ARMED-2021/02/18 1 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION WEBINAR NONSTATE ARMED ACTORS AND THE U.S. GLOBAL FRAGILITY STRATEGY: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES Washington, D.C. Thursday, February 18, 2021 PARTICIPANTS: Keynote: STEPHANIE TURCO WILLIAMS Former Acting Special Representative of the Secretary General in Libya United Nations Support Mission in Libya Panelists: MODERATOR: VANDA FELBAB-BROWN Senior Fellow and Director, Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors The Brookings Institution FRANCES Z. BROWN Senior Fellow, Democracy, Governance and Conflict Program Carnegie Endowment for International Peace GEORGE INGRAM Senior Fellow, Center for Sustainable Development The Brookings Institution PATRICK QUIRK Nonresident Fellow, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology The Brookings Institution * * * * * ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 600 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 ARMED-2021/02/18 2 P R O C E E D I N G S MS. FELBAB-BROWN: We have an extraordinary set of speakers, starting with a keynote by Ms. Stephanie Williams, who, until recently, was the acting special representative of the U.N. secretary general in Libya, and followed by a very knowledgeable panel, consisting of Dr. Patrick Quirk, of the International Republican Institute, and also my colleague at Brookings, Dr. Frances Brown, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Dr. George Ingram, another distinguished colleague of mine, at Brookings. I will introduce each of our speakers in more detail, later on. Nonstate armed actors, be they militants, terrorist, criminal groups, or pro-government militias, have been a defining feature of international relations and U.S. foreign policy for the past two decades. Efforts to prevent their emergence and the emergence of violent conflict, or at least to mitigate their effects and improve government, has been at the center of U.S. and international stabilization effort, from wars in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, to areas of intense highly violent criminality, such as in the Northern Triangle of Central America. However, many of the stabilization efforts have often been challenging to implement, and often been challenged by competing priorities. In 2019, nonetheless, the U.S. Congress recognized the crucial importance of stabilization efforts, elevating them to a level of law, when it the passed the Global Fragility Act, that the Biden administration will now be implementing. In the -- a few recent years, geopolitical situation has changed, and now intersects with the issue of nonstate armed actors. Heightened rivalries and power competition, the rise of the centrality of the Indo-Pacific Region, however, in no way eliminate the role, impact, and indeed profound effect of nonstate armed actors. The new geopolitics merely adds new layers to the issue and new complexities, as actors, such as China and Russia, are or will be increasingly interacting with nonstate armed actors. Sometimes, fielding nonstate armed actors, such as private security companies, themselves, and as many other actors in the international system, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, also, engage with them. But of course, it’s not just external actors who engage with nonstate armed actors, local governments do so, too, either by sponsoring militias that combat some of the criminal groups or militant ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 600 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 ARMED-2021/02/18 3 groups or terrorist groups or use nonstate armed actors for delivering governance in areas that they are not able or willing to do so, themselves. Examples abound from Bangladesh, Nigeria, to Colombia, Venezuela, and Jamaica. The COVID-19 pandemic is yet another significant factor in the relationship between states and nonstate armed actors, changing the balance of power between the two toward nonstate armed actors. Around the world, governments have faced catastrophic collapse of GDP. In many countries, the level of economic decline are in levels unseen, really, since World War II (inaudible) 8%, 10% of GDP. The weakening of budget, of course, means that there will be further strain for resources to be devoted to police and law enforcement or even military actions, but we also need to recognize that many of these efforts struggled, even prior to COVID. At the same time, the stabilization efforts that helped us on improving good governance, improving economic livelihoods, trying to generate economic livelihoods will also be affected. At the time when the first year of COVID pushed some 150 million people into extreme poverty, and often did so in ways, in which those that have lost their status in lower-middle class, that have been pushed back into extreme poverty, did so in ways that required them to liquidate all of their human capital development assets. That means -- they may no longer be able to recover their status, even when the economies of the countries start growing, and they may languish in the context of lack of legal employment, often pushed into illicit economies, and thus the hands of nonstate armed actors, for perhaps even a generation. This, too, strengthens nonstate armed actors by giving them political capital and by strengthening their grip on local populations that are governed, and this is not simply a phenomenon of weak countries. We see the impact of COVID strengthening nonstate armed actors, even in the United States. Right-wing armed groups in the U.S. very actively capitalize on COVID, as did right-wing armed groups in Europe. However, amidst this overall difficult and -- picture, there is one bright spot that has recently emerged, and that bright spot is Libya, a country that, 10 years ago, experienced a revolution ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 600 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 ARMED-2021/02/18 4 that deposed the Muammar Gaddafi Regime, and what, after the past decade, then was a seemingly intractable tangle of divided political class, a multitude of fluid militias, both internal and external, and complexities and rivalry of regional powers, since October, now seems to be experiencing a great window of opportunity to achieve significant improvements, and this window of opportunity has only be strengthened in February. To a large extent, this window of opportunity has risen as a result of a joined persistent, dedicated, and innovative facilitation, international mediation and facilitation, by the international community. There is no better person to start us in the conversation about fragility, stabilization effort, and nonstate armed actors than Ms. Stephanie Williams, who has been one of the key architects of international mediation efforts in Libya. Until a few days ago, Ms. Williams served as the acting special representative of the U.N. secretary general in Libya, having previously served as the U.N. special deputy representative for political affairs. Ms. Williams has a distinguished career in the U.S. State Department, with many different deployments and assignments in the Middle East. I will highlight just a few. She was a chargé d’affaires, in the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, in 2018. She also served as deputy chief of mission in the U.S. missions in Iraq, Jordan, and Bahrain. Ms. Williams, I am so thrilled and honored that you can join us today. I’m so impressed. A hearty congratulations on your tremendous work in Libya. Please tell us about the experience and lessons there. The floor is yours. MS. WILLIAMS: Thank you so much. Thanks so much for this Brookings invitation, and -- and you, Vanda, and I really look forward to the discussion part of this event. So, I -- but I will start on a bit of a contrarian note, as I’d actually like to challenge the use of the word nonstate actor in the Libyan context because really, in my view, what dominates in Libya are quasi-state actors, in the form of hundreds of armed groups, at the national, provincial, and even local level, that are either directly or indirectly supported by state institutions. And then we get -- the state institutions, themselves, are weakened and divided, as you noted. In the case of the Government of National Accord, the so-called GNA, which was the product of the 2015 Libyan Political Agreement, while it enjoys international recognition, as the U.N. recognized government, it has lacked a domestic legitimacy, and has been, in many ways, unable to extend its writ, ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 600 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 ARMED-2021/02/18 5 much beyond the Capital. In the case that there’s a parallel executive in the East, the interim government, while it was able to garner some domestic legislative recognition, it also lacks significant popular legitimacy. So, in fact, one can say that all, you know, current institutions in Libya are bereft of legitimacy, including the two legislative bodies, which are way beyond their shelf life, the last elections, for instance, for the High State Council, occurred in 2012, and the last elections for the House of Representatives took place in 2014. So, fundamentally, we -- the country suffers from a crisis of legitimacy. The quasi-state actors, the armed groups, have morphed, you know, from the days of the Revolution, to really become groups that are able to extract rent from the state, directly, via salaries, and in the case of some powerful armed groups, they’re able to enjoy really a straight -- a direct budget line, a dedicated and independent budget, bypassing the ministries, such as the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Defense, or the Ministry of Justice. These groups then benefit directly from a relationship to the Presidency Council, as is the case of many or most of the prominent Tripoli armed groups.