“I chose a catchy title to make you all come here on this rainy afternoon,” jokes Simone Tholens at the start of her presentation at the Robert Schuman Centre’s Seminar Series. The phrase “making security dirty again” might indeed sound cryptic at first, and even provocative — but as Tholens’ talk unfolds, it quickly begins to make sense.
Tholens sets out to unsettle the dominant narratives of security as tidy frameworks, where violence is tucked away and acknowledged only when it co-produces order. Instead, her research places violence at the centre of the conversation, unpacking how it operates, hides, and persists in the realm of security assistance.
What is security assistance, exactly? Unsurprisingly, the term is contested in academic circles. In her minimalist framing, Tholens defines it as ‘the practice of a state supporting and working with the security forces of another’. Think capacity building instead of missiles; infrastructure projects rather than bombs; training programs over boots on the ground — military interventionism wrapped in soft furnishings. “When we say ‘security assistance’, we sound everything but violent,” she quips. It’s an intervention by invitation, minus the political cost.
The real case in focus is the UK’s security assistance to Lebanon, which Tholens calls an archetypal example of the phenomenon she is researching; a perfect case to explore the blurry, often contradictory, nature of this practice.
She raises a core question: does security assistance actually work? Does it win wars, stabilise regions, or achieve the political change it's often packaged to support? The literature, she notes, is skeptical.
And yet, we still do it. Why?
There’s the cynical explanation: signalling. “Look at us, we are not doing nothing!” In this view, security assistance becomes a kind of performance — a way to appear engaged without an obligation to deliver. Then there’s the more optimistic take: that security assistance offers a means to influence outcomes while sidestepping the dangers of full-scale military involvement, with its risk of escalating conflicts.
But crucially, both approaches share one thing in common: they allow governments to act without being held fully accountable by public scrutiny. By operating in the blurred space between diplomacy and intervention, security assistance enables states to fund, equip, and train foreign forces without the political fallout that could accompany direct military action.
This lack of accountability is at the heart of Tholens’ critique. Security assistance operates in a shadow zone, enabling militarised outcomes without public debate, without democratic oversight, and often without clear accountability. What patterns of power does this reinforce? What kinds of violence does it enable?
During the presentation, a slide flashes up, showing a photo of a military tower along the Syria-Lebanon border. The accompanying caption from The Telegraph reads: “For years, this area was a no-man’s land, but with British help, it has been reinforced as a Lebanese stronghold.” To Tholens, this language is far from neutral. It borders on epistemic violence, recasting military activity as humanitarian progress, using infrastructure to construct both loyalty and dependency.
“Security assistance,” she argues, “creates intimacy. It builds relationships and loyalty. At the same time, it can also defer peace, entrench instability, and obscure violence beneath layers of order.”
Her concluding remarks drive the point home: we need to investigate the violence embedded in assistance. What’s more, we need to question how security studies' focus on ‘order’ has allowed the actual mechanisms of violence to go unnoticed, unchallenged, and unaccounted for.
Tholens’ call to ‘make security dirty again’ is, in the end, a strong call to confront the uncomfortable truths that security studies often sanitise.
Read Tholens' paper 'Recalibrating international security assistance to Lebanon : a strategic imperative'.