On Sunday 5 February 2023, the ACRPS held a public lecture organized by the Unit of State and Political Systems Studies and the Strategic Studies Unit titled “Security Assistance to MENA: Reinventing a Cold War Legacy in Light of the Ukraine War and Hybrid Challenges”. The presenter was Dr Robert Springborg, Research Fellow at the Italian Institute of International Affairs and former Program Manager for the Middle East at the Center for Civil-Military Relations, who clarified that his talk would be based on a new book he co-edited with Hicham Alaoui on security assistance.

Springborg began by explaining that the book is the culmination of a research project by a group of specialist contributors, many of whom are from the Arab region, whose chapters illustrate the model of contemporary security assistance from the West to the MENA region. It addresses an array of questions as to this assistance and its roles, which often extend beyond supporting militaries and into political spaces now associated with the persistence of despotism and the causes of regional conflict.

Because the model for security assistance to the MENA, Springborg argued, has not sufficiently evolved from its Cold War legacy to meet today’s challenges, the lecture explored the history of assistance to the region, especially in relation to peace between Egypt and Israel and to Gulf security since the invasion of Kuwait. He presented the theoretical approaches to the question of why this assistance model has faltered and its impact on the balance of provider-recipient relations.

This model relies on the potential to replace “Western boots on the ground” with a new strategy of “building partner capacity”, but this process has faced significant difficulties. Most importantly, there are profound disconnects between the providers of security assistance and its Middle Eastern recipients, in addition to the paradox of provider states – established democracies – supporting fledgling dictatorships and using assistance to strengthen these regimes to the point of gaining access to instruments of war with great destructive potential. Springborg traced developments in this process and presented cases that illustrate how its efficacy came into question, stressing that these critiques have laid the groundwork for a multifaceted review of the modes of security assistance and presented new means to sidestep its shortcomings. Extending to the present day, this discussion drew upon lessons learned from the war in Ukraine to explore ways to improve security assistance outcomes for providers and recipients alike.

The lecture, held in the ACRPS lecture hall as part of a research workshop by the Unit of State and Political Systems Studies, saw high turnout and engagement with Springborg’s theoretical and practical contributions; many researchers, members of faculty, graduate students in Critical Security Studies and Political Science, as well as online attendees (via Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) posed their questions. Discussion moderator Dr Omar Ashour, Director of the ACRPS Strategic Studies Unit and Chair of the Critical Security Studies Programme at the Doha Institute, closed the discussion by reaffirming the growing trend toward the study of security assistance. Ashour also stressed the importance of Arab scholars engaging with the various aspects of the topic and considering its outcomes comparatively – whether through successes, failures, or mixed cases – at both the military-military level (i.e., the competence of armies and allied militias) and the domestic politics level of countries in which defence and security institutions dominate governance.