Ungoverned Territories: A Unique Front in the War on Terrorism

Rabasa, Angel; Boraz, Steven C.; Chalk, Peter; Cragin, Kim; Karasik, Theodore W.; Moroney, Jennifer D. P.; O’Brien, Kevin A.; Peters, John E.

doi:10.7249/rb233

Cited by 29 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…The history of law in Pakistan’s tribal areas illuminates how post-colonial contexts are oftentimes steeped in, constituted, and controlled by past and contemporary legal legacies. Formerly referred to as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), this region is regarded by policymakers and think tanks as the “prototypical ungoverned territory” (Rabasa et al, 2007: 23). However, the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR)—a frontier-disciplining legal code from the colonial era—defined this region as an “exceptional” 8 area where the rule of law of the Pakistani state did not extend until as recent as 2018 (Farooq, 2014).…”

Section: International Law and Violence In Frontier Territoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

Nylen

2019

European Journal of International Relations

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How does the discourse of international law facilitate extraterritorial state violence? This paper synthesizes insights from International Relations, comparative politics, and legal studies in order to explore how the sovereign foundations of international law may render “frontier territories” exceptionally vulnerable to external military intervention. I argue that international law’s focus on sovereignty constitutes frontier territories as “ambiguous,” which leads to discursive conflicts over how to define these spaces, what is considered “legal” and “illegal” action within them, and who gets to define their status. All of this creates a conducive environment for powerful international governments to denigrate frontier territories as “lawless,” by rhetorically constructing them as exceptional legal spaces that do not deserve the same protections as areas ordered by sovereign ideals. To illuminate this empirically, I conduct a discourse analysis of 16 distinct legal documents from the Obama White House, including internal memorandums and public speeches on the legal standing of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

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Section: International Law and Violence In Frontier Territoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

Nylen

2019

European Journal of International Relations

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“…In policy circles from Washington and London to international organisations, assumptions of links between weak states and transnational threats, including illicit flows and transnational crime, have become a ‘conventional wisdom’ (Patrick 2006, 29) or even an ‘emerging orthodoxy’ (Cockayne and Lupel 2009, 5). Likewise, the security concerns of many prominent liberal (Fukuyama 2004) and realist (Krasner and Pascual 2005) scholars have also converged on ‘failed states’, and influential think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, the Fund for Peace and the Congressional Research Service have emphasised the centrality of failed and failing states in transnational criminal and terrorist threats (Baker 2007; Rabasa et al 2007; Wyler 2008).…”

Section: Security Mutual Vulnerability and Illicit Flows: A ‘New Ortmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the core of this centring of illicit flows in failed states is an assumption of a symbiotic relationship between ‘anarchy’ and ‘crime’ prominent in the security strategies outlined above. This is continually re-emphasised through references to ‘ungoverned’ places in US and other security discourses (Rabasa et al 2007; Clunan and Trinkunas 2010). For instance, in February 2003 CIA Director George Tenet highlighted ‘ungoverned areas’ as a major source of threat to US security (Tenet 2003).…”

Section: Netwar Geopoliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Netwar Geopolitics: Security, Failed States and Illicit Flows

Bourne¹

2011

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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Recent and emerging security policies and practices claim a mutual vulnerability that closely links human insecurity in failed states with the threat to powerful states from illicit flows. This article first examines this 'emerging orthodoxy' of transnational security issues that reinforces the securitisation of poverty and the poor. It then subjects this orthodoxy to theoretical and empirical critique. Theoretically it shows that this orthodoxy is formed as a 'geopolitical imagination' that associates and stabilises particular views of weak states and illicit flows in a 'netwar imagination' by reasserting and reconfiguring traditional assumptions of the spatiality and nature of threats. A final empirical section, focusing on drug production and nuclear smuggling, argues that those assumptions and their assemblage are a partial, incomplete and often self-referential reading of illicit flows.International security discourse and practice increasingly see 'weak' and 'failed' states as 'ungoverned' or 'dangerous' areas in which transnational security threats such as transnational criminal organisations and terrorists, and illicit flows of drugs, arms, people, nuclear materials and other harmful objects and actors converge and flourish. The first section of this article outlines the growth and breadth of this apparent consensus that combines the failed states discourse with the merger of security and development to produce particular understandings of the mutual vulnerability of north and south in which the transnational security problems of the north are seen as concentrated in 'ungoverned' areas of the south.The second section then uses the 'critical geopolitics' literature to argue that this asserted convergence is not a reflection of the globalisation of transnational threats but rather an evolving set of assumptions about the origin and nature of threats: a 'geopolitical imagination' that presents such places as nodes in a network for the organisation and transmission of illicit flows. Thus the failed states discourse and the merger of security and development, though widely criticised, are now integrated into a particular spatial imagination of security centring on the 'network'. However this represents a limited understanding of networks, in which traditional geopolitical assumptions are amended and re-stabilised rather than the full implications of network thinking being realised. In particular, by superimposing categories of network/non-state/criminal and hierarchy/state on to the map of 'ungoverned areas', more complex relations and geographies of the constitution and character of illicit flow networks are neglected.The final section seeks to highlight these more complex relations and geographies by assessing the relationship between these sites and networks and illicit flows of

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“…Given the interconnectedness of the global economy, and the ease with which modern technology allows communications and mobility, the internal problems of states with weak central governance are framed within the ‘state failure’ literature as readily exportable, and thus dangerous for the rest of the world (Rabasa et al . 2007; Clunan & Trinkunas 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Order beyond the state: explaining Somaliland's avoidance of maritime piracy

Hastings

Phillips

2018

J. Mod. Afr. Stud.

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How do some places with weak institutional capacity avoid being caught in the cycles of violence and criminality so often associated with African institutions in the ‘failed states’ literature? This paper exploits in-country variation in piracy incidence across different regions of Somalia to investigate how some territories with low state capacity can nonetheless deter piracy and provide relative order. We find that the usual explanation – state ‘failure’ in Somalia, compared with a reasonably functional government in Somaliland – does not withstand scrutiny. Somaliland's lack of piracy was not due to ‘strong’ state institutions, but can be attributed to the strength of a discourse that emphasises Somaliland's ‘inherent’ capacity for order against the disorder supposedly endemic to the rest of Somalia. The exploration of the discursive underpinnings of Somaliland's supposed ‘piratelessness’ has implications for understanding the relationship between state institutions, political order and violence, particularly where the state does not exercise a monopoly on force.

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Ungoverned Territories: A Unique Front in the War on Terrorism

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

Netwar Geopolitics: Security, Failed States and Illicit Flows

Order beyond the state: explaining Somaliland's avoidance of maritime piracy

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