Sharing the Burden? Assessing the Lithuanian Decision to Establish a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan

• Authors: Asta Maskaliūnaitė
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper assesses theories explaining the states’ burden-sharing decisions in an alliance and uses them to evaluate the Lithuanian decision to establish a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Afghanistan. In the literature, several influences on such decision-making are identified. These fall into two broad categories of systemic and domestic factors. From the former, threat perception, alliance dependence, systemic pressures of alliance politics are analysed; and from the latter three clusters of aspects such as: state autonomy, elite consensus, space of manoeuver of the executive; bureaucratic politics and organizational interests, and third, some additional elements of strategic culture/state identity. While most factors have some explanatory value, the analysis invites the conclusion that in case of the decision to lead a PRT, the two most important elements were alliance dependence from the first cluster and strategic culture and bureaucratic politics from the second.

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 223-243

Dates

published

2014-12-01

online

2014-12-30

Contributors

author

Asta Maskaliūnaitė

• Baltic Defence College

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/lasr-2014-0010