Volume 29, spring 2009

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Militaries spend enormous amounts of money, time, and energy ensuring that their troops are trained on weapon systems, vehicles, and equipment. They spend small fortunes on preparatory exercises and training to test tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs); drills; and general soldier proficiency and effectiveness should they need to exercise force protection, demonstrate a deterrent posture, or actually fight during an operation. This preparation and expenditure is only prudent. However, what makes less sense is that, comparatively speaking, very little effort, if any at all, is spent solving the "people puzzle."

In reality, most stability and counter-insurgency operations are all about the people. The importance of people is true at all levels, whether dealing with the adversaries, host nation population, international community, and even one"s own nation. To be successful in these potentially diverse environments, cultural intelligence (cultural quotient or CQ), that is the ability to recognize the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors of a group of people and, most importantly, to apply this knowledge toward a specific goal, is critical.

The fact is, understanding the people you work with makes for smoother relationships, better communication and comprehension, and, therefore, more effective results. Grasping differences in how others think, behave, make decisions, view the world, and interpret actions assists in providing strategies and options in how best to engage them to achieve your own objectives.

Furthermore, a better understanding of one"s adversaries is equally as empowering. Abandoning preconceived, superficial, or erroneous perceptions and actually endeavoring to fully comprehend the "enemy" can provide invaluable insights into their attitudes, behaviors, decision-making processes, and motivations.

In all, CQ is an underused tool that provides enormous capability to empower military personnel and assist them in achieving mission success. It is a force multiplier that is relatively inexpensive and, if properly harnessed, can furnish a return on investment far in excess of its cost. After all, conflict in general, and military operations specifically, are all about the people.

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Accounts of human rights abuses and stories of shooting incidents have dominated the image of the private security industry in the media. Despite plenty of anecdotal evidence, to date there has been no empirical research analyzing whether there is a professional identity emerging among individuals who sign on with private security firms to assume roles traditionally reserved for the military. Using a survey of more than 200 American private security contractors with law enforcement backgrounds and operational experience in conflict regions, this research explores their social identities and examines the extent to which these identities shape their values, attitudes, and professional self-conceptions. It concludes with some preliminary recommendations for the future of outsourcing security functions to the private sector and the utility of using contractors in peace and stability operations.

EN :

Accounts of human rights abuses and stories of shooting incidents have dominated the image of the private security industry in the media. Despite plenty of anecdotal evidence, to date there has been no empirical research analyzing whether there is a professional identity emerging among individuals who sign on with private security firms to assume roles traditionally reserved for the military. Using a survey of more than 200 American private security contractors with law enforcement backgrounds and operational experience in conflict regions, this research explores their social identities and examines the extent to which these identities shape their values, attitudes, and professional self-conceptions. It concludes with some preliminary recommendations for the future of outsourcing security functions to the private sector and the utility of using contractors in peace and stability operations.

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Nation-building has become a very controversial topic in recent years. From the Former Yugoslavia to Iraq and Afghanistan, the topic has generated much debate among policy makers, policy implementers, and academics. The contemporary literature on the issue of nation-building varies substantially on issues such as legitimacy, timing, order of development, and approaches. But nation-building as a concept is not one that is unique to the modern age. Aristotle, in his Politics, addresses the key themes of legitimacy, timing of development, and approaches that emerge from the current literature on nation-building. There are principles in Aristotle’s work that can be directly applied to nation-building efforts today. Ensuring legitimacy through justice, simultaneous development, and an approach consistent with the mean will ensure a state becomes and remains stable. These ideas, first proposed by Aristotle, remain relevant today.

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In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, the prime ministers of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom began the task of framing these events for their respective audiences through their many public addresses and speeches. Given their different geographic locations, political cultures, and experiences with terrorism, the ways in which these attacks were framed differed. Each of these prime ministers was concerned with managing local circumstances in the face of global challenges to security. As the most public representatives for their respective countries, the prime ministers’ efforts to present events in particular ways is critically important in terms of how the local and global public interprets events. We examine the period immediately following 9/11 and consider how communicating these acts may have been impacted by general and specific terrorist security threats against these countries; their respective political histories with the United States; and the resources available to each prime minister (and his country) to address these concerns. Finally, we consider the legislation that has since been put in place by these three countries to deal with terrorism.

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As a result of its engagement in combat operations in Afghanistan, the Canadian Forces have detained a number of individuals and subsequently transferred these detainees to a third party. This article will discuss the relevance of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in regards to the responsibility of the Canadian government for the treatment of these individuals. In order to provide an accurate examination of this issue, it is necessary to identify the classification of the armed conflict in Afghanistan during the initial invasion and consequently after the establishment of the Afghan Transitional Government. It will be noted that this shift in classification will have a significant effect on the pertinent rules of international humanitarian law governing the treatment of the detained. However, the consistent applicability of international human rights law will demonstrate its omnipresence, coupled with the prospect of Canadian domestic human rights protections.

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This article examines the al-Qaeda movement within the categories of "global" and "local." Both descriptions are relevant. Structurally, the label al-Qaeda is used to describe many things: the original al-Qaeda central organization; locally based affiliated groups that operate under its banner; and a global social movement of sympathizers and participants connected via the internet. Ideologically, the emergence of jihadist doctrine has taken place against the backdrop of social change on a global scale and can be convincingly analyzed as a direct symptom of modernity and globalization. However, the roots and aims of the movement are local. They pertain to specific societies and emerge from widely felt grievances against the state system and the ruling elites of the Arab world. As such, the al-Qaeda movement is best viewed as a global expression of local grievances: a new "global" strategy in the service of local goals centered on the states of the Middle East.

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Asymmetry is considered one of the most relevant features in today’s conflicts. In this article we address one particular type of asymmetry — structural asymmetry. After introducing the main characteristics and different phases of these types of conflicts, i.e. conscientization, confrontation, negotiation, and sustainable peace, we address the specificity of the Israeli-Palestinian case presented here as a typical case of a structurally asymmetric conflict. The aim is to explain why, despite the many negotiation phases this conflict has been through, none has ever led to a sustainable peace. On the contrary, each negotiation has brought on yet another confrontation phase, in a never-ending series of loops. The strong imbalance between the two sides and the scarce reciprocal conflict awareness represent the two main reasons for explaining this pattern.

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German Democratic Republic (GDR) diplomatic missions included a legal residentur: an intelligence service base whose presence was more or less openly acknowledged. It was staffed by the Hauptverwaltung A (HVA - Main Directorate Foreign Intelligence), one of the principal divisions within the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security). The HVA’s main task was espionage. While most of the HVA files have been destroyed, the HVA had created a special database that holds all of the information it produced between 1969 and 1989. This database allows scholars to identify which source delivered what information and when, who received the information, and what value each piece of information had. The GDR’s Canadian embassy did not open until 1987, and due to the short term of its existence, the HVA residentur in Canada could hardly have played a significant intelligence role. And we can be almost certain that it did not build up and manage an unofficial spy network from Canada. In fact, the HVA appears to have acquired its knowledge about Canada primarily from other sources, mainly agents within the West German foreign ministry and from other partner intelligence agencies. The GDR undoubtedly had deep insights into the domestic and foreign affairs of Canada. They were well informed about the role Canada played within NATO and the Helsinki Accord. Within Canada, regulations governing everyday life were of primary concern, indicating that the country was being used as an operational spearhead. Knowledge about the Canadian intelligence services was fragmentary and selective but also very accurate. Although there has been no evidence concerning East German spies in Canada, we cannot definitely conclude that there were none. Only the Canadian Security Intelligence Service can shed light on that.

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The centrality of intelligence to counter-insurgency operations and campaigns is now widely acknowledged, but this has not always been the case, even for Great Britain, which is generally regarded as the world leader in counter-insurgency. By examining operational experience, doctrine and training, and professional writing on the subject, this article will show how intelligence emerged as a centerpiece of British counter-insurgency theory and practice in the post-war era. It will demonstrate that the British experienced a steep learning curve. Sound theory and practice were no guarantee of success, since victory or defeat was determined largely by local conditions and British political considerations, and some intelligence practices that had been effective in distant conflicts proved problematic when applied in the domestic arena of Northern Ireland. Ultimately, British counter-insurgency theory and practice became ‘intelligence-driven.’

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A long-standing debate divides many analysts in the intelligence community over whether structured techniques work on complex problems, such as intelligence analysis. The non-structured approach has become the norm in the intelligence community. This article describes both sides of the debate and argues that using systematic processes is better than intuition alone. Most importantly, this article asserts that the intelligence community should acknowledge the results of the debate and take a major step by committing to a uniform set of standards (indicators and methodology) that combine intuition and structured technique for the standing intelligence warning topics. Recommendations for implementation are described in a proposed methodology model that identifies a uniform set of standards to improve intelligence warning.

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Criminals and irregular fighters target non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for a variety of political and economic reasons forcing some NGOs to increase their safety through NGO-driven intelligence. The analytic capability of NGO intelligence must be strengthened if NGOs are to survive in an increasingly dangerous operational environment. Academia, through remote access analysis, provides a non-intrusive approach to support NGO-driven intelligence.