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Written in a comprehensive yet accessible style, Urban Violence,
Resilience and Security investigates the diverse nature of urban
violence within Latin America, Asia and Africa. It further analyzes
how regular and irregular governing mechanisms can provide human
security, despite the presence of chronic violence. The empirically
rich and conceptually grounded contributions of established and
emerging scholars evaluate the current state and future trajectory
of urban development. They also question common explanations of the
drivers of violence in urban areas and also provide measured
recommendations for improved policy and future governance. Chapters
thoroughly examine the opportunities and hazards of focusing on
resilience as the only method to improve security and identify
governance and policy practices that can move beyond the rhetoric
of resilience to evaluate diverse approaches to attaining human
security in urban areas of the Global South. This invigorating book
will be an excellent resource for academic researchers interested
in urban dynamics in the Global South as well as scholars embarking
on geography, human security, political science and policy studies.
Based on a set of original case studies, policymakers will also
benefit from the questions and challenges to the conventional
approaches to urban planning and governance that it raises.
Many new development initiatives have been introduced in Africa
over the past few decades. Each of these has been heralded as
marking a new era in the continent's development. However, many of
these initiatives have failed to produce sustained results due to
numerous challenges, including, most importantly, the lack of good
governance. The Africa Progress Panel stated in 2011 that good
governance is the key enabling factor for sustainable development.
This book discusses the role good governance plays in achieving
sustainable development and eradicating extreme poverty in Africa.
The contributed chapters in this book seek to broaden the policy
debate and provide conversations about the sustainable development
challenges facing African countries from multiple viewpoints and
interdisciplinary perspectives-from academics, researchers,
policymakers, and practitioners in the field. The book focuses on
the governance perspectives of practitioners who deal with
day-to-day realities on the ground, with the goal to use
evidence-based information to make informed policies, programs, and
strategies to move the continent toward achieving sustainable
development. This book tries to strike a balance between
recognizing the need to bring politics back into development
programs and understanding the limitations of political
institutions in weak states. To that end, it looks at the
challenges of development from the perspective of human security,
with a focus on strengthening the human resource component of
African economies in order to achieve better governance as part of
a sustainable development process.
A popular myth emerged in the late 1990s: in 1900, wars killed one
civilian for every eight soldiers, while contemporary wars were
killing eight civilians for every one soldier. The neat reversal of
numbers was memorable, and academic publications and UN documents
regularly cited it. The more it was cited, the more trusted it
became. In fact, however, subsequent research found no empirical
evidence for the idea that the ratio of civilians to soldiers
killed in war has changed dramatically. But while the ratios may
not have changed, the political significance of civilian casualties
has risen tremendously. Over the past century, civilians in war
have gone from having no particular rights to having legal
protections and rights that begin to rival those accorded to
states. The concern for civilians in conflict has become so strong
that governments occasionally undertake humanitarian interventions,
at great risk and substantial cost, to protect strangers in distant
lands. I n the early 1990s, the UN Security Council authorized
military interventions to help feed and protect civilians in the
Kurdish area of Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. And in May 2011 , Barack
Obama 's National Security Advisor explained the United States'
decision to support NATO's military intervention in these terms
"When the president made this decision, there was an immediate
threat to 700,000 Libyan civilians in the town of Benghazi. We've
had a success here in terms of being able to protect those
civilians." Counting Civilian Casualties aims to promote open
scientific dialogue by high lighting the strengths and weaknesses
of the most commonly used casualty recording and estimation
techniques in an understandable format. Its thirteen chapters, each
authoritative but accessible to nonspecialists, explore a variety
of approaches, from direct recording to statistical estimation and
sampling, to collecting data on civilian deaths caused by conflict.
The contributors also discuss their respective advantages and
disadvantages, and analyze how figures are used (and misused) by
governments, rebels, human rights advocates, war crimes tribunals,
and others. In addition to providing analysts with a broad range of
tools to produce accurate data, this will be an in valuable
resource for policymakers, military officials, jou rnalists, human
rights activists, courts, and ordinary people who want to be more
informed-and skeptical-consumers of casualty counts.
This study focuses on the questions of when and how military
intervention in conflicts can achieve humanitarian benefits. It
uses the standard that an intervention should do more good than
harm to evaluate the successes and failures. The author develops a
methodology to determine the number of lives saved, as a minimalist
measure. The analysis of 19 military operations in the 6 case
studies of Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor
reveals both successful and unsuccessful interventions in the same
locations. The study posits that an intervention's short-term
effectiveness depends primarily on six factors within the control
of the intervenor, rather than factors inherent within the
conflict. Political and humanitarian dimensions are combined to
create a typology that compares the needs of populations suffering
from conflict with an intervenor's military intervention
strategies, motives, capabilities and response time. Hypotheses
derived from the model are tested in the case studies and policy
implications are offered.
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