Achieving the MOD’s objectives and preventing violence will require a sophisticated understanding of unstable operating environments. However, the UK’s global engagement network is not yet optimized for this task.
In support of the Integrated Review, the defence command paper and the Integrated Operating Concept 2025 introduced persistent engagement as the MOD’s approach to state and non-state security threats below the threshold of conflict. However, the concept is immature, overseas operating environments are fluid and fast-evolving, and the capabilities that sustain persistent engagement are still under development.
First, the security challenges emerging from weakened and failed regions are increasingly complex with potential to negatively impact the UK’s security and trade interests as well as contribute to human suffering. Unstable environments present state competitors of the UK with opportunities to further their foreign policy agendas and provide conditions for illegitimate and violent non-state actors to flourish. For the UK and the EU, the eastern and southern flanks of the Euro-Atlantic area hold potential to generate complex security threats at a time when the US is pivoting to the Indo-Pacific, the established institutional mechanisms for keeping conflict at bay are weakening, and the coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating already complex situations.
A civilian-led comprehensive cross-government approach is needed, which coordinates resources early in the conflict cycle to generate understanding, address the root causes of conflicts, promote durable peace, prevent escalation to violence and, if necessary, manage the transition to crisis response. Success requires a balanced approach, blending the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) diplomacy and development activities with the MOD’s persistent engagement approach. Through its global network, the MOD can support FCDO by understanding and shaping environments and building capability and capacity in partners.
Second, since the Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2010, the MOD has developed a non-combat ‘defence engagement’ capability with the purpose of preventing conflict, building stability, promoting prosperity, and generating influence in support of national security objectives. It has grown and matured in the last decade, particularly the defence attaché network. However, in light of the Integrated Review’s added emphasis on persistent engagement, there is now a need to review and enhance the MOD’s approach to its international engagement and optimize it for a new policy era. This process must start with the development of a cohort of personnel who possess sufficiently specialist and tailored KSE to understand and decipher complex operating environments and design and implement effective MOD activity in support of wider UK objectives.
Complex security threats and human suffering in weakened and failed states
A group of academics including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his famous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, have argued that the world is in an unprecedented era of peace, war and violence are steadily declining, and inter-state wars are less likely than ever. Others are less optimistic having used different metrics to reach an opposing conclusion: violent conflicts are more numerous, last longer, and involve a broader range of more extreme non-state actors including organized criminals and jihadists. Despite fewer inter-state wars, civilians suffer at the hands of repressive and exclusive states leading to political turmoil and violence. The Integrated Review highlights an increase in violent conflict globally in the last decade, the majority now being civil wars, and acknowledges that conflict and instability will remain prevalent unless concerted action is taken to address underlying political, social, economic and environmental drivers.
At the same time, the established institutional mechanisms for keeping conflict at bay – democracy, economic prosperity and international cooperation – are weakening and increasingly ill-suited to dealing with non-state actors. Prevailing conditions in weakened countries – including inequalities, perceptions of injustice, lack of opportunity, stalled development, unrepresentative and predatory leadership with little or no political legitimacy, weak state institutions, a politicized security sector, and illicit financial flows – create a toxic mix of spoilers that fuel violent conflict with insufficient capacity to stop it. Climate and demographic change and the forces of globalization are now adding macro-level stress to already fragile countries and exacerbating the drivers of violence, increasingly shaping the security narrative. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed and accelerated these trends, made fragile regions even more fragile, increased the prevalence of hard security solutions for political problems, and made the world more vulnerable to international conflict. The upshot is that conflict, violence and fragility remain major obstacles in reaching the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
The established institutional mechanisms for keeping conflict at bay are weakening and increasingly ill-suited to dealing with non-state actors.
Weakened and failed states are also ideal arenas for major state competitors to leverage hybrid warfare tools and conduct destabilization activities to advance their geopolitical interests. Addressing the root causes of instability and violence in these regions can therefore have multiple effects, such as countering state, security and economic threats, and reducing human suffering.
The character of conflict continues to evolve
There are numerous theories to conceptualize contemporary conflict and the shift in its character since the end of the Cold War including ‘war among people’, ‘hybrid war’, ‘irregular warfare’, ‘privatized war’ and ‘new wars’. It is worth dwelling on the most prominent of these to identify key themes.
Mary Kaldor championed new wars as a framework for understanding and distinguishing contemporary violent conflicts in unstable regions where she identified a transformation in the character of the actors, goals, methods and means of finance in conflict. New wars are globalized and regionalized and fought by networks of state and non-state actors rather than regular state armed forces. They fight in the name of identity rather than for geopolitical interests or ideologies. There is no victor and no conclusion, and conflicts persist and spread because the actors waging violence are gaining politically and economically. Kaldor advocates a response that attempts to undermine the dominant logic of ‘political marketplaces’ and ‘identity politics’, which in her view are the primary drivers of violence, and instead focus on nurturing local-level ‘civicness’ and fostering vibrant contracts between the authority and the citizen. Her theory is increasingly supported by evidence of effective locally-led conflict prevention cases.
Rupert Smith, in his 2006 book The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, complements Kaldor’s thinking with his identification of a paradigm shift away from ‘industrial warfare’ to ‘war amongst the people’ i.e. persistent, intrastate conflict between parties within a population or operating among it. The root causes and objectives of conflicts today lie in the grievances and confrontations of individuals and societies, usually political, rather than the harder absolutes of interstate industrial war. Tensions continuously simmer along political, socio-cultural and economic fault lines that fluctuate between periods of non-violent confrontation and violent conflict waged by a range of state and non-state actors. Traditional hard combat power optimized for an interstate ‘trial of strength’ cannot be effective in these human-based clashes of politics and will. Instead, new capabilities are needed that decipher and understand the human elements of a conflict and offer solutions focused on people in order to prevent, manage and when necessary win conflicts.
In his 1990 book, The Management of Protracted Social Conflict: Theory and Cases, Edward Azar argued that the sources of conflict in underdeveloped parts of the world lie predominantly within and across rather than between states. Like Kaldor, he identified multiple causal factors in violence and emphasized that goals, actors and targets constantly evolve and conflicts have no clear start or end. Key preconditions for violence include the mix of racial, religious, political and cultural identity groups; deprivation of human needs; weak state governance characterized by ‘incompetent, parochial, fragile and authoritarian governments that fail to satisfy basic human needs’; and international linkages – both political–economic and political–military – exacerbated by the porosity of a state’s borders.
Azar’s ideas have been extended by contemporary academics into an interpretative framework labelled ‘transnational conflict’. Its hallmark is that global drivers of conflict are linked almost instantaneously to local sites of confrontation via transnational connectors – flows of people, capital, weapons, criminal networks, money and ideas. Ramsbotham et al. advocate a pluralistic approach to conflict analysis that focuses more broadly on global, regional, local, state, identity group and elite/individual levels, while employing a range of social science tools from anthropology, psychology, politics and international relations.
The theories of Kaldor, Smith and Azar are not without criticism. However, their thinking on contemporary conflict provides a conceptual and analytical prism through which fast-evolving conflicts in unstable regions and their dynamics can be interpreted and more easily understood. They also offer insights for the MOD on how to conceptualize and design its approach to persistent engagement and optimize its support to the UK’s wider conflict prevention, stabilization, and peacebuilding initiatives.
Shifting to the left of the conflict curve
The concept of preventing violence is neither new nor radical. It was a dominant theme at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 where preventive frameworks and measures were introduced for the first time. It remains a central component of the Charter of the United Nations, the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 and its 2005 Responsibility to Protect principle focused on safeguarding populations by preventing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The World Bank, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the UN and others give priority to addressing fragility and the drivers of violent conflict. As a prime example, the 2018 joint initiative by the World Bank and the UN – Pathways for Peace – builds on 30 years of evolutionary developments in conflict prevention and makes the case for the attention of the international community to shift away from crisis response and reconstruction towards preventing conflict through an early, sustainable, inclusive and collective approach.
In 2019, the US passed the Global Fragility Act, which was followed in 2020 by the supporting Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability. This legislates a pan-government approach to addressing inherent problems in fragile, conflict-prone states early, with a focus on states where weakness or failure would magnify threats to the American homeland. Commentators regard this as a good opportunity to re-shape how the US approaches violent conflict prevention and migration and to balance the reactive foreign policy approaches of the previous decades.
The recent intensified focus on early action in a conflict curve is perhaps understandable. Traditional responses to violent conflict have proven unreliable and the risk of failure high.
The recent intensified focus on early action in a conflict curve is perhaps understandable. Traditional responses to violent conflict have proven unreliable and the risk of failure high: military intervention may exacerbate violence, top-down political diplomacy potentially entrenches the power structures inherent to the original problem, and humanitarian assistance can fuel the political economy of the conflict. There are also moral, security and economic benefits to preventing violent conflict and avoiding costly, prolonged resolutions through crisis response. Human suffering is more likely to be lower in a stable, well-governed state, which is progressing towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions. Stability can help deny opportunities for major state competitors to exploit situations for geopolitical advantage (although there remain risks in propping up undemocratic allies merely to achieve higher strategic ends as seen in the Cold War). A stable state can also reduce the likelihood and severity of threats emerging that negatively impact UK and European national security. From a financial perspective, a stable, non-violent state is also cheaper for the global community. A 2017 UN report estimated that, for every $1 spent on prevention, there is potential to save $16 in conflict costs, with potential total savings estimated between $5 billion and $70 billion a year.
Despite this, the interests and behaviours of the UN’s member states are regularly at odds with this logic. Members have a tendency to support reactive crisis management at the point when risk has become most apparent and most concentrated, explicable by the fact that the issues are tangible, pressing and their impact is easier to measure. The consequence is that future-looking, long-term and potentially slow-moving preventative solutions are disproportionately lacking and under-resourced. Resources allocated to longer-term prevention initiatives represent only a fraction of those spent on crisis response and reconstruction. The economic and human incentives for adopting the alternative approach are compelling.
The Pathways for Peace report among others is attempting to change this behaviour by promoting a preventive framework for steering weak and unstable societies along a ‘unique pathway’ towards peace. It incentivizes viable, coordinated and sustained action to prevent violence. Importantly, it also aims to replace the trend of episodic bursts of activity at flash points in the conflict cycle with more consistent, committed and long-term approaches. This way of thinking is important in shaping the UK’s future approach to its international engagement activities and driving development of the MOD’s future capabilities.
Preventing violent conflict by building long-term stability
The UK has retained a strong conceptual foundation for, and considerable practical experience in, preventing conflict and building stability over the last decade. However, commentators are now calling for the UK government to build on this legacy through publication of a comprehensive, pan-government sub-strategy or strategic framework for tackling conflict akin to the activity spawned by the US Global Fragility Act. The creation of the conflict centre in the FCDO will help to push forward this objective.
Policy foundations were laid in the UK’s Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2010 in which the concept of early, upstream activity to address the root causes of conflicts emerged. The tri-departmental Building Stability Overseas Strategy coordinated the long-term, whole-of-government approach to building stability and preventing conflict in fragile states by drawing on all diplomatic, development, military and security tools. This recognized that ineffective governance and accountability, low integrity in security and justice institutions, and poor legitimacy directly trigger and fuel violent conflict and open up power vacuums to be filled by malevolent non-state actors (who admittedly can sometimes provide legitimate, effective governance) and to be destabilized by authoritarian regimes. In contrast, strong, fair and legitimate institutions, including sometimes those operated by non-state actors, have potential to act as an immune system in societies by promoting resilience to ward off illness through quick, targeted responses to emerging pathogens.
The Department for International Development’s (DFID) Building Stability Framework, the Stabilisation Unit’s Stabilisation Guidance, and the MOD’s complementary policy on human security in military operations (JSP 1325) have since been added to the stable of UK doctrine in this area. The introduction of Fusion Doctrine in 2018 has the potential to facilitate coordination of all this activity more effectively towards singular national security priorities including early conflict prevention, but to date views on its efficacy to do so are mixed.
Any new conflict strategy must, however, recognize the perils of generalizing approaches to fragility and instability. No two countries’ circumstances are the same and no common solution exists either in policy or in practice. Equally, despite popular sentiments, it is not inevitable that conflict in weakened and failed states will lead to violence given that some states possess sufficient resilience to contain clashes. The assumption that good state governance is an essential pre-condition for stability, and vice versa, is at times contradicted by the reality that political and developmental outcomes are often determined by an underlying, hidden political settlement rather than the state’s formal institutions themselves. Recognizing this reality, the FCDO’s ‘elite bargains’ policy highlights how internationally-led conflict prevention and resolution initiatives need to carefully consider in-country dynamics including the informal ways through which resources are allocated, decisions are made, and people are given power.
For the MOD, the good news is that a great deal of conceptual thinking on conflict prevention and peacebuilding was conducted by a UK-led Multinational Capability Development Campaign (MCDC) project in 2013–17, culminating in publication of the military handbook Understand to Prevent. This sought to re-balance the traditional focus on national security through warfighting and crisis response with a complementary focus on human security and prevention of violent conflict. Such an approach has produced examples of best practice elsewhere, for example the Dutch Conflict Prevention Unit and the US Security Governance Initiative. In this way, there is now potential for the MOD to play a supporting role to the UK government similar to that being adopted by the US Department of Defense following the US Global Fragility Act and the Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability. Understand to Prevent offers a method to interpret complex environments, foster relationships, support security for diplomatic and development efforts, and build the capacity of foreign security forces. As an easy first step in doing so, and in light of the renewed emphasis on persistent engagement in the Integrated Review, the MOD must invigorate its prevent doctrine.
The MOD already possesses an engagement capability through its global network
Britain has a long history in the use of non-combat military power overseas to achieve national ends. In the 20th century its use was widespread, diverse and a primary way in which the MOD supported national objectives through the mediums of shared intelligence, technology exchanges, training of indigenous troops, exchange officers and military attachés, and covert influence operations.
In the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review this type of military activity was formalized as ‘defence engagement’ within the government’s invigorated focus on upstream conflict prevention. Defence engagement, currently being re-named as global engagement, is defined as the use of defence personnel and assets overseas short of combat operations to achieve influence internationally, shape the environment, build stability, and prevent conflict in support of the UK’s security and prosperity, all underpinned with the credible threat of hard power. In the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, defence engagement received a policy and resource boost and, with the introduction of persistent engagement overseas in the Integrated Review in 2021, the next step in its evolutionary lifecycle has been taken.
The international defence engagement network is large, far-reaching and adds weight to the UK’s global diplomatic network. The defence command paper announced the expansion of the network by one-third. Permanent defence engagement roles include policy posts in the UK, defence attachés in British embassies and High Commissions, loan service personnel attached to other nations’ armies, exchange officers and liaison officers in other nations’ HQs and NATO, British defence staffs (BDS) coordinating regional engagement activity, British military advisory training teams (BMATT), and British peace support teams (BPST). Total numbers swell considerably when temporary defence engagement roles are included, for example tactical-level short-term training teams (STTT), partner capacity-building, overseas training exercises, and military advisory roles including in security sector reform (SSR). Peacekeeping missions such as the UK military deployment to Mali as part of the United Nations Multidimensional Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) are technically not classified as defence engagement. However, individual knowledge and skills needed to operate in such an environment are relatively common in defence engagement roles.
The point is that all defence engagement roles, both permanent and temporary, ultimately support the achievement of UK policy objectives particularly in building long-term stability and preventing conflict in unstable, weak regions. However, the UK’s defence engagement capability is currently not optimized for this role and it must be enhanced.
The MOD’s global engagement network is not yet optimized for persistent engagement
UK defence engagement has matured over the last decade. Key developments at the defence and Army-levels include the creation of regional points of contact known as British defence staffs; a defence engagement school to train personnel in language, culture, intelligence and security; a new defence engagement career field for better management of personnel; the creation of the British Army’s 77th Brigade as an influence and outreach capability possessing advisers in stabilization, outreach and culture to support defence engagement activity overseas; and, as part of the British Army’s Future Soldier programme, a new Security Force Assistance Brigade and Special Operations Brigade that are designed to strengthen tactical engagement activity below the threshold of combat by building partner capacity and generating influence networks in unstable regions.
This is all encouraging, but there remain issues with the KSE of personnel filling all engagement roles, which limits the overall effectiveness of the MOD’s engagement capability.
First, specialist training is only available to personnel in some defence engagement roles. Defence attachés and their teams receive greatly enhanced training at the defence engagement school and bespoke training is being developed for the new Ranger battalions in the Army Special Operations Brigade. However, there is currently no uniform, tailored and comprehensive professional development programme for personnel in all defence and Army-level engagement roles. A large element of personnel employed in engagement roles, both permanent and temporary, receive limited to no specialist training for their roles.
Instead, the MOD operates a policy of re-purposing individuals’ generalist, mainstream knowledge and experience, forged in the mainstream disciplines of combat and warfighting, to specialist engagement tasks. The assumption is that education and training in this most demanding task equips an individual with sufficient breadth and depth of generalist KSE to be applied to other forms of warfare and also to more specialist roles such as building stability and conflict prevention i.e. doing the former automatically makes you capable of the latter. This phenomenon has been coined by observers as the ‘fallacy of the lesser-included’ on the basis that the two tasks are actually very different, rarely interchangeable, and the outcome of such a generalist approach will always be less than optimal. They argue that a specialist task needs someone with specialist KSE for an optimal outcome.
While individuals will certainly accrue knowledge and experience ‘on the job’, the short length of their assignment means they will never get beyond a perfunctory level of analysis.
The consequences of continuing with a generalist approach are potentially far-reaching: through their inexperience individuals are more likely to misinterpret the dynamics of their operating environment; they are more likely to design and execute tasks in complex environments poorly; they may select the incorrect or inappropriate partner for the UK; and they will miss opportunities. Poor continuity between personnel rotating through engagement assignments at a high rate risks them reaching different and contradictory interpretations of the nature of the objective and the ways to achieve it. Not only does this risk confusing partners but it sows seeds of doubt over the UK’s long-term objectives and its commitment.
Second, the career structures in the British Army, as the major supplier of individuals to the engagement network, are not fit for purpose for more specialist tasks like engagement. A large majority of individuals assigned to defence engagement roles have no prior experience of engagement let alone building stability and conflict prevention, and assignments are normally short in duration. An individual’s contextual understanding of a region, its political and socio-cultural dynamics, key actors and networks, and their grasp of the potential tools for addressing the causes of instability will be superficial at best. While individuals will certainly accrue knowledge and experience ‘on the job’, the short length of their assignment means they will never get beyond a perfunctory level of analysis leading to the concomitant risk that their progress assessments are over-optimistic, meaningless or misleading.
On completion of an engagement assignment, it is common for personnel not to be re-employed in the same region and a large majority are never re-employed in the engagement career field. Any KSE and understanding accrued in the role will be lost to the MOD as an organization with consequences for its collective understanding. The underlying cause of all these issues is that engagement individuals are not part of a distinct, coherent body and they lack clear leadership and sponsorship, identity, ethos, career structure and policies, and a management framework. Other nations are distinctive for the heightened emphasis they place on developing specialists for engagement roles, which serves to highlight the competitive nature of understanding and the potential opportunity costs for the UK:
Third, the management of specialist knowledge is weak despite the emphasis in the Integrated Review and Fusion Doctrine on securing a position of advantage through greater integration across government, allies and society. Currently there is no formal, routine mechanism for connecting engagement individuals to networks of expertise or ‘knowledge networks’ comprising external thematic and regional experts in government, the private sector, NGOs, academia, retired military and experts in-country. Access to external networks would assist individuals in preparation for their assignment, act as an alternative source of advice during it, avoid the risk of repeated mistakes as roles pass from person to person, and enhance the MOD’s long-term institutional memory.
Fourth, there remains a perception among UK military personnel that employment in the engagement career stream equates to a step out of mainstream military employment with potential to damage promotion and career prospects. Recent research found that the incentives and career rewards for individuals in combat forces to commit to international training and engagement roles are questionable and indistinct, and specialist skills are not valued by the hierarchy. Currently an individual who has demonstrated an aptitude for the defence engagement career field and accrued extensive specialist KSE is not guaranteed recognition and reward commensurate to peers in other career fields. Even if this is more a perception than a reality, the effect is that individuals are discouraged from volunteering for defence engagement assignments and the pool of available talent is diluted. A better incentivization system is required.
