Inviting Intervention: Statebuilding by Delegating Security

Aila Matanock, University of California, Berkeley

Research Grant, 2023

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My Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation–funded project examines delegation agreements as a form of cooperative statebuilding. Delegation agreements are arrangements where host states invite foreign actors to temporarily assume authority over security governance, including the implementation of reforms in security institutions. This project fundamentally explores the circumstances under which such agreements arise and the agreements’ implications for long-term security outcomes.

The core of this project has three dimensions: developing a typology of all invited interventions, with a particular focus on delegation agreements that provide for reform of security institutions; building a theoretical framework to understand the adoption of these agreements as well as how their design shapes security outcomes over time; and collecting and analyzing multiple types of data to test the empirical implications of delegation agreements.

This project fundamentally explores the circumstances under which [delegation] agreements arise and the agreements’ implications for long-term security outcomes.

The funding from The HFG Foundation facilitated work on a book manuscript that developed the typology and theoretical framework, as well as the first systematic dataset on delegation agreements, which codes cross-national data on all invited interventions in security institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1980 to 2015. The manuscript posits that delegation agreements—the most intrusive form of invited intervention because they provide for reform of state security institutions—are mainly driven by domestic leaders facing internal crises where tying their own hands is useful for enacting hard changes to stabilize security institutions. Foreign sovereign entities are willing partners in these deals because of their concerns about transnational threats. The evidence, including the patterns in the new cross-national dataset, supports these empirical implications. This project not only enhances our understanding of delegation agreements and shared sovereignty more broadly, but it also provides insights for policymakers considering how to reform security institutions, including by highlighting some of the challenges and limitations of this method of statebuilding.