Regional Security Cooperation

ABSTRACT The moderate Muslim states of Central Asia have a critical role to play in the war on terrorism. Notwithstanding their importance, the establishment of US bases, expanded US aid programs, and the conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom has not been sensitive to these countries' political agendas. Lingering instability in Afghanistan poses crucial problems for eliminating terrorist networks in Central Asia, as well as confronting the northward flow of drugs.

This paper sets out to examine how regional security cooperation in the Middle East has developed since the Cold War. It is done with the assumption, that it has developed within three periods following the Cold War, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab Uprising in 2010-2011. It is found that, due to complexity of cooperation and security issues only sub-regional security cooperation are identified in the contemporary Middle East, why these constitutes the subjects of examination. Based on a theoretical frame of structural realism and liberal theory the sub-regional security cooperation is analyzed within the above-mentioned periods. The post-Cold War-period shows a broadening of security issues beyond traditional issues of the Israel-Arab conflict and securitization of identities towards issues as upholding nation-state sovereignty, labor migration and nuclear threats, causing changed cooperation preferences from multilateral to bilateral. In the post-Iraq War-period, identity politics is found to be the main security issue in the region, along the Israel-Arab conflict, the rise of religious groups, proxies and low politic issues of provision of basic goods and rights. It is found that security cooperation was entered depending on level of agency-regimes upholding their authority domestically and regionally through proxies, and civil societies fighting for goods and civil rights not provided by the regimes. In the post-Arab Uprising-period, power structures are found completely changed, and human security issues as primary security issues, along the Israel-Arab conflict, the role of identities and the fight for sovereignty. In general, the scope and shaping of these issues are found to have changed in relation to a regional fragmentation. It is concluded that these changes are shaped by preferences, and have developed along the regional fragmentation, why the paper concludes that the regional security cooperation has developed in a negative direction, where it since the Cold War has become even more impossible to establish.

"Comprehending the Mission to Advise" provides a practical definition of the duties and responsibilities associated with advising foreign security forces. Despite deploying thousands of servicemembers and civilians to security force missions around the globe to serve as "advisors", no formal definition of the job existed prior to 2019. The lack of a consistent definition contributed to inconsistencies in how advisors were employed and how advising missions were assessed. This article is written from the perspective of an actual advisor and attempts to describe the considerable scope of the actual duties associated with advising and references current U.S. military doctrine and policy related to the mission. The article also offers a method for describing the various types of environments advisors are required to serve in, based on the legitimacy and stability of the host nations.

Regional conflicts increasingly require multilevel efforts by regional, subregional, and international actors. When states are confronted with a cooperation problem, often there are several institutions available to address this issue. Drawing on the literature of overlapping regionalism and forum-shopping, we argue that existing explanatory models benefit from adding power-based explanations. By conceptualizing an issue-specific dimension and factors specific to the national environment as additional power-based criteria for forum-shopping, we expand the existing literature. Applying our framework to the response to the Boko Haram uprising, our study examines why Nigeria preferred specific regional entities to others. We find that Nigerian resistance toward external intervention and hegemonic interests inherent in national elites as power-based aspects of forum-shopping explain the counterintuitive creation of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) under the umbrella of the rather unknown Lake Chad Bassin Commission (LCBC) instead of reliance on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or the African Union (AU) as important security providers in Africa.