Strategic intimacy in international security: The relational politics of security assistance

Global security governance has undergone a significant transformation, shifting from large-scale statebuilding and comprehensive Security Sector Reform (SSR) toward leaner, locally tailored security assistance programs. This article challenges prevailing narratives that characterize contemporary security governance as practiced through indirect forms of interventions such as light footprints, remote warfare, or technologically enabled distance. Instead, we argue that late modern security assistance is profoundly intimate, shaped by strategic relationships between embedded advisors and their counterparts across national politico-security ecosystem. We introduce the concept of strategic intimacies —the deeply personal and materially entangled relationships that underpin security interventions. These relationships enable the effectiveness of security assistance programs by fostering trust, commitment, and shared purpose, but they also generate tensions and struggles, betrayal and suspicion. To analyze these dynamics, we develop a framework that captures the experimental and labor-intensive nature of security assistance, focusing on three modalities: (1) practicing the purpose through experimentation and developing a shared lexicon of action; (2) performing rituals of coordination; and (3) infrastructures of intimacy, i.e. the enabling material and ideational conditions that make global relationships possible. Using Lebanon as a case study—a site of sustained international security assistance—we draw on interviews with security practitioners, diplomats, parliamentarians, and civil society members to illustrate how intimacy structures contemporary interventions. Ultimately, we argue that understanding patterns of power in global security governance requires examining how relationships are formed, maintained, materially conditioned and strategically leveraged.