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This chapter looks at the army building in three very different political environments: the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), and the civil war in El Salvador (1979–92). Although the objective in both Bosnia and El Salvador was to develop a democratic army in the wake of the civil war, it has not been achieved fully in either setting. Lebanon is unique not just in the category of post-civil war army building but because it is an outlier in the entire group of twenty-seven cases studied in two important respects. First, in the first fifteen years after the civil war, a foreign army of Syria controlled some of Lebanon's territory and was instrumental in rebuilding the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Second, aside from the state-controlled LAF, another local, contending or complementary and yet legitimate military force has functioned in the country: the militia of Hezbollah, a Shi'a Islamist political and paramilitary organization.

This chapter begins the examination of whether international humanitarian law is an appropriate legal framework that can be applied to extraterritorial force against non-state actors. This includes both the possibilities of such measures being categorised as international armed conflict and non-international armed conflict. The notion of non-international conflicts as including extra-territorial circumstances is considered, as are the criteria for determination of such conflicts, including threshold of violence and identification of the parties to the conflict.

This chapter utilises the analysis conducted throughout the book, and applies it in the context of two cases. The first is the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. The second is the targeted killings conducted by the US in Yemen and Pakistan. The rules of the ius ad bellum are examined, as are the rules regulating the use of force, whether human rights law or international humanitarian law. The chapter concludes with a summary of the analysis and identification of the challenges yet to be resolved.

In campaigns involving suicide terrorism, individual operatives and parent societies can rarely ‘surrender’ in the conventional wartime sense; however, terrorist organizations sometimes terminate their campaigns. The reasons why they do so are widely misunderstood. This overview begins with the Assassins and moves through the history of suicide terrorism. It explains the surprising findings of research done on hundreds of modern groups, with case studies on the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict examined in greater depth. The conclusion discusses the unique challenges, especially for democracies, of compelling groups that use suicide terrorism to end their operations and surrender.

Hamas and Hezbollah are often perceived and categorized as being alike, as a result of similarities in their organizational structure, ideology, and activities. They exhibit comparable characteristics, as they both represent sociopolitical agendas while adhering to ideological paradigms of political Islamism. Attitudes and perceptions of the Middle East generally conform to an “intellectual laziness” or assumption of the unchanging and often static nature of regional actors, state and nonstate alike. A more productive research endeavor is concerned with why nonstate actors (NSAs) have emerged as an alternative form of governance in the region of the Middle East. The formation and development of the two organizations are a consequence of the spillover or “multiplier” effects stemming from two “big bangs”: the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the collective failure of the Arab states in the June 1967 War.

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in 2006. The genre of language employed in the coverage of the conflict in Arab media channels reveals their political and ideological orientations. The analysis shows that the channels adopted different strategies in producing their text/discourses and demonstrated how Arabic channels have shown different approaches in the way they report conflicts. As the analysis shows, Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Al-Hurra have used different discourses to represent the content and meaning of the news. Al-Hurra and Al-Arabiya have shown some similarities in their coverage of the conflict, and this is manifested in their selection of lexis to represent different parties in the conflict. Both channels seem to cover the conflict, taking into account their sponsors' stance. Al-Jazeera's strategy is different. Its coverage of the conflict could be seen to be from an Arab perspective.

Tony Blair's foreign policy following the invasion of Iraq continued to display the features of a high perceived degree of influence over events, certainty in the framing of issues, and the use of tightly held decision-making processes, coupled with a determined closeness to the United States. Blair's room for manoeuvre was quite narrow during this late period of his prime ministership—having staked his career on Iraq and involved the British state in a war against the better judgment of much of the domestic political scene, he would have found it very difficult to recant the decision or resile from its consequences. The dynamics that had emerged in the run up to war—an eager prime minister seeking to rationalize and multilateralise US policy without having a very compelling hand to play—continued into the postwar phase. The extent to which Iraq had damaged Blair's standing in the UK, but conversely had strengthened his core foreign policy convictions, was manifest in the summer 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war.

This chapter revisits the most commonly cited examples in history of terrorism paying politically. If even these cases fail to illustrate the political effectiveness of terrorism then that would further undermine the evidentiary basis of the Strategic Model. Many scholars point to the political successes of the Irgun, African National Congress, and Hezbollah as evidence that terrorism is an effective instrument of coercion. Yet these campaigns did not coerce the occupying powers to withdraw by attacking their civilians. Instead, the groups focused their attacks on military and other government targets. This chapter shows that people overestimate the value of terrorist campaigns by lumping them together with guerrilla campaigns that have been far more successful.

This chapter looks at George W. Bush's second term, during which the administration supported Palestinian elections that brought Hamas—a Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist organization—to power. This resulted to the anomalous situation in which Bush could declare the Palestinian elections to have been “free, fair and democratic” but also vow that the United States would not deal with Hamas unless it changed its policies and its involvement in terrorism. Meanwhile, the Lebanon War in 2006—initially supported by the administration as offering the possibility of defeating Hezbollah—gave way to Israeli despair and demands from Arab moderates for the United States to reengage in peacemaking. Bush then organized the Annapolis conference in November 2007, wherein the administration promoted a new opportunity to negotiate a conflict-ending agreement and set a one-year deadline, but then assumed a noninterventionist posture. In the end, nothing was concluded.

This chapter describes the many social actors involved in urban planning for two informal settlements in the same southern suburb of Beirut. It studies resident committees that support Hezbollah and organize basic public services in return for municipal financial support, and Jihad al-Binaa, the branch of Hezbollah in charge of building basic infrastructure. Hezbollah's refusal to invest in the urban renewal of informal settlements, because it considers that to be a duty of the state, is detrimental to economic development in this coastal area, which has great economic potential.

This chapter examines Saudi Arabia and Egypt's threat perception and policies of this type of ideational threat during the 1990s and 2000s. This chapter shows that ideational power can threaten indirectly through symbolic policies that have communicative political value. Moreover, ideational balancing by Saudi Arabia and Egypt took on more of a coordinated effort as seen in how Riyadh and Cairo framed the Iranian threat in sectarian terms. This securitization of sectarianism attempted to coordinate policies at the domestic and international levels and had slightly different meanings for each state. While it would seem that Iran's pursuit of its nuclear program should trigger traditional forms of balancing (which it did), this chapter points out how fears of this development enhanced the ideational threat and reaction at home. Lastly, these developments further demonstrate how the ideational security dilemma can be destabilizing.

Israeli diplomatic delegations have frequently been targeted by terrorist attacks. The Israeli state has established a single overarching approach against this violent campaign, choosing the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) as the leading organization tasked with countering attacks against both diplomatic missions and other civilian objectives abroad. The ISA has been crucial in enhancing Israel’s diplomatic security by providing intelligence and armed personnel to protect missions abroad.

While the TSR has acted as a coordinating mechanism, the limits of its reach were demonstrated by the Syrian civil war. Israel’s initial reluctance to get heavily involved was in marked contrast to the aid given by Riyadh to its proxies. Only with Iran and its militias operating ever closer to the Golan Heights did Israel scale up its intervention both overtly and covertly.

This chapter investigates Assad's allies, particularly Iran, and their support for the regime. From the beginning of Syria's civil war, Assad's allies were more willing to ensure the regime's survival than those states that wished to hasten its fall. For the first four years, Iran was by far Assad's most important ally. Major General Qassem Suleimani led a major reorganisation of the regime's forces, brought in Hezbollah and other Shia militias, and directed key aspects of military strategy. Financial and military support prevented the regime from collapsing under pressure, while Iran and Hezbollah's role significantly contributed to sectarianising the conflict. Such deep involvement by Assad's allies greatly impacted the shape of the Syrian civil war.

This chapter examines the implications of Iran's nuclear development for hybrid warfare and deterrence of nonstate and rogue actors. Nuclear weapons will greatly enhance Iran's ability to conduct hybrid warfare with a broad range of instruments through a combination of techniques from asymmetric and irregular warfare. These include the use of nonstate armed groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, together with high-end military technologies such as cyberwarfare capabilities, missiles, and, potentially, nuclear weapons. This chapter considers how Iran is using asymmetric operations to strike at soft targets as well as covert financial and political campaigns to enhance its influence and undermine that of the United States in and beyond the Middle East. In particular, it looks at the activities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Qods Force elements outside Iran. It also suggests strategies for deterring rogue elements or nonstate armed groups based on a combination of deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial. Finally, it discusses twenty-first-century deterrence planning based on the three heuristic models of a nuclear Iran: a Defensive Iran, an Aggressive Iran, and an Unstable Iran.