Robert D. Lamb, a doctoral student in the School of Public Policy working at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), was lead author of a Defense Department report that is now being used as the basis for a war game and a Congressionally mandated report on ungoverned areas. Lamb was detailed to the Pentagon through an agreement with the University of Maryland so that he could apply his dissertation research to future defense strategy.

“The question was, essentially, ‘What can we do about places that transnational terrorist and criminal networks use as safe havens?,'” says Lamb, who spent the past 22 months managing the Ungoverned Areas Project at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  “I worked with people from more than 40 offices throughout the U.S. government to try to distill some of the best thinking about the issue into a framework that can be used to systematically analyze the problem and U.S. efforts to address it.” That framework is described in the 60-page report, titled “Ungoverned Areas and Threats from Safe Havens.”

The report found that safe havens can be a problem not only in “ungoverned” areas but in any place where people and governments are unable or unwilling to stop illicit actors from exploiting local conditions and resources to operate with impunity: “Weakly governed societies have governance gaps that can give freedom of action to illicit actors, but some highly governed societies have legal protections that give freedom of action to everybody, while other highly governed societies provide freedom of action to certain illicit actors as a matter of policy,” the report notes. “Analyzing and countering safe havens in any of these environments requires interagency attention to a broad range of geographical, political, civil, and resource considerations that are relevant locally.”

The main finding of the project was that American foreign assistance and diplomacy have not been effective in dealing with safe haven issues because they pay more attention to building the institutional capacities of foreign partners than on how those capacities are actually being used. “Capacity-building, as a strategy to address safe havens, is most effective when it is done in a way that not only enhances our partners' capacity to govern, but also enhances their legitimacy to act on behalf of the people the illicit actors exploit. Likewise, targeting the capacity of illicit actors is most effective when it supports efforts to undermine their legitimacy with key populations.” Legitimacy-building, the report argues, should therefore be the central concern of U.S. efforts to address safe haven problems in all regions of the world.

Lamb's dissertation research looks at the “microdynamics” of legitimacy-building, which he hopes will give policy makers a tool they can use as they implement the report's recommendations.

Full Report

Four One One | Spring 2008