Inviting Intervention: Statebuilding by Delegating Security
This is an on-going book project. For now, for more, please see these early pieces of the project:
Matanock, Aila M. 2014. “Governance Delegation Agreements: Shared Sovereignty as a Substitute for Limited Statehood.” Governance 27(4): 589-621. [Special Issue Edited by Krasner and Risse.] [Article.][Author draft (ungated).] Monkey Cage post here.
Related working papers: “Untouchable Forces: Restoring Security in Weak States?” (with Natalia Garbiras-Díaz) and “Shared Sovereignty in Statebuilding” (awarded the American Political Science Association’s Foreign Policy Section’s Best Paper Award)
Many contemporary challenges to global security emanate from fragile states with weak institutions, as citizens face insecurity, and other states face transnational threats that spread from instability. Outside policymakers therefore seek to reform and then strengthen weak institutions – yet the international community has struggled to do so successfully. Studies of statebuilding focus mainly on cases in which outside actors fight their way into the state and then seek to reconfigure or reform institutions. These large and coercive statebuilding missions typically fail, however. They are also rare given the costs involved, recent notable setbacks in cases such as Afghanistan, and the current geopolitical context. This book project offers a comprehensive examination of a model for statebuilding that has yet to be systematically explored: cooperative arrangements between weak states and foreign powers. In what I call invited interventions, host states allow other sovereign entities to conduct security functions, including policing or prosecuting their own citizens within their own territory; in a subset of these interventions, delegation agreements, host states also delegate reform of their security institutions to foreign personnel. This book project does three things: first, it generates a comprehensive typology of all invited interventions including delegation agreement. Second, this book project develops a theory to explain when and why delegation agreements specifically occur. As I show delegation agreements are common – occurring in about half of all African states – but they are also puzzling. Why do host states share this central source of their power – their control over security functions – with other sovereign entities? The book project examines the incentives of both host states and foreign powers to agree to these arrangements and considers when they are likely to succeed in shaping host states. The central driving factor is changing conditions that force host state leaders to paradoxically seek to constrain themselves or, more often, their successors. Third, this book project presents multimethod empirical research including analysis of an original dataset of invited interventions in African states in the period 1980-2015, case studies that include survey experiments within regions with variation in delegation agreements, and an elite survey on policymakers in states leading these missions.