|
Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
The United States has provided support to political transitions
worldwide for many years. But it was just twenty years ago that the
US government established an office specifically to respond when
regimes or conflicts ended and to maintain momentum toward positive
change. Today's conflicts, however, are more complex, usually
involving half a dozen or scores of armed groups-and their
alliances and motivations are not always clear. Seldom are peace
agreements in place to act as a roadmap to the transition. And
transition work now more commonly begins before violence even ends.
This report, published on the twentieth anniversary of the founding
of the Office of Transition Initiatives at the US Agency for
International Development, considers what today's complexities
imply for how conflicts and transition work might evolve in the
future, with chapters on each major region of the world and on
topics such as extremism, urbanization, gender, and humanitarian
response.
This report introduces a new assessment framework for legitimacy
and illegitimacy that governments, businesses, and other
organizations can use to better understand the sources and dynamics
of support or opposition for any entity, policy, or program. It
includes an intellectual history of the concept of legitimacy,
summarizes the literature, introduces a new conceptualization of
illegitimacy, and outlines four types of legitimacy assessments,
from a rapid to a comprehensive assessment.
This report from the CSIS Americas Program provides a detailed look
at the challenges the Colombian government confronts as it moves
from providing security to developing rural areas that were
previously conflict zones. In particular, the report examines such
issues as remaining security needs; land tenure; needed
infrastructure improvements; and better governance. In addition,
the report offers recommendations on how the Colombian government
can move forward in consolidating gains in its countryside and how
the United States can help."
Can the United States prevent or end conflicts and protect its
interests without using military force? Do U.S. civilian
institutions have the right mix of support, funding, and
capabilities to respond to major crises and political transitions?
In July 2013, CSIS raised these questions before more than 200
policymakers and experts, with 22 speakers offering perspectives
from donors, implementers, and recipients. The demand for civilian
power is high. U.S. leaders are under constant pressure to respond
to armed conflicts abroad. Better civilian tools could help avoid
more risky (and costly) military engagements. The past decade has
seen real improvement in civilian stabilization and reconstruction
capabilities. Yet many lessons of the past eight decades remain
unlearned, and public support to civilian agencies remains low.
In development, stabilization, and peace building, donors
increasingly recognize the importance of being sensitive to the
local contexts of their efforts. Yet the use of "blueprints"
remains widespread. Even when standard approaches are modified for
particular aid partners, there often remains a poor fit between
donor efforts and local conditions. When recipients cannot absorb
the aid and attention they are offered, the common response is
"capacity building." While it is true that many aid recipients do
not have adequate capacity for implementation, this report presents
the results of a case study demonstrating that some security and
justice programs are designed and implemented without an adequate
appreciation of local desires, resources, capabilities, and
challenges. Absorptive capacity, in other words, is a byproduct of
the donor-recipient relationship. An earlier study by the authors
introduced a new framework for measuring absorptive capacity. This
volume applies it to security and justice sector programs that did
not meet all of their objectives in Lebanon, Cambodia, and
Colombia.
When recipients cannot absorb the aid and attention they are
offered, the common response is "capacity building"-as if the
source of the problem is the recipient's implementation capacity.
In this report, Robert D. Lamb and Kathryn Mixon present the
results of their research on the sources of absorptive capacity.
They find that this sort of "blaming the victim" mentality, while
common, is not always justified. While it is true that many aid
recipients do not have adequate capacity for implementation, it is
equally true that many aid programs are designed and implemented
without an adequate appreciation of local desires, resources,
capabilities, and challenges. Absorptive capacity, in other words,
is a byproduct of the donor-recipient relationship. The authors
present a new framework for measuring absorptive capacity. This
framework is intended to supplement existing planning, monitoring,
and evaluation processes, offering a new way to test whether an
existing approach is compatible with local conditions and a method
for improving the fit.
Every three weeks, a major political crisis begins somewhere in the
world. The United States intervenes in less than a fifth of them.
But that is still a new U.S. intervention about every two months.
And almost all of them are civilian interventions; less than a
third involve the military. CSIS has released a new dataset of
"potential transitions" worldwide, covering responses to 758
political crises between 1989 and 2010, including 134 civilian and
military interventions. The report describes the dataset and
presents the results of the initial analysis. Its recommendations
focus on the disconnect between the high demand for civilian power
and the support civilian institutions have for responding to such
crises, and on the importance of caution and moderation when
deciding whether and how to intervene.
Most violent conflicts since the turn of this century were in
countries that had experienced an earlier violent conflict. How can
we tell when a country is likely to remain stuck in a cycle of
violence? What factors suggest it might be "ripe" for stabilizing
and peace building? The authors studied four cases: Chad is stuck
in a cycle of violence, while El Salvador, Laos, and Mozambique
have had different results in their transitions from violence to
stability to peace. Conflicts without internal cohesion of
combatants or pressure from foreign patrons to stop fighting are
probably not ripe for stabilizing. Where there are subnational or
regional actors committed to violence, post-conflict peace building
is not likely to succeed without enforcement capacity to contain
violence or demonstrated commitments to increasing political
inclusion and making material improvements in the lives of
residents.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|