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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations > Peacekeeping operations
Post-conflict peacebuilding efforts can fail if they do not pay sufficient attention to natural resources. Natural resources - diamonds, oil, and minerals - are frequently at the heart of historic grievances, and have caused or funded at least eighteen conflicts since 1990. The same resources can play a central role in post-conflict peacebuilding, providing revenue for cash-starved governments, basic services for collapsed economies, and means for restoring livelihoods. To date, there is a striking gap in knowledge of what works, what does not, and how to improve peacebuilding through more effective and systematic management of natural resources. Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Management addresses this gap by examining the growing literature on the topic and surveying experiences across more than forty post-conflict countries. The six-volume series includes more than 130 chapters from over 200 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
A riveting, action-filled account that sheds light on the realities of working in a war-torn country, this is the first book on the war in Iraq by a South African. Johan Raath and a security team were escorting American engineers to a power plant south of Baghdad when they were ambushed. He had first arrived in Iraq only two weeks before. This was a small taste of what was to come over the next 13 years while he worked there as a private military contractor (PMC). His mission? Not to wage war but to protect lives. Raath acted as a bodyguard for VIPs and, more often, engineers who were involved in construction projects to rebuild the country after the 2003 war. His physical and mental endurance was tested to the limit in his efforts to safeguard construction sites that were regularly subjected to mortar and suicide attacks. Key to his survival was his training as a Special Forces operator, or Recce. Working in places called the Triangle of Death and driving on the ‘Hell Run’, Raath had numerous hair-raising experiences. As a trained combat medic he also helped to save people’s lives after two suicide bomb attacks on sites he then worked at.
For much of the last half century, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has seemed the outlier in global peace. Today Iraq, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Yemen, and Syria are not just countries, but synonyms for prolonged and brutal wars. But why is MENA so exceptionally violent? More importantly, can it change? Exploring the causes and consequences of wars and conflicts in this troubled region, Ariel Ahram helps readers answer these questions. In Part I, Ahram shows how MENA's conflicts evolved with the formation of its states. Violence varied from civil wars and insurgencies to traditional interstate conflicts and affected some countries more frequently than others. The strategies rulers employed to stay in power constrained how they recruited, trained, and equipped their armies. Part II explores dynamics that trap the region in conflict--oil dependence, geopolitical interference, and embedded identity cleavages. The catastrophic wars of the 2010s reflect the confounding effects of these traps, culminating in state collapse and intervention from the US and Russia, as well as regional powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Finally, Ahram considers the possibilities of peace, highlighting the disjuncture between local peacebuilding and national and internationally-backed mediation. War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa will be an essential resource for students of peace and security studies and MENA politics, and anyone wanting to move beyond headlines and soundbites to understand the historical and social roots of MENA's conflicts.
An acclaimed expert on violence and seasoned peacebuilder explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war, and how to interrupt that deadly process. It's easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war, to see it solely as a series of errors, accidents, and emotions gone awry. It's also easy to forget that war shouldn't happen-and most of the time it doesn't. Around the world there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a tiny fraction erupt into violence. Too many accounts of conflict forget this. With a counterintuitive approach, Blattman reminds us that most rivals loathe one another in peace. That's because war is too costly to fight. Enemies almost always find it better to split the pie than spoil it or struggle over thin slices. So, in those rare instances when fighting ensues, we should ask: what kept rivals from compromise? Why We Fight draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. From warring states to street gangs, ethnic groups and religious sects to political factions, there are common dynamics to heed and lessons to learn. Along the way, we meet vainglorious European monarchs, African dictators, Indian mobs, Nazi pilots, British football hooligans, ancient Greeks, and fanatical Americans. What of remedies that shift incentives away from violence and get parties back to deal-making? Societies are surprisingly good at interrupting and ending violence when they want to-even the gangs of Medellin, Columbia do it. Realistic and optimistic, this is book that lends new meaning to the old adage, "Give peace a chance."
This book examines the continuing devastation in the Darfur region of Sudan, from the perspective of a multiplicity of conflicts of distinct types. The crisis reached its peak in 2003-2004, when certain Arab militias joined forces with the Sudan armed forces in a campaign against insurgent resistance movements. Engulfed in the tumult, Darfurians experienced systematic slaughter, sexual violence, and internal displacement on a massive scale. Although the violence has waned in recent years, the fighting continues to this day. The authors cast this crisis as a complex web of four distinct, yet interlacing, conflict types: long-standing disputes between farmers and herders and between different herder communities political struggles between the local elite leaders of the resistance movements, and those between traditional leaders (elders) and younger aspiring leaders long-standing grievances of marginalized groups against those at the national centre of power cross-border conflicts, primarily the proxy war waged between Chad and Sudan The crisis in South Sudan is also examined through the lens of conflict complementarity. This book will be of interest to students of African politics, genocide, political violence, ethnic conflict, war and conflict studies, peacebuilding and IR.
Since 1961 the Adelphi Papers have provided some of the most informed accounts of international and strategic relations. Produced by the world renowned International Institute of Strategic Studies, each paper provides a short account of a subject of topical interest by a leading military figure, policymaker or academic.
Dr. Evans examines the international responses to the ethnic
conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda from 1993-1997 and their overspill
into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). A senior UK
diplomat, she concludes that the international response was
impotent and incoherent--soundbite diplomacy led decision-makers to
act before adequately assessing the situation and in the end it was
the power of local rather than international intervention that set
the agenda and provided the solution.
Peace operations entail a special form of co-operation between nation-states and international organization, but tend to be most difficult for the soldiers, police and civilian officials on the ground. This volume highlights the latter role with case studies of Srebrenica and Somalia. More robust peace operations are similar to counter-insurgency. This is an attempt to clarify the types of mission involved and also relate the diplomatic objectives to the bewilderingly complex task of the individual in the field.
Conflict resolution and peacekeeping are not only closely related conceptually, they were also "inventions" of the same historical period. Peacekeeping was first defined under the Hammarskjold Principles of 1956, while we can date the formal institutionalization of conflict resolution to the founding of the "Journal of Conflict Resolution" in 1957. However, it is in the 1990s that conflict resolution theorists turned to the perspectives of conflict theory in an effort to develop more effective practices of peacekeeping. This book is about the ways in which conflict resolution theory has become relevant to the various challenges faced by the United Nations peacekeeping forces as efforts are made to learn from the traumatic and devastating impact of the many civil wars that have erupted in the 1990s.
Conflict resolution and peacekeeping are not only closely related conceptually, they were also "inventions" of the same historical period. Peacekeeping was first defined under the Hammarskjold Principles of 1956, while we can date the formal institutionalization of conflict resolution to the founding of the "Journal of Conflict Resolution" in 1957. However, it is in the 1990s that conflict resolution theorists turned to the perspectives of conflict theory in an effort to develop more effective practices of peacekeeping. This book is about the ways in which conflict resolution theory has become relevant to the various challenges faced by the United Nations peacekeeping forces as efforts are made to learn from the traumatic and devastating impact of the many civil wars that have erupted in the 1990s.
Peacekeeping in the late 1990s is a complex and diverse task, in which civilian and military personnel are working together to a greater degree than ever before. However, when an international body such as the UN takes strategic decisions, it does so with inadequate input from the military; in the field, there are clashes of culture, confusion over command and control arrangements and insufficient operational coordination. These issues also affect regional organisations such as NATO. The awkward management of operations and their uneven level of achievement have contributed to a decline in the number of UN peacekeeping operations since 1994. This paper argues that the balance between civilian and military expertise and advice at all levels of a peacekeeping mission - strategic, tactical and operational - needs to be reappraised. At the strategic level: * mandates must be clear, and must respond both to the needs of the situation and to the resources available * there must be regular dialogue between all the principal players, military and civilian; the military-staff capacity at UN headquarters should be made more effective, and should be responsible to the Security Council * major troop-contributing countries should be systematically involved in determining mandates, as well as in reviewing operational plans * senior military officers from all large troop-contributing countries should be based at a mission's field headquarters. At the operational level: * the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General - the head of a UN peacekeeping mission - should be strengthened. In non-UN operations, the authority of the High Representative needs to be increased * a cadre of civilian officials with peacekeeping experience needs to be developed; standard operating procedures for the civilian head of a mission to follow when dealing with the military need to be developed * greater emphasis should be placed on the 'softer' aspects of military science - managing resources, civilian control and human rights * the reluctance of civilians and non-governmental organisations to engage with the military should be addressed. Much experience has been gained from the peacekeeping operations of the 1990s, but both military and civilian participants must make considerably more progress before they can be said to have forged a partnership that makes them an effective intervention force
This book fills a major gap in the study of inter-war British foreign policy: it is the first complete study of Austen Chamberlain's term of office as Stanley Baldwin's Foreign Secretary from 1924-29. It is argued that Chamberlain's priority was a two-stage policy in western Europe, which aimed at pacifying both France and Germany, as well as encouraging the League of Nations. Other key chapters deal with British policy in the Middle East and China and policy Towards America. Overall, Chamberlain is shown to have committed Britain to a European diplomatic role, which was opposed by Cabinet ministers who did not see a European interest to all aspects of British foreign policy. Today, in the Conservative Party, the debate is still unresolved.
Heart-breaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is a Palestinian doctor's inspiring account of his extraordinary life, growing up in poverty but determined to treat his patients in Gaza and Israel regardless of their ethnic origin. A London University- and Harvard-trained Palestinian doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and 'who has devoted his life to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians' (New York Times), Abuelaish is an infertility specialist who lives in Gaza but works in Israel. On the strip of land he calls home (where 1.5 million Gazan refugees are crammed into a few square miles) the Gaza doctor has been crossing the lines in the sand that divide Israelis and Palestinians for most of his life - as a physician who treats patients on both sides of the line, as a humanitarian who sees the need for improved health and education for women as the way forward in the Middle East. And, most recently, as the father whose three daughters were killed by Israeli shells on 16 January 2009, during Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip. It was his response to this tragedy that made news and won him humanitarian awards around the world. Instead of seeking revenge or sinking into hatred, Izzeldin Abuelaish called for the people in the region to start talking to each other. His deepest hope is that his daughters will be 'the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis'.
Classical arguments about the legitimate use of force have profoundly shaped the norms and institutions of contemporary international society. But what specific lessons can we learn from the classical European philosophers and jurists when thinking about humanitarian intervention, preventive self-defense or international trusteeship today? The contributors to this volume take seriously the admonition of contextualist scholars not to uproot classical thinkers' arguments from their social, political and intellectual environment. Nevertheless, this collection demonstrates that contemporary students, scholars and policymakers can still learn a great deal from the questions raised by classical European thinkers, the problems they highlighted, and even the problematic character of some of the solutions they offered. The aim of this volume is to open up current assumptions about military intervention, and to explore the possibility of reconceptualizing and reappraising contemporary approaches.
Examining the organization of everyday life inside the regiments of the French Foreign Legion, this book takes its theoretical point of departure in the notion of the voluntary total organization; that is to say, an institution that constitutes a geographically delimited place of residence and work in which inmates are voluntarily separated from the outside world, leading an enclosed, formally administered life. Informed by a modified version of Goffman's original concept of the total institution, A Sociology of the Total Organization untangles the Foreign Legion and the ways in which different kinds of social orders interplay there. With a focus on regimental life, the author characterizes the armed forces not only as a total organization, but also as a greedy one, seeking undivided loyalty and the incorporation of all social roles within its bounds. Against this understanding, the book draws on rich ethnographic work to develop the notion of atomistic unity, the ideal relational condition that exists in the military, in which individuals commit to a unit and articulate ties with individuals on an impersonal basis, grounded in the belief in a greater whole. A detailed and empirically grounded study of the mechanisms in which the Foreign Legion not only cuts members' ties to people outside the organization, but also restricts the creation and maintenance of ties among its members, this book shows how atomistic unity is not limited to greedy organizations such as the military, but applies to a variety of collectivist settings. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in military life, social relations, social theory and the work of Goffman.
This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific focus on analyzing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping operations led by the United Nations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian-inspired approaches in the field of International Relations, it highlights how interventions can be viewed through the lens of governmentality and its key attendant concepts. The book draws from these approaches in order to explore how international interventions are increasingly informed by governmental rationalities of security and policing. Two specific cases are examined: the UN's Security Sector Reform (SSR) approach and the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda. Focusing on the governmental rationalities that are at work in these two central frameworks that have come to guide contemporary UN-led peacekeeping efforts in recent years, the book considers: The use in IR of governmentality and its attendant notions of biopower and sovereign power The recent discussion regarding the concept and practice of international policing and police reform The rise of security as a rationality of government and the manner in which security and police rationalities interconnect and have increasingly come to inform peacekeeping efforts The Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework for peacebuilding and the rise of the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda. This book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, security studies, critical theory, and conflict and intervention.
This book explores the question of whether peacekeeping commanders can be held accountable for a failure to protect the civilian population in the mission area. This requires an assessment of whether peacekeeping commanders have an obligation to act against such serious crimes being committed under domestic and international law. The work uses the cases of the Dutch and Belgian peacekeeping commanders in Srebrenica and Kigali as examples, but it also places the analysis into the context of contemporary peacekeeping operations. It unfolds two main arguments. First, it provides a critical note to the contextual interpretation given to international law in relation to peacekeeping. It is argued that establishing a specific paradigm for peacekeeping operations with clear rules of interpretation and benchmark criteria would benefit peacekeeping and international law by making the contextual interpretation of international law redundant. Second, it is held that alternative options to the existing forms of criminal responsibility for military commanders should be considered, possibly focusing more clearly on failing to fulfil a norm of protection that is specific to peacekeeping and distinct from protective obligations under international human rights law and international humanitarian law.
Women and Gender Perspectives in the Military compares the integration of women, gender perspectives, and the women, peace, and security agenda into the armed forces of eight countries plus NATO and United Nations peacekeeping operations. This book brings a much-needed crossnational analysis of how militaries have or have not improved gender balance, what has worked and what has not, and who have been the agents for change. The country cases examined are Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and South Africa. Despite increased opportunities for women in the militaries of many countries and wider recognition of the value of including gender perspectives to enhance operational effectiveness, progress has encountered roadblocks even nearly twenty years after United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 kicked off the women, peace, and security agenda. Robert Egnell, Mayesha Alam, and the contributors to this volume conclude that there is no single model for change that can be applied to every country, but the comparative findings reveal many policy-relevant lessons while advancing scholarship about women and gendered perspectives in the military.
This book offers an in-depth study on the deployment of military operations in the framework of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (ESDP/CSDP). While existing studies of the subject are either descriptive or focused on a single level of analysis, this book incorporates factors from three different levels of analysis to explain the deployment of ESDP military operations. First, the international level, where the emergence of events that threaten certain values held dear by EU member states, catalyses the process leading to an operation; second, the national level, where the member states formulate their initial national preferences towards a prospective deployment based on national utility expectations; and third, the EU level, where the member states come to negotiate and seek compromises to accommodate their different national preferences towards a deployment. The strength of this multi-level collective action approach is demonstrated by four in-depth military case studies, which analyse the preference formation of France, Germany, and the UK towards the deployments of Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Operation Artemis and EUFOR RD Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Operation Atalanta off the coast of Somalia, respectively. The author draws on a wealth of primary sources, including over 50 semi-structured interviews conducted with national and EU officials during 2011-15, and provides an up-to-date overview and critique of the existing theoretical literature on the deployment of ESDP/CSDP military operations. This book will be of much interest to students of European security, EU politics, military and strategic studies, and International Relations in general.
This book critically examines peacebuilding, humanitarian intervention and peace operation practices and experiences in francophone spaces. Francophone Africa as a specific space is relatively little studied in the peace and security literature, despite the fact that almost half of all peacekeepers are deployed or were deployed in this part of Africa during the last decade. It is an arena for intervention that deserves more serious attention, if only because it provides fertile ground for exploring the key questions raised in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding literature. For instance, in 2002 a French operation (Licorne) was launched and in 2003 a UN force was deployed in Cote d'Ivoire alongside the French force there. Filling a gap in the current literature, Peace Operations in the Francophone World critically examines peacekeeping and peacebuilding practices in the francophone world, including but not limited to conflict prevention and resolution, security sector reform (SSR), francophone politics, and North-South relations. The book explores whether peace and security operations in francophone spaces have exceptional characteristics when compared with those carried out in other parts of the world and assesses whether an analysis of these operations in the francophone world can make a specific and original contribution to wider international debates about peacekeeping and peacebuilding. This book will be of much interest to students of peacekeeping, peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, African politics, security studies, and IR in general.
Development assistance to fragile states and conflict-affected areas can be a core component of peacebuilding, providing support for the restoration of government functions, delivery of basic services, the rule of law, and economic revitalization. What has worked, why it has worked, and what is scalable and transferable, are key questions for both development practice and research into how peace is built and the interactive role of domestic and international processes therein. Despite a wealth of research into these questions, significant gaps remain. This volume speaks to these gaps through new analysis of a selected set of well-regarded aid interventions. Drawing on diverse scholarly and policy expertise, eight case study chapters span multiple domains and regions to analyse Afghanistan's National Solidarity Programme, the Yemen Social Fund for Development, public financial management reform in Sierra Leone, Finn Church Aid's assistance in Somalia, Liberia's gender-sensitive police reform, the judicial facilitators programme in Nicaragua, UNICEF's education projects in Somalia, and World Bank health projects in Timor-Leste. Analysis illustrates the significance of three broad factors in understanding why some aid interventions work better than others: the area of intervention and related degree of engagement with state institutions; local contextual factors such as windows of opportunity and the degree of local support; and programme design and management. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal International Peacekeeping. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351624572, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, 'the local' is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence 'everyday peace' is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, 'the local', and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the 'local turn' of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
This edited volume provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of UN peacekeeping and the use of force, to inform a better understanding of the complex and interconnected issues at stake for the UN community. Peacekeeping is traditionally viewed as a largely passive military activity, governed by the principles of impartiality, consent, and the minimum use of force. Today, most large UN Peacekeeping Operations are only authorized to use force in defence of their mandates and to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence. Recently, with the deployment of the Force Intervention Brigade in the DRC, the UN has gone beyond peacekeeping and into the realm of peace-enforcement. These developments have brought to the fore questions regarding the use of force in the context of peacekeeping. The key questions addressed in this book examine not only the utility of force, but also the dilemmas and constraints inherent to the purposive use of force at a strategic, operational and tactical level. Should UN peacekeepers exercise military initiative? Is UN peacekeeping capable of undertaking offensive military operations? If so, then under what circumstances should peacekeepers use force? How should force be wielded? And against whom? With chapters written by experts in the field, this comprehensive volume will be of great use and interest to postgraduate students, academics and experts in international security, the UN, peacekeeping and diplomacy.
This is the first introduction to the United Nation's activities during the Cold War period. It combines a history of the UN with a broader account of east-west diplomacy during the Cold War and after. Norrie MacQueen begins by looking at the formation, structure and functions of the UN. Then, within a chronological framework, he assesses its contribution to international security from the emergence of the UN's peacekeeping role in 1945-56 right through to UN operations in the 1990s in Angola, Somalia and Bosnia. |
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