Description
Given the military and political utility that partners can bring to missions and operations, it is straightforward to understand why NATO member states welcome their contributions. Partners can enhance both military and civilian capabilities that member states do not readily possess or are unwilling to provide, while external contributions also bolster the legitimacy and visibility of the Alliance’s international action through extended multilateralism. The same cannot be said, however, for partners’ motives for engagement–particularly in the case of those for which membership is not an option, such as non-European partners. Indeed, their participation in NATO-led multinational military operations has received limited scholarly attention and remains undertheorized, as extant research generally amounts to a disparate body of literature lacking a systematic understanding of partners’ motivations. These are puzzling, since partners do not enjoy the same alliance benefits accorded to member states–notably treaty-based security guarantees–that might otherwise incentivize burden sharing in military operations. This study focuses on NATO’s ISAF mission in Afghanistan and seeks to explain the patterns of partner-state contributions. Mirroring previous research on democratic participation in multinational military operations and NATO burden sharing, it employs qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to test a multicausal theoretical framework. Results are expected to document the complex interplay of multiple causal paths leading NATO partners to commit capabilities to ISAF, thereby contributing to a more systematic understanding of partnership dynamics in multinational military cooperation.
