Inviting Intervention: Statebuilding by Delegating Security

• In Event: Securing State Reform in Fragile States

Abstract

Many contemporary challenges to global security emanate from fragile states with weak institutions, as citizens face insecurity, and other states face transnational threats. 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 in and then seek to reconfigure or reform institutions. But coercive statebuilding missions are rare especially after recent failures. This paper instead 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. This paper generates a comprehensive typology of all invited interventions, including delegation agreements, showing that they occur in about half of all African states, according to new cross-national data that I collected covering 1980-2015. It then shows how different conditions that produce delegation agreements also influence how effectively they reform states.

Author

• Aila M. Matanock, University of California-Berkeley