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Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan
During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How is US security assistance likely to affect governance and state repression for citizens that often suffer at the hands of both extremist groups and their own security forces?
The empirical record is mixed. Between 2002 and 2019, the US spent almost $300 billion on security assistance and trained at least one million foreign military personnel. In some countries, such as Ukraine, these programs have improved both the capability and professionalism of the state’s armed forces. In others, they escalated human rights abuses and increased the risk of coups d’état. Take the example of Kenya—one of the largest recipients of US military training and equipment in East Africa. The state’s security forces have been found to engage in torture, extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, and forced disappearances. Or the Philippines, where President Duterte employed the country’s military—armed and trained by US aid programs—in a brutal war on drugs that took the lives of thousands of civilians.
Although some studies have found that security assistance can reduce civilian targeting by state security forces, there is mounting evidence that it often fuels human rights violations. Recent research suggests that the risk of civilian harm is greatest when donors transfer weapons to postconflict states or provide aid to states with fragmented, “coup-proofed” security forces. On the other hand, effective institutions to constrain executive power in recipient states, and the provision of some forms of “nonlethal” security assistance—like military education for officers and defense institution building—appear to mitigate the potential for civilian harm.
As the War on Terror spread from Afghanistan to the African continent, the US greatly expanded the use of security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—to build the capacity of weak states to take on the counterterrorism mission without sacrificing American troops in ground combat. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent in the ten years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, the US has provided security sector assistance to more than two-thirds of the sovereign states in the world. Between 2015 and 2020, $4.8 billion in security aid went to sub-Saharan Africa.
While the goal is to reduce the threat posed by violent non-state actors, Kristen Harkness at the University of St. Andrews points out that most aid went to “repressive, heavily coup-proofed authoritarian regimes,” even though boosting military capacity in non-democratic states can fuel grievances that drive recruitment to extremist groups and increase political violence.
When “lethal” aid—weapons, military equipment, and combat skills training—reaches countries that lack effective institutional constraints on executive power, as in many autocratic and anocratic regimes, the risk of extrajudicial killings at the hand of security forces spikes, according to data that follows low- and middle-income recipients of US security force assistance between 2002 and 2019.
In the absence of effective legislative or judicial constraints, leaders can use military aid to buy the loyalty of their security forces and incentivize compliance with orders to repress dissent. Of course, lethal aid also directly increases the capacity of state security forces to quell civilian threats to the regime with force. Security assistance signals that a foreign patron is invested in regime survival. While soldiers ordered to use deadly force against the civilian population might experience moral conflict, or fear facing consequences for targeting civilians if the regime is overthrown, foreign security aid increases the odds that repression will succeed, the regime will survive, and soldiers will be rewarded for their loyalty.
One way to avoid the risk that US assistance increases human rights violations is to provide aid only to countries with effective legislative and judicial institutions. But many regions where extremist groups are active would offer a limited menu. An alternative is providing safer forms of aid.
Separating “non-lethal” security aid—a broad category encompassing professional military education, security sector reform, defense institution-building, and a variety of other types of assistance—from “lethal” aid—which includes material aid, direct combat assistance, and combat training—reveals divergent effects on state violence. While increasing lethal aid significantly raises the risk of extrajudicial killing, non-lethal aid appears to have a dampening effect. The exception is authoritarian states in which leaders have created overlapping and competing security institutions to “coup-proof” their regime. In these states, all forms of security assistance are associated with civilian harm. In post-conflict countries, one study shows that while weapons transfers and military aid increase human rights abuses, levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are associated with improved human rights protections.
Moving forward, as the US promises a new wave of security assistance to African states, it has a choice. Considering the recipient country’s institutional context, the state of its security forces, and the type of military aid, can decrease the risk that those resources are used to commit human rights violations.
Patricia Lynn Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
Guest post by Júlia Palik
In November 2022, the government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a peace agreement to end two years of conflict which killed thousands and displaced millions of people. The Pretoria agreement calls for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of the TPLF. It stipulates an overly ambitious timeline according to which TPLF fighters have to disarm heavy and light weapons within 30 days of the signing of the agreement. Two weeks after the deal the parties specified that the TPLF is to disarm when foreign forces—i.e., fighters from Eritrea and the Amhara region—leave Tigray. While the TPLF did not disarm by the initial deadline, in early January, TPLF members began to hand in their heavy weapons. Although the process has started, the Tigray presidential spokesperson said that disarmament could take months, if not years to complete.
What can previous DDR processes tell us about the likely outcomes of the Pretoria deal?
DDR programs are generally thought to prevent conflict recurrence, but the global evidence to support this claim is thin. Yet donors continue to fund DDR projects that may not be able to deliver the proposed outcomes.
To better understand the impact of DDR programs, our team has been collecting cross-national data on DDR provisions in peace agreements. While this work is still underway, we’ve learned four key lessons that provide clues about how the TPLF’s DDR process may fare.
While disarmament can theoretically restore the Ethiopian government’s monopoly of violence—and thus make renewed civil war less likely—our research showed that complete disarmament almost never happens. Even if the TPLF hands in most of its heavy weapons, it is unlikely that all of the group’s small arms and light weapons will be collected. Rebel groups tend to keep some of their weapons as security guarantees, but this can lead to conflict recurrence, as was the case in Mozambique. But other cases, such as Tajikistan, show that complete disarmament does not necessarily need to take place for peace to prevail. Given that disarmament is the costliest concession rebels can make, they often require inducements, such as political and military integration or amnesty. The Pretoria agreement is silent about such buy-ins, making it questionable that TPLF will fully renounce its armed struggle in the medium to long term.
Although DDR programs consist of at least three substantially different activities, the Pretoria agreement devotes only one line to demobilization and reintegration. Yet this task is essential, and likely to be especially challenging in the case of the TPLF. The TPLF is not a loosely connected rebel group scattered across the country, but a geographically concentrated entity with decades of governance experience. To break up command and control ties, demobilization programs typically scatter combatants around different areas (which is an incomplete solution in itself, since geographic distance may not automatically create social distance). This is not a viable option for TPLF fighters who have lived and fought in the same place, similar to Moro Islamic Liberation Front fighters in the Philippines. Demobilization and reintegration in the same community where rebels were recruited pose unique challenges. Other programs that have focused less on breaking up command and control ties and more on exploring and utilizing the peacebuilding potential of ex-combatants, may be better suited for this context. There is also speculation that parts of the TPLF might be integrated into the federal army. Although integration has been tried in other places like Nepal, there is little evidence that military integration is an effective peacebuilding strategy. Even if army integration happens, not all TPLF members will be part of a future army. Most of them will need economic, political, and social reintegration support if sustainable peace is the aim.
The Pretoria deal’s DDR program has no specific provision related to female combatants or minors recruited by the conflict parties (Article 4 only says that parties shall condemn the recruitment of child soldiers). Yet, both children and women were part of the TPLF. The lack of reference to these groups is problematic since research shows that conflicts characterized by high levels of child soldier recruitment are more likely to recur. While women combatants are rarely seen as threats to peace, sustainable resolution requires that reintegration programs take into account that female ex-combatants are stigmatized and often pushed back to pre-war gender roles when returning to their home communities. In previous demobilization and reintegration efforts (1991-1997), the government (at that time the TPLF-led coalition) did not provide tailored reintegration support to female ex-combatants. The current agreement seems likely to repeat this mistake.
One of the most important findings of research on DDR is that that unless the disarmament process is accompanied by meaningful external security guarantees, groups that are disarming may perceive themselves to be vulnerable, and conflict may recur if they are attacked or pre-emptively attack others. DDR programs are costly. Their implementation requires resources, which are usually covered by external actors (the UN and the World Bank, among others). While, representatives from the government, the TPLF, The Intergovernmental Authority on Development, and the African Union are jointly monitoring the implementation of the TPLF’s disarmament, there is little transparency regarding the funding of these mechanisms and the power the monitoring team has in case of breaches of the deal. Although inclusive national DDR ownership is desired by the UN, it needs financial resources and functioning institutions that are capable of managing donor funding. If the DDR process moves to the demobilization and reintegration components, the Ethiopian government will need to make sure that it is able to design and execute these processes, otherwise ex-combatants will have little incentive to fulfill their parts of the deal.
The Pretoria agreement has put a halt to the violence that devastated Ethiopia for two years. This is a laudable achievement. For guns to remain silent, however, there is a need to build on the initial momentum and complement disarmament with a viable demobilization and reintegration program that benefits combatants and their communities alike.
Júlia Palik is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Insitute Oslo.
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