ALLIES Civil-Military Relations Conference Keynote
by Denise Looi
On November 10-11, the Center for Strategic Studies co-sponsored the fourth annual Civil-Military Relations Conference, organized by ALLIES (The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), a Tufts University undergraduate student organization. The student organizers of the conference provided the following summary of the keynote address.
This year’s keynote speaker was Douglas Farah, a senior associate with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a senior visiting fellow at National Defense University’s Center for Complex Operations. He is an expert on transnational criminal organizations, insurgencies, ungoverned spaces, illicit money flows, and resource exploitation in Latin America, and has written extensively about the region.
Farah opened with his perspective on an increasingly fragile liberal world order. The end of the Cold War created expectations of a peace dividend, but instead precipitated the erosion of the nation-state as the primary actor in the world, especially in regions like Latin America and Africa. In his view, the world seems to be breaking down into a “pseudo-Middle Ages world order”: a largely negative erosion in the consensus of what constitutes a state, in the Westphalian sense of the term.
Farah then discussed the increasingly apparent divergence between expectations and reality. while it seems as if countries and despots aren’t playing by the rules of sovereign statehood, they are in fact playing a completely different game. Using Liberia as an example, Farah illustrated how organized crime, criminal enterprises, and the funding of weapons for non-state armed groups resulted in a weapons trade that produced a vicious cycle in which the flow of weapons comprised a significant source of revenue for both the government and criminal organizations. He argued that to analyze these cycles, we need to look at networks instead of individuals. In nearly every modern conflict in West Africa, there has been a group of people that migrate from government to government and have the existing technical skills that every unstable government wants and needs. In the Liberian diamond trade, these “fixers” were empowered with special rights to exploit the sector, while the “super fixers” were able to move the money generated by the diamond trade into the arms trade.
These networks, which make the trade in weapons lucrative and accessible, grant access to large surpluses of weapons. However, due to the new threats which came into view with the 9/11 attacks, those networks and resources were quickly diverted toward entirely different, more violent and extreme goals. Weapons networks now pose a specific danger when they interact with those seeking to attack the United States and proliferate extremist ideas and tactics, which has been strong enough to unite countries as disparate as Iran and Venezuela.
Farah discussed at length his research into the emergence of MS-13 to show how territorial control is not just about non-state actors being able to extort money, but about political and economic power. Such organizations are often able to act as quasi-governments where a state’s legitimate government fails, such as providing employment and civil services. Traditional governments are proving increasingly incapable of confronting this reality, allowing non-state actors to establish permanent control. Furthermore, multilateral institutions have also contributed to the de-legitimization of the state.
Farah’s keynote address provided the audience with a unique perspective into how the global arms trade intersects with and perpetuates wider dynamics in the current world order. Tufts ALLIES and our co-sponsors were grateful for his participation in this year’s Civil-Military Relations Conference and were delighted to be able to host this insightful discussion.