Disasters, 2001, 25(4): 345–357

© Overseas Development Institute, 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

The Challenge of Civil-military Relations in International Peace Operations

Michael Pugh International Studies Centre University of Plymouth

The relationship between military and civilian humanitarian organisations has developed in an increasingly integrative way. Military initiatives to institutionalise the relationship, since the interventions in Somalia and the Balkans, entail a dilution of humanitarian independence as was manifested in practice in Kosovo. Further, the state-centric foundations of military intervention run counter to the potential for humanitarian organisations to foster a cosmopolitan ethos that would not only preserve humanitarian principles but also contest statist assumptions about conflict, development and power.

Keywords: humanitarian principles, civil-military relations, peace support operations, cosmopolitanism.

Introduction

Civil-military relations in the context of humanitarian activities and peace support operations encompass a broad range of actors and activities. Divergence in the interpretation of the meaning of civil-military relations reflects to a significant extent the different purposes of military and civilian participants. In the particular framework of military operations, for example, CIMIC (civil-military co-operation) is a cardinal concept of civil-military relations, considered to be fundamentally distinct from civil emergencies and natural disasters where a host nation ultimately determines the interweaving of military and civilian support. CIMIC is defined by NATO for situations where external forces supply military security as follows:

The co-ordination and co-operation, in support of the mission, between the NATO Commander and civil populations, including national and local authorities, as well as international, national and non-governmental organisations and agencies (NATO, 2000: §102). This article considers only one of the NATO dimensions: relations between

external military and external civilian (exclusively humanitarian) actors in peace support operations. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations uses CIMIC to mean co-operation between military and civilian to harmonise responses in fulfilment of Security Council mandates. But civilian bodies, whether NGOs, the Red Cross/Crescent

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Movement, intergovernmental organisation or national aid organisations, have not adopted the military acronym, CIMIC, and although approaches vary among them, they have generally approached the issue in terms of whether (and, if so, how and when) to associate with UN or other international forces. For example, a training manual issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the mid-1990s, emphasised the benefits of ‘partnership’ with the military while also identifying measures to avoid being compromised by military action (Wolfson and Wright, 1994/5). In contrast a more dissociative approach has been advocated for NGOs by French commentators, citing a conflict of interest between the political actions of the UN and others working for peace, and the moral actions of humanitarians in meeting the needs of all victims (for example, Brauman, 2001: 37–8).

Each approach is problematic. The institutionalisation of CIMIC (see Rollins, 2001: 122–9) that emerged from the military interventions in Somalia and the Balkans, manifests a hegemonic approach to civil-military relations that subordinates humanitarian action to military neccessity. Maximising benefits through partnership has laced the relationship with a degree of confusion over identity and roles. The former UNHCR, Mrs Ogata, noted during the Kosovo crisis that: ‘all partners currently face the challenge of trying to define the increasingly blurred boundaries and limits of humanitarian action, in an environment that is subject to political and military imperatives which are outside their respective mandates’ (UNHCR, 1999: para. 46). Dissociation is confounded by a contradictory trend towards the integration of much of the voluntary NGO sector into state-based relief efforts (as highlighted by Mark Duffield and Joanna Macrae in preceding papers). It also seems to rely on the questionable assumption that humanitarian NGOs are non-political and should have only an indirect impact on the dynamics of peace and conflict. The consequences of the institutionalisation of CIMIC, the blurring of roles and the quest for moral purity among humanitarian actors were exposed by the Kosovo crisis. But they have been emergent issues since international involvement in intra-state wars entered a new phase after the cold war.

This article re-casts issues of civil-military co-operation in the humanitarian field in the light of theories in international relations known collectively as ‘cosmopolitanism’. Indeed the following analysis can be considered an application of cosmopolitan theory concerning concerning conflict prevention and good order. CIMIC and the concept of integrated civil-military partnership can pose significant challenges to humanitarian principles of independence, impartiality and so on. But from a cosmopolitan perspective, the issue can also be addressed in terms of a politically relevant role that humanitarians often play, without necessarily realising it. The sources used here are drawn from the recent literature on modern conflict, military intervention and humanitarian action. On the military side these include CIMIC documents issued by NATO, the Western European Union and the UN Stand-by Forces High Readiness Brigade. On the civilian side they include reports prepared under the auspices of the Disaster Emergency Committee which evaluated the activities of some UK humanitarian NGOs during the Kosovo crisis.

The article begins with the essentials of cosmopolitan theory. Second, it identifies discrepancies between the features of modern conflict and the responses of states. Third, it is argued that an important demarcation between civilian and military components lies in their different functions vis-à-vis the state and that, in spite of critiques which present the civil sector in a condition of crisis, it has taken steps to professionalise and reform. Fourth, the article surveys the institutionalisation of CIMIC in military doctrine and operations, and the essay concludes that this development has to be critically examined if a distinctive role for civilian humanitarian actors is to be fostered.

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Theoretical considerations

Cosmopolitan theory is analytical: highlighting the weakening of state power and the growth of a global society based on the spread of norms that secure human rights, democratic freedoms and social justice. It is also prescriptive: identifying measures that will promote good order and conflict prevention. Proponents of the theory envisage further reduction in the sovereignty of states through the development of international law, institutions and regimes, and through the activities of communities of non-state actors (international associations of experts, regional associations, peoples’ associations, interest groups and voluntary sector NGOs). Cosmopolitan theorists favour political models that empower citizens independently of their own governments, and that contribute to the development of a global civil society (Held, 1991; Shaw, 1994; Falk, 1995: 79–103). Legitimate governance, and therefore a less conflictual world, will emerge from the emancipation of otherwise voiceless citizens and from political processes involving transparency, participation and accountability (Archibugi and Held, 1995). Acknowledging that ‘civil society’ is a contested concept that could embrace, for example, racist vigilantes and Mafia organisations, cosmopolitans seek solidarity with suppressed political communities that offer tolerant alternatives to abusive authorities (Campbell, 1998). Even in the midst of violence such ‘islands of civility’ survive that can mitigate conflict (Kaldor, 1999: 120–21).

In a variant of the theory, ‘ethical’ democratic states can also be expected to intervene — with military force if necessary — to protect victims of abuse, facilitate humanitarian action, support human rights goals and encourage the growth of tolerant civil society. These states can act as guardians of the moral good in the international system (Vincent, 1986; Shaw, 1994; Kaldor, 1999). From a more critical perspective, however, these state paragons are unreliable in their support for rights and humanitarian action,1 disguising their responsibility for violence in the international system. For ‘ethical democratic states’ are also the richest and most powerful states whose dominance over international finance and trade have been held responsible by critics of neo-liberal globalisation for straining the social cohesion of poor countries to breaking point. During the 1990s, some institutions certainly began to associate poverty and conflict, and to regard development in the ‘third world’ as having a security role (DFID, 1997: 68–9; Collier, 2000). However, this security agenda, albeit under the banner of making globalisation work for the poor, still gives priority to the establishment of global markets and consumerism as if it were a manifest destiny (O’Tuathail et al., 1998: 1–24; DFID, 1999).

Moreover, the claim by ‘ethical democratic states’ to be facilitating humanitarian action by engaging in humanitarian intervention is also contested by realists as well as proponents of cosmopolitanism. ‘Military humanism’, in Chomsky’s phrase, only occurs where human rights abuse or a refugee crisis affects strategic, realpolitik interests, and is therefore not a reliably moral standpoint (Chomsky, 1999; Mayall, 2000: 326; Gibbs, 2000: 41–5). The primary objectives of ‘humanitarian intervention’ are thus to isolate or police areas that experience the structural disorder of global capitalism. Dramatic military interventions, such as the protection of the Kurds in northern Iraq, do not represent a significant extension of global justice and security when abuse in Turkey and elsewhere is tolerated, and governments are not especially heroic about humanitarian intervention (see Jakobsen, 1996).2 One might go further to argue that civilised, ‘humanitarian intervention’ is part of the packaging in which Western security culture, self-perception and self-interest is wrapped, and to ‘fill a threat vacuum in the unruly post-Cold War world’ (Chomsky, 1999, 2000). It is hardly surprising that governments in the conflict-prone South are

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anxious to cling to non-intervention principles and to divorce humanitarianism and peacekeeping.3

There is clearly room in cosmopolitan theory, too, for scepticism about dividing states into good and bad, when it may be the state system itself that is flawed. Any claim to convergence of interests between intervening states and non-state humanitarian actors should be scrutinised, not least to distinguish between military intervention justified in humanitarian terms, but reflecting raisons d’état, and humanitarian action driven essentially by universal values that are also accorded a privileged position in cosmopolitan ethics. By definition, the latter commitment is as profoundly political as the former.

Two caveats have to be borne in mind. First, just as it would be false to portray military components as homogeneous, so also it is axiomatic that the civilian sector contains different perspectives. The ICRC, UNICEF, international and local NGOs and Military Professional Resources Inc. have distinctive practices and standpoints. Indeed a practical obstacle to co-ordinated, let alone integrated, responses to complex emergencies is the sheer scale and fragmentation of actors, activities and perceptions in the civilian sector (see Gordenker and Weiss, 1996: 17–47; Economist, 2000: 25). Second, civilian organisations with cosmopolitan political attributes are heavily Western European dominated, and may themselves exhibit hierarchical, bureaucratic and hegemonic approaches to humanitarian action, and have narrow interests to pursue (Edwards and Hulme, 1995: 3–16; Walker, 2001). Nevertheless, humanitarians in peace support operations can aspire to cosmopolitan responses to humanitarian emergencies and their distinctiveness can safeguard the integrity of approaches that have particular relevance to contemporary conflicts.

State-centrism and modern conflict

Politicians and military intervenors represent the world as statist, that is to say an ‘international community’ of states. But many contemporary conflicts (variously labelled ‘new’, ‘post-modern’ and ‘residue’ wars) represent a significant challenge to this construction of sovereignty. In such conflicts the territorial state is dysfunctional, lacking centralised authority and elementary control of its borders. Conflict is characterised by militia activity, the use of child soldiers, the flow and currency of small arms, the privatisation of security, the deliberate goading of civilian population movement to accompany or counterbalance military power and by the political manipulation of refugees and diasporas. The violence is as much about the private control and exploitation of resources (guns, diamonds, drugs, people) as about ideology and competing views of the public good. Local elites forge links to the global economy for markets, the acquisition of arms and the expatriation of profits (Jean and Rufin, 1996; Duffield, 1998; Kaldor, 1999; Berdal and Malone, 2000; Collier, 2000; Cooper, 2001). This seems to be a logical extension of marketisation, privatisation and decentralisation, in which emergencies do not ‘emerge’ and then go away but stay. The phenomenon is not sustainable development but ‘sustained emergency’ in ‘virtual states’.

In Mark Duffield’s analysis, current conflicts are also mediated by a ‘new aid paradigm’ (1999). States in the North have nurtured aid as a kind of semi-detached engagement. It is no longer assumed in the major capitalist centres that economically marginal areas can be developed and integrated into the global system. Crisis areas have to be insulated and refugees contained by in loco protection. By the mid-1980s development support to governments had begun to give way to policies of funding NGOs whose role

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was essentially to provide welfare safety netting, particularly in conflict areas where they were gaining unprecedented access (Operation Lifeline Sudan in 1989, for example). In this respect, subcontracted NGOs have been the handmaidens of a shift from development to safety netting for areas excluded from global integration. The use of humanitarian agencies by states to address issues of poverty and redistributive justice has perhaps been an alibi for political inaction — or alternatively as a political weapon featuring the imposition of aid conditionality (Macrae and Leader, 2000: 25).

Nevertheless, civil-military ‘partnerships’ in response to emergencies are affected by a distinction that can place a ceiling on their co-operation.

Nationals, internationals, transnationals

It deserves re-emphasising that the external military and civilian components of emergencies are not defined simply by their different roles — which are presented as increasingly overlapping in the humanitarian field — but by their divergent philosophies and allegiances. Military and police forces are state servants sent by governments. This is partly what gives military establishments a clear advantage in configuring civil-military relations. They boast a hierarchical structure, relatively regular funding, logistics capabilities, a pool of labour and the backing of the state that sent them. In UN missions when military contingents are under the ‘operational’ control of a non-national commander, strategic command remains with a national government, and this determines accountability to the state. Indeed, the more powerful Western military establishments avoid being answerable to international officials in the UN, especially for enforcement operations. When national military forces adopt the blue beret under the UN, they set up parallel reporting and control structures with their home states.4

By contrast to the national militaries, however, the civilian sector is much more diffuse in its chain of accountability. For example, international civil servants working for UN aid and development agencies are sent by organisations whose policies are indirectly moulded by states and deal with state authorities, but which may also develop a corporate loyalty and have the capacity to mobilise grass-roots organisations (Pierce and Stubbs, 2000; Suhrke, 2001). Voluntary sector NGOs are likely to have transnational allegiances across state borders, dividing their loyalties between donors, governing boards and local communities. Basic distinctions vis-à-vis the state — between nationals (military), internationals (inter-governmental organisation actors) and transnationals (NGOs) — suggest that problems in civil-military relations may be ameliorated but cannot be removed by CIMIC institutions, joint crisis management or lofty appeals to integrated agendas.

Of course these broad distinctions cannot be exaggerated: overlap and convergence exist. In the jostling for media coverage and funding, the various civilian elements are thrust into the marketplace. UN agencies such as UNHCR are dependent on, and politicised by, state funding and policy orientations (Cunliffe and Pugh, 1999). NGOs draw significant proportions of their funds from governments (Walker, 2001). The ICRC’s mandate is based on the Geneva Conventions, to which only states can be signatories. American and northern European NGOs have often had close relationships with their states. There was a strong degree of nationalism in Kosovo where many NGOs worked with refugees in tandem with their own nation’s army.

As previously alluded to, aid has been politicised in the sense that agencies use it to achieve social transformations and construct market-oriented societies (which may actually foster further instability). On the other side of the relationship, military forces are

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often integrated at certain levels (in NATO, for example) and take on the attributes of internationals. Committed humanitarians in state institutions will sometimes strive to move their state apparatus in a more cosmopolitan direction. Moreover, like NGOs, military establishments have been penetrated by private security companies that run facilities and logistical support. Still, it remains broadly true that a class of internationals and transnational groups ‘working without borders’ have greater freedom to challenge statist assumptions about governance.

A further cultural distinction that has a bearing on approaches to transformations is worth noting. Military personnel are trained to interrogate and negotiate with political elites, warlords and paramilitaries. External and internal military actors ‘speak the same language’ of security, command, hierarchy and ceremony, and have a common culture and technical interest in such issues as demilitarisation. This may be particularly important in arranging ceasefires and transitions, but it is not the military’s job to empower those vulnerable to abusive states or warlords. Indeed this has been a major criticism of the UN administration of East Timor, which was conducted by the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and which, against the intentions of UN and other civilian agencies, failed to consult adequately with the Timorese or build structures for Timorese participation (Suhrke, 2001).

NGOs, in particular, are relatively unhindered by statism and have the potential to operate in local communities in ways that reach groups without power as well as local authority structures. Their social services may be more adaptive and critically aware because they form transnational communities and are not state employees. They certainly have the greater potential, actively pursued by French humanitarian organisations, to take a cosmopolitan approach to disadvantaged communities. Even if they depend on state funding, the large aid agencies such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have international structures and staffing. Above all, they are concerned with norms that advance welfare, rights and justice. In this role, their culture ought to equip them to nurture processes — prized by cosmopolitans — of grass-roots education, capacity building, local ownership and responsibility in civil relations, even if civil society development is not their primary goal.

This distinction between state/military and non-state/civil actors is perceived to be blurring but is perhaps sufficiently significant to preclude the achievement of an integrated civil-military ‘ideal’. Indeed, NGOs and agencies may be uneasy about being depicted alongside military components. British agencies made efforts to avoid being trapped into the prevailing bilateral relief effort in the Kosovo crisis.5 On the grounds that we could think more radically about the limits of state sovereignty and the disjunction between statist realpolitik and modern conflict, non-state responses have an important role that is worth preserving. Whether it can be preserved may be questioned in the light of a variety of critiques of the civilian sector.

Is there any sense in turning to non-state actors to offset state interests, when NGOs and UN agencies are assailed by well-publicised shortcomings — such as lack of regulation, duplication of effort, poor needs assessment and weak evaluation (Economist, 2000: 25)? Aid agencies have been associated with the political economy of war and with serving the exclusionary purposes of capitalist centres of the world economy (Duffield, 2001). They have been accused of being preoccupied with perpetuating their own existence and for acting as bearers of ‘Western/Northern’ cultural values (Duffield, 2001; Stubbs, 1997). UN agencies have suffered from irregular funding and half-hearted reform. Although UNHCR had wide-ranging control of humanitarian co-ordination in the Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict, its poor showing in Albania and Macedonia during the Kosovo

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crisis seems to have been the lack of qualified co-ordinating staff as a direct consequence of cuts to its Emergency Response Section (Morris, 1999: 19).

However, there is little sign of the voluntary NGO sector diminishing in size or influence, and the profit-making firms may be additional to, rather than replacements for, it. Indeed, the transnational dimension of the international system has expanded dramatically, suggesting the growth of a counterbalance to state interests. Since the Great Lakes Crisis in 1997, the Security Council has held sessions with non-state humanitarian organisations, originally with the ICRC, but now with Oxfam, CARE, MSF and others to provide non-state perspectives, thereby ‘penetrating the state monopoly on humanitarian perspectives’ (Weiss, 1999a: 61).

Furthermore, among civilian agencies there is increasing commitment to accountability and professionalism. The major UN agencies are more transparent and accountable than in the 1980s. The UNHCR’s commissioning of an independent report into its Kosovo performance, and broad acceptance of the findings, may be indicative of this. More generally, various codes of conduct have been developed, notably the International Red Cross/Crescent Movement and NGO Code. An annex to the code recommends that donor governments should provide funding with a guarantee of operational independence (IFRC, 1999). An International Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response comprising the major umbrella organisations also produced the Sphere Project to set minimum standards of provision in disaster response (Sphere Project, 2000). The civilian sector is now more aware of the possibilities of monitoring and evaluating its own procedures and impact (van Brabant, 2000). The vast majority of agencies seem well disposed to the idea of UN co-ordination and standards monitoring (Valid International, 1999: 28) — although one should not underestimate the wariness of French humanitarians about codes being used as levers for state donors to exert control over NGOs (Grunewald, 1999: 5–6).

If humanitarian agencies seem to be more reflective about their purposes and performance than in the 1980s, a lack of awareness of the politics of conflict can compromise their potential to transmit cosmopolitan values, as was demonstrated during the Kosovo crisis, when few civilian agencies contested the official NATO representation of a humanitarian war (though subsequently Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other independent commentators did so (Rieff, 1999). Virtually all agencies were barred from assisting displaced persons in Kosovo during the bombing, and the Serb, Roma, Montenegrin, Bosnian and Krajina refugees were largely ignored. Without greater awareness of their political distinctiveness, the capacity of civilian non-state groups to counterbalance or influence strategic preoccupations will be limited.

Indeed, attention to civil-military relations has tended to be stronger in one direction than another. Humanitarian actors have not generally been involved in the initial design of co-operative frameworks, but have been brought in at the implementation planning stage, as the UNHCR was for Kosovo.6

Institutionalisation of CIMIC

The formulation of civil-military co-operation has been progressively institutionalised by military establishments. Given that relief operations detract from the main purposes for which armed forces are maintained, it is significant that military establishments took initiatives to do this. In messy internal conflicts external forces are dependent on local civilian authorities and populations for resources and freedom of movement, and on

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external civilian organisations for advice and information. In the US and the UK, civil-military co-operation grew out of army civil affairs branches that were capable of providing civil emergency relief and undertaking public works. In Operation Provide Comfort for Northern Iraq in 1991 the US forces set up a Civil-Military Operations Command Center (CMOC). In Somalia, Civil-Military Liaison Centers were used to brief civilian agencies (see Kennedy, 1996). In Rwanda, the US military again provided CMOCs to co-ordinate with civilian activities that were already being co-ordinated by the UN’s Rwanda Emergency Office (Weiss, 1999b: 155). Such forums facilitated dialogue, mutual awareness, exchange of information and requests by civilian fieldworkers for military logistical support.

There was also a pressing need to define relations on matters of civilian protection. Although an absence of military protection is the rule in most civilian relief missions, in Somalia, Rwanda and the Balkans, civilian organisations considered that principles of moral conduct were no longer adequate protection against deliberate attacks on workers and supplies. Faced with the prospect of suspending their activities, they turned to peacekeepers for security (for example, UNHCR in Bosnia and Herzegovina) or to local police and armed guards (for example, Oxfam in Somalia). Military protection, especially in coercive peace support operations, may improve physical access to conflict zones and protect populations, but the civil-military relationship remains a thorny issue because it is subordinate to strategic purposes, as in Kosovo, leading to conditions being placed on the exercise of humanitarian principles. The ICRC continues to avoid at least the semblance of such an association (Pugh, 1998).

However, the development of CIMIC as a doctrine in the US, UK, NATO and the European Union began to be codified with the development of a new strategic concept (SC 99) in the late 1990s. SC 99 emphasised that ‘civil environment protection’ — that is good relations between Allied forces and civilian organisations — was crucial for effective military operations (NATO, 2000, 2001). CIMIC operations give priority to supporting a military mission in all circumstances, so as to ‘create civil-military conditions that will offer the Commander the greatest possible moral, material and tactical advantages’ (WEU, 1999).

Separate from, but complementary to, the doctrinal development of CIMIC, has been the involvement of military forces in ‘humanitarian’ work. Some military commentators and the Italian and US governments have favoured structural transformation in NATO (whose members conducted uncoordinated national relief efforts during the Kosovo crisis), so as to give the organisation a more central humanitarian role.7 At one extreme, General George Joulwan (former Supreme Allied Commander Europe), has proposed mandating the North Atlantic Council to co-ordinate all conflict prevention activities through a Civil-Military Implementation Staff, on the grounds that ‘NATO is the organization of choice to accomplish UN-mandated conflict prevention operations throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa’ (Joulawan and Shoemaker, 1999: 16–20, 50–51). Apart from the questionable hubris in depicting NATO as the global repository of humanitarian values and the fount of solidarity with oppressed people, there is debate in military circles about the wisdom of such a trajectory. Military personnel are clearly capable of performing humanitarian tasks, but whether they can do it appropriately at the same time as enforcing a peace or fighting a war is another matter. Humanitarian action and co-ordination will be ancillary to military goals. And although state military forces can help to improve the environment for human rights, without the empowerment of civilians, phasing out the military presence is delayed. Further, military institutions cannot be expected to address the problems of capacity building and local empowerment.

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An alternative model to CIMIC may be emerging in Europe, but the outlines are not, as yet, sufficiently clear to assess its significance for the cosmopolitan project. The European Union’s evolving competence in crisis management as part of a European Security and Defence Policy highlights civilian capabilities to support international missions and appears to be steering away from the CIMIC concept in its planning discourses. Policy refers to co-ordination, coherence of action and synergy between state servants (whether civilian or military) in conflict zones. The EU promises to provide: police officers; legal experts to strengthen the rule of law; civilian administrators; and civil protection teams (for example, to assist humanitarian actors in covering the immediate survival and protection needs of affected populations, including refugee camp construction). How the coherence will be managed remains unspecified, and at the higher levels of policy formulation, the EU merely refers enigmatically to close co-operation with the private sector and civil society (Council of the European Union, 2001: 29).

Conclusion: the cosmopolitan distance

Non-state actors appear to be increasingly co-opted into an aid paradigm dominated by the strategies of states and the economics of neo-liberalism (Duffield, 2001). CIMIC doctrine and institutions have been expressions of efforts to politicise humanitarian action in a statist and realist framework. Increasingly institutionalised in the post-cold war period, the Balkan crises spurred military establishments to promote CIMIC frameworks and provided incentives to institutionalise civil-military relations whereby humanitarian organisations are invited to integrate into a peace support mission. Consultation with civilian sector representatives has been limited to planning for the implementation of frameworks already designed and presented as a fait accompli. CIMIC is hierarchical and hegemonic and a significant challenge to an ethical humanitarian politics that states and their military forces set the agenda of civil-military relations and the agenda is not debated.

However, it may not be enough for civilian NGOs simply to ignore the CIMIC model without becoming involved at all in configuring civil-military relations in peace support operations. Interaction of some kind would seem to be unavoidable. This essay suggests that not only should the principle of civilian leadership for civilian relief be preserved, but that in any association with military forces in peace support operations a cosmopolitan ethos should be sustained, if not privileged. In any conception of work for humanity, as well as in humanitarian law, the principle of treating people according to need, including casualties of ‘friendly’ military forces, is an ideal that demands respect. Humanitarians should engage in civil-military relations on their own terms and with critical awareness of their political distinction. Civilians, whose activities are inherently political, need to be more conscious about their role. Do they want to be co-opted by the state, substitute for the state where there is a welfare vacuum or offer an alternative humanitarian, cosmopolitan politics to that of external states promoting their strategic interests and commercial values.

For the civilian aid community, then, the CIMIC model not only raises presentational and practical issues, and challenges long-standing principles, it also risks closing off a cosmopolitan future. A significant shift in excessive respect for state sovereignty will only occur as a consequence of individuals and non-state communities contesting the sources of sovereignty and not just its abuse (Moisi, 1999). And this means contesting statist representations of sovereignty in states that do the intervening as well as

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those that are targets of intervention. If a cosmopolitan approach has validity, it is more likely to be found in those whose ties to state interests are weakest.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Danish Institute for International Affairs conference on Civil-Military Cooperation: Lessons Learned and Models for the Future, Copenhagen, 1–2 September 2000 and the Center for International Studies, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, conference on ‘Peace Support Operations – Lessons Learned and Future Perspectives’, 8–9 February 2001. A lengthier version is forthcoming in Bernauer, T. et al. (eds.) (2001) Peace Support Operations: Lessons Learned and Future Perspectives. Peter Lang, Bern. The author conveys grateful thanks to Neil Cooper, Mark Duffield, Peter Viggo Jakobsen and Joanna Macrae for their helpful comments, but the views expressed here are his alone.

Notes

1. To cite an obvious example, the George W. Bush administration has refused to ratify rights conventions and has attacked the universal principles of the International Criminal Court. In May 2001 the US was voted off the UN Human Rights Commission; in retaliation, the House of Representatives voted to withhold overdue payments to the UN (UN Wire, 2001a, 2001b).

2. In 2000 Canada funded an ad hoc International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty comprising distinguished international figures (ICISS, 2000). But its efforts to reconcile intervention and sovereignty are unlikely to lead to a change in international law and in practice the deployment of multinational forces will continue to depend upon a coincidence of policy among states with the means and strategic interests to put together a coalition.

3. See, for example, statements by the Jordanian, Mexican and other delegates, Peacekeeping Operations Committee, press release GA/PK/166-67, 160th meeting, 14–15 February 2000.

4. Even in a well-integrated, military institution such as NATO, the member states, and partic-ularly hegemonic states, directly determine crisis management and their contributions to it. This sometimes leads to conflicts of loyalty, as implied when General Mike Jackson of KFOR was ordered by NATO’s Supreme Commander, Wesley Clarke, to prevent the Russian component of the force from occupying Pristina airport. Jackson complied with his own state’s view and said that the airport was not worth starting World War Three over.

5. The British Red Cross Society, for example, resisted Department for International Development (DFID) pressure to take on a British army camp in Albania, and CARE raised funds through public appeal and not from the UK government on the grounds that: ‘It kept us honest’ (DEC, 2000; Valid International, 1999).

6. Exceptionally, Danish humanitarian organisations initiated a project with SHIRBRIG to map out civil-military guidelines for emergencies, though this is limited to unopposed peacekeeping missions (Hatzenbichler, 1999).

7. NATO sources, interviewed in July 1999.

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