last of these, the relationship between external military and civilian (exclusively humanitarian) actors in conflict environments, that provides the material for this discussion. This relationship is interesting because it has manifested a shift from detachment, suspicion and ignorance - in which interaction was based essentially on a duality of roles and culture - towards a level of civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) that is becoming institutionalised. Indeed it has been described in some quarters in terms of ‘partnership’. It is nevertheless laced with a degree of confusion over identity and roles, and many of the previously assumed boundaries around operational principles have become rather porous. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has noted that: ‘all partners currently face the challenge of trying to define the increasingly blurred boundaries and limits of humanitarian action, in an environment that is subject to political and military imperatives which are outside their respective mandates [1].

This paper sets out to answer two questions: what is the basic problematique in civil-military cooperation in the humanitarian field, and do discernible trends suggest that the process of institutionalisation is hegemonic or emancipatory? Although the paper does not claim to contribute to theory, it is grounded in critical security studies and might be considered an application of the solidarist/emancipatory theories concerning voice, empowerment, social justice, human rights and humanitarian intervention [2]. A second disclaimer is in order at the outset because the paper takes a pragmatically convenient rather than theoretically robust stance in treating institutions as the basic unit of analysis rather than individuals. This has implications for the concept of emancipation because even institutions claiming to stand for solidarism and emancipation are frequently hierarchical, bureaucratic and hegemonic in their control over individual participants. This is one of the reasons why Bernard Kouchner broke away from the organisation he part-founded, Médecins sans Frontières, to create Médecins du Monde. However, the focus on collectivities might be excused in the light of the empirical evidence that CIMIC has become codified, bureaucratised and sentenced to ‘death by doctrine’ - in short institutionalised. Of course it also hardly needs emphasising that within each part of the civilian- military duality there are manifold perspectives. UNICEF, the ICRC, the Danish Refugee Council, 2 Oxfam, local NGOs and Military Professional Resources Inc., have distinctive practices and standpoints. The NGO world is a fractured, fractious zoo full of weird and wonderful animals. A major practical obstacle to co-ordinated, let alone integrated, responses to complex emergencies is the sheer scale and fragmentation of actors, activities and perceptions in the civilian sector. The military sector, too, is marked by a variety of traditions, cultures and objectives - sometimes proving debilitating, as in the UN Mission to Sierra Leone [3]. With these reservations in mind, the argument can be summarised as follows. To the extent that civilian components represent non-statist, even cosmopolitan, approaches to humanitarian emergencies, their distinctiveness safeguards the integrity of emancipatory responses that have particular relevance to contemporary conflicts. Indeed if this demarcation ceased to exist, the blurring of boundaries would lead not to an appropriate pragmatism, but to a dilution, even dysfunctional renationalisation, of non-statist humanitarianism. Whilst the demarcation remains intact, it places a ceiling on the prospects for CIMIC. However, institutionalisation has been marked by the military-driven approach to CIMIC that emerged from the Somalia and Balkan interventions. In Bosnia-Herzegovina the UNHCR was in control [4], but in Somalia and Kosovo the military enjoyed a hegemonic position. Practice may not yet demonstrate an overriding militarising trend in civil-military relations, but the evolution of CMIC and CMIC doctrines present challenges to the cosmopolitan potential of civilian agencies. The paper begins by identifying the disjunctions between the modern conflict context and statist responses. It then argues that the demarcation between civilian and military components rests to a large extent on their different transmission functions vis-à-vis the state. The contention is then made that in spite of frequent observations that the civil sector is in a condition of flux amounting to a crisis, a willingness to professionalise and reform inter-civilan cooperation is evident. Finally, the paper notes the institutionalisation of CIMIC by military sources and to a military model, a development that challenges the non-statist elements of the civilian sector.

Source : www.odi.org.uk/hpg/confpapers/pugh.pdf

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Pugh Civil-Military Relations in Peace Support Operations