La cooperación civil-militar en las operaciones post-conflicto como espacio antroplógicoel caso del equipo italiano multinacional CIMIC en el espacio de la paz virtual del Líbano

Résumé

Abstract This thesis is about the production of security knowledge and adopts an anthropological approach and is about the capacity to produce security knowledge by a military team belonging to the Multinational CIMIC group (Motta di Livenza, Treviso, Italy) who operated in a UNIFIL mission in Lebanon. This work takes as subject of its research the 'The Civil-Military Cooperation in Post-Conflict Operations as an Anthropological Space: The Case of the Italian Multinational CIMIC Team in the Space of Virtual Peace of Lebanon' and focuses on the CIMIC activity which is a specific military tool which is employed in order to acquire consensus from the local populations in whom territory a military operation is deployed. The members of this team (six military personnel) received six month training before their deployment; it was military and cultural awareness training. The cultural awareness training (1) had the aim to provide to the members of the team the cultural knowledge on the 'other' (Lebanese population); and (2) these acquired knowledge represented a capability to employ with the local population in order to conquest their trust and to collect information. Ideally the members of the team were able to produce security knowledge about their theater of operations. The objectives of this thesis were multiples. The first one was to enter in the official structure that provides security and to describe the experience. This structure, which is the Multinational CIMIC Group (Motta di Livenza, Treviso, Italy) is an Italian battalion which, is part of the Italian Armed Forces (under the control and order of the IMoD), and performs CIMIC operations in NATO and UN missions. These missions are based on the political official security knowledge which is produced by the Italian Ministry of Defence (Italian Defence Staff, and Army General Staff). The same structure provides the CIMIC, and cultural awareness training which is necessary to its military personnel to operate in non-NATO territories. This cultural training, according the NATO's CIMIC doctrine represents a 'capability' in order to operate in a CIMIC theater of operation (defined in this thesis as the 'space of virtual peace'). Therefore, with my fieldwork I experienced the reality to perform this kind of research in contact and inside a military structure. The second objective was to verify the quality of the cultural awareness training, and to collect the experiences of my main informants in the pre-deployment phase, in deployment (UNIFIL Mission, Lebanon) and in the post-deployment phase. In this thesis I do consider the experience maturated by the informants as extremely relevant for the production of legitimate security knowledge due to the fact that is based on first hand experiences made by the military personnel with their booths on the ground. The thesis considers the relation that the anthropologist had with the main structure (Italian Defence Staff) which (1) has legitimate power to produce security knowledge; (2) has power on the informants of this work; and (3) had power on the very practicability of this thesis. And in order to sustain my anthropological approach the production of legitimate security knowledge this thesis is organized in four chapters. The first chapter explains and develops the concept of security. Here security is approached as a myth, a language, and as a symbol. The process of securitization becomes a ritual. It considers the evolution of NATO's security discourse, and the transformation of attitude of the Alliance toward the importance of cultural and religious factors in security operations. NATO CIMIC doctrine is explained and the emergence of conflict ethnography is studied. The second chapter establishes the methodology and the method of the thesis which will be applied to the fieldwork experience. Here an anthropological approach is developed and the anthropological space of the 'Space of Virtual Peace' is created. This space can be considered a critical framework to the formal narrative on peace operations and/or CIMIC operations. The third chapter represents the fieldwork experience which lasted from the 24th July 2012, until the 7th May 2014. It covers and records the personal experiences of the author of this thesis, and the semi-structured interviews which were carried out in the pre-deployment phase (MNCG HQ, Italy), in Lebanon (UNIFIL mission), and in the post-deployment phase (MNCG HQ, Italy). The fourth chapter presents the conclusion of the thesis and develops the idea and the need of an engaged anthropology in the field of security studies.