The intimate distance of global security governance

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• the Robert Schuman Centre Seminar Series

Join Simone Tholens, as she presents co-authored research by Ada Sophia Hahn and Jacob Boswall in the RSC Seminar Series

In jointly authored research, Simone Tholens, Ada Sophia Hahn, and Jacob Boswall observe how the continuously redefined rationale of delivering security assistance illustrates a wider trend in global security governance, where indirect yet inherently intimate practices anchor the international in the local. This observation contests the common reading of how interventions have turned ‘remote’ and thereby how security assistance providers, increasingly concerned with strategic priorities rather than conflict governance, can ‘turn off the tap’ and abandon their local partners at any given moment. Instead, the authors argue that maintaining relationships through the delivery of security assistance is an inherently intimate practice that locks providers and recipients in relationships that tend to strive for survival. In what an interviewee for this research called ‘The Art of the Possible’, the modus operandi by trainers, advisors, and liaison officers, as well as security-political elites in the recipient countries, is to develop skillsets fit for working against all odds, deploying creativity, friendships, and skills in navigating the political/technical zone, in order to operate and deepen the networks they form in situations where success, peace, or even strategic value are hard found targets. By understanding security assistance as an inventive field of practice, with objectives distinct from building stable and prosperous states, Tholens, Hahn and Boswell provide an alternative and intimate reading of interventions in the 21^st century.  

Research for this paper was conducted in the context of the UK XCEPT funded project Security assistance and border management in Lebanon , hosted at the EUI (2022-2023)