Security Assistance and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order

Abstract The crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO) has intensified amid growing great-power competition, the war in Ukraine, and the erosion of multilateral institutions. This Forum examines security assistance (SA)—the training, equipping and support of external security actors—as a critical lens for understanding how this crisis is unfolding and how international order is increasingly contested in practice. The Forum consists of an introductory essay and nine contributions organized into three thematic sets. Collectively, the contributions move beyond viewing SA as either a technocratic instrument of governance reform or a mechanism of proxy warfare. Instead, they conceptualize SA as relational practices that shape political authority, strategic alignments and normative expectations across diverse contexts. The first set analyses SA as a foreign policy instrument, focusing on its political purposes, strategic logics and effectiveness in an era of intensified geopolitical rivalry. The second set examines the unintended and often destabilizing consequences of SA. The authors show how assistance can contribute to political-territorial fragmentation, militarized competition and the proliferation of violence, while frequently in tension with its stated objectives. The final set of contributions looks ahead, exploring why SA continues to expand despite persistent shortcomings and how it may evolve as the liberal foundations that historically underpinned Western-led assistance are increasingly contested. Taken together, the Forum demonstrates that SA is a central site of contestation within contemporary international politics. While commonly justified as a means of stabilization and order-building, SA often produces new forms of dependency, dissonance between intention and outcome, and competing visions of political order. As a growing number of states deploy SA to an expanding range of recipients, the Forum highlights the need for a relational understanding of SA that captures its simultaneous ordering and disordering effects in an era of multipolar competition.