A twenty-first century foreign policy for Canada in the Middle East and North Africa

Tackling twenty-first century threats

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, numerous new international security threats have emerged across the world, from state collapse to environmental migration to ethnic conflict contagion. ³ It is thus no accident that some of the most important research in security studies over the past two decades has focused on new threats, pushing scholars to challenge conventional wisdoms and identify innovative approaches. This ground-breaking research has moved away from simplified state-based analytical models, and offers indispensable tools for understanding the many new and powerful actors operating in contemporary conflict zones.

This cutting edge scholarship has special relevance for the MENA region. The most pressing problems in the region today are complex, multi-actor, and cross-border conflicts, steeped in identity politics and historical rivalries. For example, it is impossible to understand Iranian regional security policies without detailed knowledge about how the Iran–Iraq War shaped the identities and interests of the Iranian Revolutionary military and intelligence establishments. ⁴ Likewise, in order to properly understand the rise and evolution of Sunni jihadist groups in northern Lebanon, we must understand both the internal sectarian conflicts in Lebanon and the long-standing role of Syria as a regional power in dominating Lebanese politics. ⁵ Making sense of these complex conflicts requires sophisticated and modern analytical instruments.

Most importantly, we cannot understand the modern MENA region by looking solely at states. In every single politically fraught MENA country, there are diverse non-state and transnational groups that play significant roles in these conflicts. Ethnic and tribal insurgents, paramilitary forces, competing jihadist factions, revolutionary social movements, and transnational criminal networks all help to construct violent conflict dynamics both within and across state borders. These unconventional actors often have greater influence than the many weak, fragile, and divided states in the region.

The diversity of these actors is a reflection of how complex the security challenges in the MENA region are. These crises have been perpetuated by the erosion of long-standing authoritarian regimes, the incomplete revolutionary processes of the Arab Spring, the rise of new insurgent groups, the emergence of persistent and lucrative war economies, the elite manipulation of identity-based grievances, the use of proxy militias by regional and global powers, and the cyclical formation and collapse of both ethno-nationalist and jihadist proto-state polities within and across state borders. This is a game of four-dimensional chess, played blindfolded, in a minefield.

These volatile flashpoints have global spill-over effects that affect Canada. It is false comfort to imagine that problems in the MENA region cannot hurt Canadian interests, due to either geographic distance or the limited ability of these actors to engage in overseas attacks. The hard truth is that the contemporary security challenges that Canada faces are transnational, and cannot be divorced from the conflict processes that are ongoing in faraway places. To start, when it comes to containing modern jihadist groups, the ideas that have motivated these groups are inherently transnational, and spread not just regionally, but also internationally. The militant non-state armed groups that are active in the MENA region work to spread these ideologies across borders and around the world. ⁶ For these extremist groups, their conflict is not simply defined by the physical battlefield in the MENA region, but also by their ideological battlefield on the world stage. Their ideological goals are not only to spread their toxic and apocalyptic ideas to potential supporters around the world, but also to undermine the fundamental values of liberal democracies around the world by inciting anti-Muslim and xenophobic hatred. ⁷ A forward-thinking Canadian foreign policy towards the MENA region must consider how ideational contagion effects shape and define both domestic and international security.

Furthermore, it is worth considering that many of these non-state militant groups are themselves highly innovative in their recruitment and radicalization strategies. ⁸ These groups seek out novel ways of using homegrown and transnational terrorist acts to incite xenophobic overreactions, again, hoping their violence will cause us to abandon our liberal democratic values of inclusion, adopt new anti-immigrant policies at home, and pursue more oppressive interventions abroad. Understanding these motivations is essential to ensuring that Canada’s responses to militant and terrorist provocations do not inadvertently give hostile actors exactly what they want. ⁹

This sort of nuanced foreign policy decision-making requires detailed knowledge of new security dynamics. Our understanding of threats must adapt to a twenty-first century reality. There is no longer a clear line between international and national security, and we cannot claim that faraway problems are not Canadian problems, even if we very much wish to avoid these fraught and complicated regions. In order to successfully stay out of this trouble, we need to first understand how conflict abroad, especially in the MENA region, does have a direct effect on Canada.

Fortunately, Canadian academics are well positioned to help Canadian decision-makers better understand these complex conflict processes. How scholars support the policy community, however, should be based on the unique security challenges of the MENA region. Given the multitude of actors, ideologies, and interests at play in these conflict zones, I argue that Canadian foreign policymakers would benefit far more from engaging with cutting-edge research on the new security threats that are prevalent in the MENA region, rather than with broad and generalized International Relations (IR) theories that are ill-suited to provide policy advice.

From theory to practice?

As the international community struggles to contain threats emanating from the MENA region, security and policy experts around the world are eager for analytical tools to help them deal with these challenges. Because these are extremely complex problems, some analysts have sought comfort in the conventional idea that Canada can revert to a classic state-based approach and “pursue its interests” from afar. ¹⁰ A deeper look at the facts, however, shows that adopting this type of broad realist theoretical approach to the MENA region provides little practical utility.

In fact, of all of the classic theoretical paradigms in IR, realism offers the least useful set of a priori conceptual tools to help Canadian foreign policymakers understand and respond to the twenty-first century security challenges in the MENA region. Though popular during the height of the Cold War, the realist approach fails to shed light on the most crucial problems affecting the MENA region, including non-state armed groups, transnational movements, fragmented states, identity-based conflicts, apocalyptic ideological extremism, and complex environmental and humanitarian crises that provoke mass migration. Even if we look at these relationships from only the perspective of the Canadian state, in concrete analytical terms, there is still no coherent set of fixed preferences or interests that Canada has across cases in the entire MENA region. Defining Canada’s interests using vague, general terms such as “security” and “prosperity” cannot effectively guide policy-making; decision-makers must turn to more precise analytical instruments to understand and respond to the complex crises in the MENA region.

The harsh reality is that there is no such thing as a simplified model that can help Canada understand and engage these multi-actor, cross-border security problems. Traditional IR theories fail to consider the majority of relevant actors on the ground, and also incorrectly diagnose their interests in these theatres. Using these sorts of blunt analytical tools leads to dangerously oversimplified policy recommendations, such as supporting Saudi Arabia to contain Iran. While Iran is no friend to Canada, Saudi Arabia is a risky and unreliable partner that is currently engrossed in religious extremism and illegal aggressive warfare. Blindly backing Saudi power in the region, while failing to consider the ideological and sectarian politics at play in the theatre, can inadvertently drag Canada into dangerous, prolonged religious wars that have neither a strategic rationale nor a moral purpose. Oversimplified tools lead us to the wrong conclusions. In order to properly understand, explain, predict, and respond to these complex crises, we have no choice but to embrace the complexity of each theatre and sub-theatre.

From a purely academic standpoint, it is worth noting that constructivist research in international security takes seriously the roles of ideology, identity politics, and non-state actors, and is thus better equipped to shed light on these conflict processes. ¹¹ The fact that constructivist models are based on mutually constitutive causal mechanisms also better suits the many long-term conflict and war economy dynamics that have emerged in the MENA region. For example, to make sense of the Iraqi and Syrian conflict, constructivist theoretical tools can help us to map tribal and insurgent groups on top of regionalized criminal networks, so that we can properly identify and diagnose cycles of destruction in this theatre. ¹² Even inter-state conflicts in the MENA region are better explained using a complex systems approach. For example, constructivism helps us unpack how sectarian and identity politics have driven conflict processes between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and have reshaped the regional sub-system in a violent competition for ideological supremacy. ¹³ Without question, constructivist theoretical tools help us better understand the most pressing problems in the MENA region, from the deeply fragmented insurgencies in Iraq and Syria to the regional power standoff between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Nonetheless, no IR theory, no matter how useful for academics, should be used as a guide for Canadian foreign policy. Neither realism nor constructivism is a foreign policy approach. To the contrary, IR theories are heuristic and analytical devices used by scholars to identify patterns of behaviour on the world stage. The utility of each IR theory should be measured by how well it can explain and predict processes, not whether or not it can be used to instruct state behaviour. The only useful purpose of IR theory for decision-makers is to help them achieve a more sophisticated understanding of patterns and processes on the world stage, so that they can then make more nuanced and appropriate policy choices.

In practical terms, the way Canadian foreign policy is actually constructed is quite dynamic. Policies are shaped by a number of different inputs, including case-specific information from policy analysts, senior-level input from deputy ministers and the military elite, and assessment agencies that provide the government with analytical context. Expert consultation further helps our decision-makers better understand the granular details of the situation on the ground. Party politics also shape how a sitting government chooses to engage on the world stage. In some cases, even the politics of personality can affect outcomes, especially in cases where the prime minister takes on a personal mission.

These decisions are also not solely determined by elite circles of government. Public opinion and lobby groups play a significant role in our decisions about deployment and engagement, and a change in public opinion can affect elite decision-making. Indeed, some scholars have argued that public opinion was one of the key reasons that Canada stayed out of the disastrous 2003 Iraq War and instead supported the lawful UN-authorized mission in Afghanistan. ¹⁴ At this critical juncture, the input of the Canadian public proved to be a rational check on our decision-making process, resulting in a wiser and more prudent outcome.

Each of these inputting nodes—both inside and outside of government—can have a disproportionate influence on the formation of foreign policy, depending on the question at hand. At no point, however, does this process involve the discussion or consideration of broad IR theories. On the contrary, our role as academics in this process is to provide detailed, ground-level insights based on our theoretically sophisticated research, to provide rich knowledge of the specific cases and regions that our decision-makers seek to understand. This scholarly support can better inform our policy community, which is responsible for making nuanced decisions about these challenging conflict theatres.

Going deep, not broad

Given the extreme fragmentation and contagion dynamics in the MENA region, the most sensible way for Canada to devise its foreign and defence policies is through detailed, ground-level knowledge of each specific case, and an honest reflection on the cyclical, mutually constitutive conflict dynamics that shape and construct these conflict theatres. Thankfully, scholars investigating these crises at ground level have already produced an explosion of ground-breaking research on rebel-on-rebel violence, insurgent group alliances and fragmentation, state failure, international interventions, and civil war contagion that can help with this task. ¹⁵ Canadian foreign policy experts can draw valuable lessons from this new international security literature, as well as from area studies experts with detailed knowledge of each respective theatre.

In this way, theory-driven research can be tremendously beneficial for policymakers. For example, the latest research on rebel loyalties teaches us that whether or not fighters will defect or desert, or whether or not insurgent groups will split or remain cohesive, depends largely on how heterogeneous or homogeneous their units are. ¹⁶ This is crucial information for Canadian foreign policymakers; a faulty assessment of these identity politics can result in a massive proliferation of spoiler groups, and thus a longer and more deadly war. ¹⁷ Scholars also know how competition over resources, including foreign aid, affects insurgent violence and civil war duration. ¹⁸ This information is vital to Canadian decision-makers: before launching an aid campaign, it is essential to know which groups have co-opted lucrative trafficking networks.

Mapping how these unconventional actors interact to create nodes of conflict is the key to understanding complex crises. This requires innovative approaches to international security, which tear down traditional disciplinary boundaries. For example, for decades, scholars believed that drug trafficking was a question for criminologists, not for security experts, but this mode of thinking is now outdated. Today, all savvy security scholars agree that the conceptual boundaries between transnational crime and international security are imaginary. ¹⁹ No one can begin to make sense of jihadist insurgency in northern Mali without also knowing how these groups are connected to Latin American drug cartels.

This is an important new approach to problem-solving, well suited to dealing with pressing twenty-first century crises. As scholars, we no longer speak from a pulpit atop of an icy intellectual mountain. Virtually all cutting-edge research on complex security crises has an interdisciplinary element: we work together, across fields and sub-fields, to solve problems that can only be addressed through a team effort. While I may have expertise on jihadist groups and civil war economies, I need my colleagues who specialize in climate change models and migration patterns in West Africa to help me make sense of the human smuggling routes. Only together can we complete the picture.

Because of the complex conflict dynamics in the MENA region, Canada would also benefit greatly by engaging with area specialists with deep linguistic and cultural knowledge to inform its foreign policy decision-making. To that end, Canada has an exciting opportunity to tap into and cultivate its extraordinarily diverse and well-educated expert community, so that our perspectives on key regions are the most informed in the world. We need not recycle our preconceived notions within closed circles of government, nor do we need to rely on a limited pool of specialists. Our PhD programs are stocked full of young Canadian scholars with ties around the world, who speak multiple languages and have conducted astonishing fieldwork and data analysis. Our base of scholars and experts in Canada is remarkable, and we are well positioned to draw from their expert insights. Embracing a team-based approach, which capitalizes on and supports our country’s diverse expert community, would improve efficiency and success in our foreign policy decision-making.

This team-based approach also inspires us to share the responsibility of public service consultation among a diverse group of experts. As scholars, acknowledging the limits of our expertise is crucial. Because of resource and network constraints, academics are often under pressure to speak about issues outside of our knowledge base. The time I spent in Lebanon does not make me an expert on Syria or Iraq. My research on the Lebanese–Syrian border region does not give me sufficient insight into the conflict processes in Aleppo, and to advise policymakers from a vantage point outside the relevant theatre would be dangerous and irresponsible. When the lives of our Canadian men and women in uniform are at stake, our professional duty is to ensure that decisions that affect our troops are made with the highest regard to the details of the field environment.

As such, when we reach the limits of our knowledge, and other experts who have spent time on the ground are readily available to chime in, our job is to help our government decision-makers to expand their networks, welcome new and diverse voices, and collect the best and most useful scholarly information from the field. All of us in security studies have academic colleagues who have spent time in conflict zones, on the ground, during current crises. Sharing our networks of experts with the Canadian foreign policy community would give our decision-makers a tremendous advantage.

Academics can and should play an important supporting role to help shape and inform foreign policy choices. Cutting-edge scholarly research can help Canadian decision-makers evaluate how military or non-military interventions—whether by Canada or its allies—can directly or indirectly affect conflict processes in the MENA region. Our research on the ground can help identify the critical links between transnational criminal networks, identity-based movements, and fragmented insurgent groups. These path-breaking areas of research offer essential insights to help Canadian foreign policymakers better understand these complex conflicts, and thus more carefully decide how best to proceed. With this support from scholars, Canada can devise a forward-thinking foreign and defence policy that responds to these evolving global conditions.

The future of Canada in the MENA region

A sustainable, forward-thinking, twenty-first century Canadian foreign policy towards the MENA region must embrace the complexity and interconnectivity that shape conflict processes both within and across state borders. Our approach must be grounded in deep contextual ground-level analysis of specific theatres, with special attention to the complex and evolving interactions between multiple state and non-state actors. To do so, we need a team-based approach to problem-solving, drawing from experts across disciplines to better counsel and support our decision-makers in government.

Working in teams is already a big part of how Canada approaches its foreign policy. For decades, we have adopted a multilateral approach to foreign policy, working with our allies and other like-minded states to maintain the post-1945 liberal international order and promote the rule of law on the world stage. ²⁰ We never send our troops into battle alone. Rather, we have positioned ourselves as team players who work with others on missions of global agreement, in line with international principles and laws, and typically under a UN mandate. Our security interests are thus fundamentally and inseparably tied to this multilateral approach, which keeps Canadians safe and allows our government to punch above its weight on the world stage.

Reflecting on our established record of multilateral engagement, it is clear that Canada has always sought out a forward-thinking, progressive, and cooperative approach to foreign policy. ²¹ We do not selfishly pursue state security interests at the expense of our allies and friends, because as a mid-sized power, it is in our interests to be cooperative and collegial on the world stage. Soft power makes us strong.

Looking to the future, Canada will need to maintain this spirit of cooperation in any and all of our engagements in the MENA region. Even when we decide not to engage, which may indeed be often, we must weigh the impact of our choices on the region, our allies, and other states. What happens to the rest of the world matters to Canada, because Canada has a deep and abiding interest in maintaining our liberal international order and the rule of law. And so, Canada’s foreign policy approach towards the Middle East and North Africa must continue to work with our partners and allies in the preservation of world order.

This is simply good Canadian sense.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.