“Toward Regional Cooperation: The Internal Security Dimension” (Querine Hanlon, Middle East Institute)
“In the MENA region, the prospects for regional cooperation have been further complicated by the events of the Arab Spring. Prior to the Arab Spring, the region’s security forces cooperated, mostly in a bilateral fashion, to counter threats to their regimes and to repress internal dissent. For example, although there were important tensions among Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli, and Cairo, there was also a surprising degree of coordination among internal security forces along their shared borders, including coordinated operations and intelligence sharing. Even across the closed border between Morocco and Algeria, security forces engaged in limited cooperation to repatriate wayward shepherds or to counter smugglers. This cooperation was largely founded on shared interests -- among which regime protection and even survival were among the most important. But in the aftermath of the collapse and overthrow of the regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this cooperation largely ceased -- not only because those shared interests had disappeared, but also because, in the case of Libya, there was no regime to cooperate with. As one senior border security officer in Tunisia explained, ‘On the border with Libya, we are doing the work of two. We have no counterpart across the border.’”
“In the MENA region, the prospects for regional cooperation have been further complicated by the events of the Arab Spring. Prior to the Arab Spring, the region’s security forces cooperated, mostly in a bilateral fashion, to counter threats to their regimes and to repress internal dissent. For example, although there were important tensions among Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli, and Cairo, there was also a surprising degree of coordination among internal security forces along their shared borders, including coordinated operations and intelligence sharing. Even across the closed border between Morocco and Algeria, security forces engaged in limited cooperation to repatriate wayward shepherds or to counter smugglers. This cooperation was largely founded on shared interests -- among which regime protection and even survival were among the most important. But in the aftermath of the collapse and overthrow of the regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this cooperation largely ceased -- not only because those shared interests had disappeared, but also because, in the case of Libya, there was no regime to cooperate with. As one senior border security officer in Tunisia explained, ‘On the border with Libya, we are doing the work of two. We have no counterpart across the border.’”
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