Since the 1990s, military operations and warfare organization have become increasingly bureaucratized. This shift is associated with the changing objectives of and expectations from military interventions, in terms of the desired political order, state-building, civil society formation, and so on. The new era has inspired more ambitious political projects to deal with conflict situations, âfragileâ and ârougeâ states, humanitarian crises, natural disasters, or other threats to international peace and security. The international interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor in the late 1990s proved to be failures, both in terms of operationalizing coordination between government departments of the intervening nations and in their cooperation with international organizations and humanitarian agencies, in response to dire humanitarian situations and in order to establish control over the socio-political circumstances of conflicts on the ground (Macrae and Leader 2000). States, especially the US and the UK but also many other European states including Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, learned from the experiences in the Balkans and started introducing new mechanisms of coordination among ministries and government entities for effective and prompt policy response to crises, and to impose effectively the desired geopolitical order during and after the crises (Gordon 2006). The changing stance of the United Nations (UN) regarding when and how to get involved in military interventions, especially after the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) was deployed in Namibia (1989), was parallel to that transformation at nation-state level.
The growing involvement of the UN in peace-building during conflicts in the 1990s reflected a new era of protracted conflicts, or a new perception of crisis situations as âchronic insecurity.â The âpost-conflictâ discourse then became obsolete in governing âweakâ or âfailedâ states in the post-Cold War era. Still limited in Bosnia and Kosovo and redesigned for more sophistication in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), civilâmilitary cooperation (CIMIC) has since become an integral part of humanitarian interventions that require intervening statesâ civilian capacities to engender local consent for intervention and to facilitate humanitarian operations in conflict regions (Ankersen 2008). CIMIC activities have been transformed from conventional Western strategies of âwinning the hearts and mindsâ of the people of occupied lands to building legitimacy among local communities for occupation and the implementation of highly controversial projects of reconstruction, governance, state-building, and development (Goodhand 2013). CIMIC is essentially a security-oriented notion that sees a necessity for bureaucratized and coordinated operations of various groups of military and civilian actors to achieve the desired political order and build local consent in extremely volatile and hostile circumstances of insecurity (Jackson and Stuart 2007). While the nature of CIMIC is determined by intervening nation-statesâ political and military cultures and institutional capacities, the idea is to define the articulation and boundaries between military and civilian actors operating in the same conflict geography.
CIMIC has been endorsed by Western governments because it provides security and opens up and defends safe spaces for humanitarian operations during and after conflicts and other crisis situations. However, CIMIC agendas have become closely integrated with the so-called stabilization, recovery, development, and state-building programs that are highly political in their nature and might have long-term priority for the intervening armies over immediate humanitarian concerns. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan were the first extensive trial of the new CIMIC policies of intervening armies (e.g. the United States (USA), the United Kingdom (UK), Norway, Denmark) (Goodhand 2013; Jackson and Stuart 2007). The military--dominated implementation of the PRT strategies contradicted CIMIC premises about the role of civilian agencies and local communities in the narrative, and underlying assumptions about the pacifying role of aid, reconstruction, and development embedded in the narrative proved to be Eurocentric and empirically groundless (Goodhand 2013).
Military personnel and their mindset have leverage over decision-making about and implementation of civilian and humanitarian aspects of CIMIC plans, and the civilian CIMIC activities might be reduced to observation and information extraction from local communities about actual and potential signs of threats to security. This is especially relevant in chronic or extreme insecurity situations, such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. NATO and powerful national armies (e.g. those of the US, the UK, and Germany) have been particularly criticized for instrumentalizing civilâmilitary cooperation in their operations for their military interests, and forging an image in the public imagination that confuses war-making with peace-making and soldiers with humanitarian workers (Gordon 2006; Ankersen 2008).
References
Ankersen, C. ed. (2008) Civil-Military Cooperation in Post-Conflict Operations: Emerging Theory and Practice. Routledge.
Goodhand, J. (2013) Contested Boundaries: NGOs and Civil-Military Relations in Afghanistan. Central Asian Survey, 32(3): 287â305.
Gordon, S. (2006) Exploring the Civil-Military Interface and Its Impact on European Strategic and Operational Personalities: âCivilianisationâ and Limiting Military Roles in Stabilisation Operations? European Security, 15(3): 339â361.
Jackson, M. , Stuart, G. (2007) Rewiring Interventions? UK Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Stabilization. International Peacekeeping, 14(5): 647â661.
Macrae, J. , Leader, N. (2000) Shifting Sands: The Search for âCoherenceâ between Political and Humanitarian Responses to Complex Emergences. Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) Report 8. Overseas Development Institute.