The Impact of Security Force Assistance on State Fragility

The SFAssist project investigated the provision of security force assistance (SFA), which predominantly concerns military training and equipment intended for combat. The project's overall aim was to advance understanding of how SFA affects the coercive capacity of developing states, as well as its impact on peace, human rights, gender, development and democracy. The PRIO project website is available here: https://www.prio.org/Projects/Project/?x=1788. SFA is being used by states of different size and strengths such as the United States, France, the EU, Russia and China as a common means of military intervention in order to address challenges such as great power competition, insurgency, organized crime, terrorism, and uncontrolled migration. However, the provision of large-scale military aid programmes inevitably has an effect upon the recipient state's security apparatus. In a worst case, provision of SFA by many different parties may exacerbate fragmentation of a recipient state's security forces. SFAssist’s main goal was however to generate new and policy-relevant knowledge concerning SFA planning, practices and impact by using interviews, data and document analysis and field observation. The project's research team was based at PRIO in Norway, and at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations (Belgium), Northwestern University (USA), the Norwegian Military Academy, and the University of Edinburgh (UK). The project was divided into three work packages: WP1 investigates which countries receive security assistance, and what they receive; WP2 uses case studies to examine how security assistance is carried out; WP3 summarizes findings and disseminates them through several different channels. Since the project start in January 2018 field research has been conducted in Iraq, the Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Sierra Leone. Over the period 2018-2023 the team has been responsible for producing 12 peer reviewed articles in international academic journals, 6 chapters in academic volumes, one edited journal special issue and one edited volume. The main academic output has been a 2021 special issue on SFA in the Journal of Intervention on State Building (issue 5, volume 15). It consisted of eight papers, all coming out of a project workshop in Oslo in 2018 and four were based on research done as part of the SFAssist project. They included research informal networks in SFA in Niger; the impacts of SFA on security sector cohesion in Mali; SFA and fragmentation of the security forces din The Gambia. The introductory article provides a framework for analyzing SFA and was the most read article of JISB in the year after its publication. In addition, project team members have written stand-alone articles or chapters on subjects such as the role of Norwegian mentors in Iraq; security assistance provided by China to African states; the politics of security assistance provided to Ukraine, and to Somalia; civil military relations in Africa; and building cultural competence in the armed forces. The team has also presented project results to a wider policy or academic audience at multiple events, which include: • A workshop in Oslo on 'Security Force Assistance in Fragile States' 5-7 December 2018 brought together Norwegian and international scholars, policy makers and SFA practitioners. It included two events open to the general public. • A dissemination seminar and policy roundtable on SFA and Small States in Brussels 28 November 2019. The events had strong engagement from US and European experts and policy makers from national governments, NATO and the European Union. • A workshop at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana 2-6 September 2019. The workshop was attended by academic researchers from West Africa (including early career researchers) and featured a policy frum attended by parliamentarians from several West African states. • Two panels on the impact of security force assistance at the 2019 European Conference on African Studies were held at the University of Edinburgh over 11-14 June. • A conference in Oslo 14 January 2020 with policy makers, scholars and practitioners, including Norwegian military personnel, Ministry of Defence, staff from the Parliament, and foreign diplomats. • A final conference on the ‘transformations of security assistance practices and their governance’, held at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence, 30-31 March 2023. The conference included academics and practitioners and it inaugurated a network who will continue to investigate security force assistance. In addition, the project team had a running dialogue with the Norwegian Ministry of Defence and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on policy implication of SFA research. Both have awarded PRIO grants to work on additional SFA case studies not covered by the Research Council’s grant. These commitments demonstrate the policy relevance of research on SFA.

The SFAssist project’s objectives included the dual impacts of better informed policy-making and public debate, and improved practice by training institutions. The project team have actively disseminated their findings to decision-makers who are directly involved in developing and implementing security force assistance (SFA) policies. Project team members have been involved in at least 44 dissemination activities. These included 32 in-person presentations to a wide variety of policy relevant audiences. Highlights include several events targeting international audiences, including: a 2021 policy workshop at Northwestern University attended by officials based in North America; a side event at a UN conference on the arms trade; and briefings provided to individuals and small groups in the Norwegian ministries of defence and foreign affairs. A further 12 activities involved the production of written outputs targeted at decision-makers and the public. These project outputs included an article in the prestigious US military journal Joint Force Quarterly, an ‘op ed’ article published by a Ghanaian newspaper, and a policy brief on procedures to mitigate risks to SFA providers. All these written outputs were actively disseminated via the project team’s professional networks to ensure that they were read by people involved in policy development and implementation. The project has directly improved practice via partner institutions and individual members of the project team. Partner institutions the Norwegian Military Academy (Krigsskolen) and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) are directly involved in training personnel who go on to work in SFA programmes, and SFAsssist research has been used by them to improve instruction. A concrete example is the volume edited by project team member Kjetil Enstad (Norwegian Military Academy) and Paula Holmes-Eber (previously a professor at the Marine Corps University) which examines how to improve the teaching of cultural competence to military trainees being prepared for overseas deployments. Project team member Kwesi Aning is the Director of the Faculty of Academic Affairs & Research at KAIPTC and he has presented SFAssist project findings to his colleagues, not least at the policy workshop organized by the project at KAIPTC during 2019. SFAssist project team member William Reno (Northwestern University) has used the experience gained in the SFAssist project on parallel work aimed at improving military training provided to Ukrainian soldiers by NATO armed forces. Likely societal outcomes of all these impacts are better decisions about whether and how to provide security assistance, and better trained military personnel who are able to help achieve the overall objectives of security assistance programmes. Such outcomes are difficult to measure with any accuracy and the reverberating effects of the SFAssist project will continue long after the termination of the SFAssist project.

The SFAssist project team will use innovative data collection and comparative approaches to create ground-breaking research for formulating recommendations for decision-makers and practitioners concerned with Security Force Assistance (SFA) to highly fragile states. The provision of SFA is worth billions of dollars each year, and involves providing arms, military training and advice. It has become a key strategy of Western governments to address new security challenges in developing countries, such as violent extremism, migration, and organized crime. Elements of SFA have been recognized for decades as components of development assistance aimed at improving governance in developing countries. However, the effects of SFA have been subject to little research, and little is known about it's effects. Providers of SFA often intend to professionalize recipient armed forces, making them more disciplined, effective fighters in order to uphold democratic institutions and the rule of law. But some analysts have pointed to SFA as increasing risks that recipients will themselves be involved in corruption, coups, illicit proliferation of donated arms, and violations of human rights. Since training comprises a key element of SFA, the project aims to examine how gender norms are affected by the experience of participating in a training programme. This three-year project maps global provision of SFA for the first time, and investigates in detail the provision of SFA by Norway and its Western allies (foremost the US, EU, the UK and France) in partner countries located in highly fragile regions (North, West and East Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan). Combining document analysis and highly interactive fieldwork (interviews and focus group discussions) we will use the research team's unique competence in military affairs in developing countries to advance our knowledge within a field of study where policy-relevant knowledge is sorely needed.