Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The Strategic Culture of Authoritarian Regimes: Mountainous Karabakh

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • The Strategic Culture of Authoritarian Regimes: Mountainous Karabakh

    Foreign Policy Journal
    Aug 29 2014


    The Strategic Culture of Authoritarian Regimes: Mountainous Karabakh
    Conflict in the Limelight

    by Grigor Boyakhchyan

    In the 21st-century security environment, both week and fairly capable
    authoritarian states will constitute the major sources of instability
    and conflict the world over. Their instability may stem from internal
    problems triggered by a lack of legitimacy, weakness in basic
    governance, and the suppression of domestic opposition movements by
    force. But these states also project power in their geographic
    regions, sometimes as a ploy of distracting attention away from
    internal issues, often as an expansion of their revisionist motives.
    Their weakness is provocative.

    The strategic culture of authoritarian regimes permits drawing several
    generalizations: the violence orchestrated to cause destruction and
    suffering are permanent conditions and not anomalies; the threat of
    military force and its limited deployment is everyday business, used
    as a routine tool, not as a last resort; the issuance of warnings
    propagating war and uncompromising enmity is used to aid diplomacy in
    communicating power, resolve, and will.

    Unlike democratic states, where peace is viewed as the norm, and
    instability and violence as the anomaly, the strategic culture of
    authoritarian regimes perceives conflict and war much more as an
    enduring state of affairs - even as an advantageous condition to
    secure the continuity and prosperity of the ruling regime. Recourse to
    such means is tempting for any authoritarian regime. They may well
    prolong a regime's life, but at the same time they impede progress
    toward sustainable peace and security.

    These strategic cultures, along with security perceptions embedded in
    them, also provide the framework through which political and military
    instruments are selected, organized and employed. At base, they are
    guided by strategic cultures that are willing to employ unrestrained
    means for achieving their political objectives. That makes their
    assaults harder to predict and prevent, while their confrontational
    rhetoric renders negotiations or compromise almost impossible.

    Now two decades into the cease-fire agreement, we are able to see that
    these regular low-level yet intensely deadly confrontations along the
    Mountainous Karabakh and Azerbaijani front line and Armenian and
    Azerbaijani border are here to stay. These are not isolated incidents
    or disparate attacks but rather examples of what is becoming the norm
    for confrontation on the ground. Rather, events such as destruction of
    cultural and historical artifacts, zealous talks about wiping Armenia
    off the map, threats to civilian aviation, glorification of
    axe-murderers, and a propensity not only to disregard the distinction
    between military and civilian targets but often to deliberately focus
    on the latter - something one would think belonged to a bygone era -
    are constant conditions. This new environment poses dangerous and
    evolving threats.

    Understanding these trends and patterns for the OSCE Minsk Group
    Co-Chairs and the European foreign and security policy architects at
    large is critical, since these new challenges are likely to continue
    in a low-level yet deadly warfare. Staying on the periphery and
    supporting the efforts of the Co-Chairs are not sufficient to quell
    the outgoing breaches of peace on its doorstep. These events are not
    short-term disruptions of ordinary state of affairs and order. Rather,
    they are the harbingers of a new security environment that will likely
    present instability and gathering danger.

    There comes a time in most mediation initiatives when the events on
    the ground force the custodians of the peace process to face the
    disparity between their favored strategies and techniques and the
    necessity of action and change. When the assessment of the political
    landscape exposes the ugly reality that strong incentives for
    continued instability and conflict exist, no cherished diplomatic
    dogmas of neutral pronouncements and expressions of concern can help
    defuse tension.

    Against the backdrop of recent intensified attacks along the
    Mountainous Karabakh and Azerbaijani line of contact and at the
    Armenian and Azerbaijani border, the mediators should come to a
    belated acknowledgement that many of their assumptions and approaches,
    often held as iron-clad tenets, are not valid. The deadly fighting,
    together with heavy toll of casualties and human death, highlights the
    many assumptions that the mediators have to jettison as they confront
    the disparity between the standardized public statements to uphold the
    peace and the increasing utility of use of force on the ground. These
    diplomatic messages are not construed on the part of a spoiling side;
    the audience is obscure, their home address is ill defined.

    The mediation efforts under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group
    Co-Chairmanship have floundered, since those who assume the custody of
    conflict resolution process - or peaceful management for that matter -
    must first of all seek to nurture peaceful conditions on the ground.
    "Ambiguity is the diplomat's friend," - the oft-repeated cliché of
    many mediation textbooks - no longer befriends the Karabakh context.
    While international mediators may be impartial to the parties to
    conflict and the solutions they craft, they should not be impartial
    about bad behavior that obstructs the peace process. The shackles and
    formalities of diplomatic parlance that constrain thinking and
    practice should be broken.

    Effective conflict resolution efforts proceed not in isolation but
    amidst different interplay of interests and forces that often seek to
    derail the peace process. A proposal to establish an "incident
    investigation mechanism" is still on waiting list for implementation,
    along with ad hoc arrangements that should be designed to manage and
    control the local operating environment through a theater-wide
    monitoring architecture for preventing the obstructionist forces to
    thwart the peace process. More importantly, this should not be viewed
    as outside the peacemaking remit; but an important part and parcel of
    the overall conflict resolution effort. To provide demonstrable
    legitimacy in support of a peace process, the motivations for
    conducting a destabilizing activity must be recognized, confronted and
    overcome.

    The case of Mountainous Karabakh is indeed unique, but the quest for
    viable peace is not. While the proposed Madrid principles are long
    shots, practical near-term priorities should be set to establish a
    predictable security environment with the potential to manage down the
    violence on the ground and dislodge those who seek to obstruct the
    road to a viable peace.

    http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2014/08/29/the-strategic-culture-of-authoritarian-regimes-mountainous-karabakh-conflict-in-the-limelight/

Working...
X