• ARMED CONFLICT: Conflict Barometer 2005 • HUMAN RIGHTS: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur • NATURAL RESOURCES: An Architecture of Instability • GOVERNANCE: Fragile States: Exploring the Concept • INT'L ORGANIZATIONS: The EU as a Security Actor • LANDMINES: Armed Non-State Actors and Landmines • POST-CONFLICT: What Went Wrong in the Iraq War • CHILDREN: Protecting Children Born of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones • TERRORISM: The New Children of Terror • HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: Forcing a People to Be Free • CONFLICT PREVENTION: Ethiopia and Eritrea: Preventing War • DISPLACEMENT: UNHCR Global Appeal 2006 ARMED CONFLICT Conflict Barometer 2005 Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research The Heidelberg Institute's annual assessment of global conflict, non-violent crises and peace settlements records 249 political conflicts in 2005. Two of them are wars and 22 are severe crises, making a total of 24 conflicts being carried out with a massive amount of violence. 74 conflicts are classified as crises, meaning violence is used only occasionally. In contrast, there are 151 non-violent, which can be differentiated in 86 manifest and 65 latent conflicts. Compared to last year, the number of conflicts carried out on the highest intensity level has slightly decreased from three to two wars. These two, the conflict in Sudan (Darfur) and the war between the Iraqi Interim Government and predominantly Sunni insurgents, had already been carried out on the same level of intensity in the previous year. Last year's third war, in the DR Congo, deescalated to a severe crisis. The number of severe crises has decreased significantly from 35 to 22, reflecting a significant reduction of conflicts on the two highest intensity levels. The number of crises, representing conflicts of medium intensity, has increased strikingly from 50 to 74. On the one hand, this increase signifies the trend of deescalation since the majority of last year's severe crises deescalated by one level. On the other hand, this development is due to the escalation of some formerly non-violent conflicts to a violent level and eleven new conflicts turning violent in the very year of thier beginning. Continue Reading More on Armed Conflict HUMAN RIGHTS Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur Human Rights Watch President Omar El Bashir of Sudan and other senior officials should be investigated for crimes against humanity in Darfur and placed on a U.N. sanctions list, according to this Human Rights Watch report published in advance of upcoming U.N. Security Council discussions on Darfur. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is scheduled to brief the Council tomorrow on his investigation into atrocities in Darfur. This 85-page report documents the role of more than a dozen named civilian and military officials in the use and coordination of “Janjaweed” militias and the Sudanese armed forces to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur since mid-2003. The Human Rights Watch report describes the process, replicated across Darfur, in which militia leaders collaborated with regional administrators and military commanders, usually meeting to co-ordinate strategy prior to attacks on rural villages and towns. By early 2004 it was clear, even to some soldiers, that civilians were the targets. One former soldier told Human Rights Watch that when he protested to his commander, he was told, “You have to attack the civilians." Continue reading More on Human Rights NATURAL RESOURCES An Architecture of Instability Global Witness An upsurge in illegal diamond mining and logging by ex-combatants in Liberia is undermining international efforts to promote good governance and stability in the worn torn West African country, and could fuel a return to warlordism, according to a new report by Global Witness. This report warns that the government and its international donors have failed to grasp the challenge of demobilising thousands of ex-fighters who are finding jobs in the illegal mining and logging industries. The regulation of the diamond and timber industries are crucial to the prospects for peace in Liberia because revenues from illegal resource extraction during the civil war funded warlords like the notorious Charles Taylor, now in exile in Nigeria. Ex-combatants were supposed to have been reintegrated into the Liberian economy through a disarmament, demobilisation, rehabilitation and reintegration (DDRR) programme run by United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). But the programme has failed to find sufficient funds to provide enough rehabilitation places, and a lack of employment opportunities has caused these ex-fighters to drift instead into natural resource extraction. Continue reading More on Natural Resources and Armed Conflict GOVERNANCE AND SECURITY Fragile States: Exploring the Concept FRIDE Whereas the culprit for both poverty and violations of human rights since the early 1980s had been the strong state (whether authoritarian, democratic but unaccountable, or interventionist in the interests of development), the problem by the 1990s had become the weak state. Susan Woodward focuses on three aspects of this new agenda: the issue, the concept, and the challenges that fragile states present for the programming of assistance. A remarkable consensus has emerged in the past two years on the international security agenda. The primary global threat is now fragile and failing states. All concrete threats to international security, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, mass violations of human rights, poverty, armed conflict, and refugees, are viewed as the responsibility of states and the consequence of state weakness. The origin of this focus on states begins, paradoxically, with efforts in the early 1990s by many middle powers such as Norway, Canada, and Japan together with the United Nations Development Programme, to take advantage of the end of the Cold War to reorient the focus and policies of international security away from states to persons. This human security focus has not disappeared from the international agenda, but the events of 9/11 and a radical shift in American foreign policy have taken precedence and reoriented rhetoric and policy onto “state failure.” Whereas the effort had been primarily to create a new consensus around the right to intervene (“droit d’ingérence”) when states were not fulfilling their obligations to protect their own citizens, the effort is now on identifying “states at risk,” strengthening fragile states, and rebuilding postwar states. Continue reading More on Governance and Security INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS The EU as a Security Actor Danish Institute for International Studies Until quite recently, Europe was one of the least secure places in the world, buleast but most of Europe has gradually been transformed from a “conflict formation” into a more benign “security community,” among the members of which war is no longer conceivable. The European Union (UN) has undoubtedly played a major role in this profound transformation. In the present report, the focus is placed on the EU and its security policy. It commences with some context-setting, i.e. with clarifying the EU’s place in the global and European security “architecture” and its relations with the United Nations, the OSCE and NATO, fi nding the latter to be more controversial than suggested by offi cial declarations. It then proceeds with the analysis of the EU, fi nding its main contribution to regional security to be related to what the EU is and represents rather than to what it does. An analysis of the latter, i.e. the directly security-related institutions and activities of the EU under the auspices of the CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy) and the ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) is also provided as well as an account of the “neighbourhood” programmes of the EU. Continue reading More on International and Regional Organizations LANDMINES Armed Non-State Actors and Landmines: Volume I: A Global Report Profiling NSAs and Their Use, Acquisition, Production, Transfer and Stockpiling of Landmines Geneva Call Although armed non-state actors (NSAs) have always existed, in the last twenty years the international community has become acutely aware of their importance for achieving universal compliance with human rights and international humanitarian law. This is particularly true for universalizing the norm prohibiting the use of anti-personnel (AP) landmines. This report, which builds on an analysis published in 2004, maps the role of NSAs in the landmine problem (2003-2005). The report investigates and analyzes how NSAs use, acquire, produce, transfer, and stockpile landmines through a presentation of individual group profiles. This report has recorded a global occurrence of AP and anti-vehicle mine planting by NSAs, whether activated by a victim, a vehicle or at a distance by command-detonation. Around 60 NSAs have deployed landmines in 24 countries in five geographic regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to these NSAs, groups that were difficult to classify or identify made frequent use of landmines in a few other countries. Over 40 groups made use of some type of victim-activated devices. The mines employed were both factory-made and handmade, indicating both involvement in mine transfers and production. One of the main findings of this report is that there is a need to discuss the mine issue not only with states, but also with NSAs. Many NSAs (as well as states) lack the long-term perspective of the consequences of mine use, and it is therefore crucial for the international community to find channels of communication with NSAs on the AP mine issue. This report argues that only by understanding NSA and region specific dynamics is it possible to address the - current and future - landmine problem caused by NSAs. Continue reading More on Small Arms, Light Weapons and Landmines POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION Revisions in Need of Revising: What Went Wrong in the Iraq War Strategic Studies Institute // U.S. Army War College Though critics have made a number of telling points against the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, the most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers—criminal anarchy and lawlessness, a raging insurgency and a society divided into rival and antagonistic groups—were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from the act of war itself. Military and civilian planners were culpable in failing to plan for certain tasks, but the most serious problems had no good solution. Even so, there are lessons to be learned. These include the danger that the imperatives of “force protection” may sacrifice the broader political mission of U.S. forces and the need for skepticism over the capacity of outsiders to develop the skill and expertise required to reconstruct decapitated states. Continue reading More on Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Reconstruction CHILDREN AND ARMED CONFLICT Protecting Children Born of Sexual Violence and Exploitation in Conflict Zones: Existing Practice and Knowledge Gaps Ford Institute for Human Security Sexual violence is endemic in conflict-affected areas, and children are often born as a result. It has been estimated that tens of thousands of children have been born out of mass rape campaigns or sexual exploitation during times of war in the last decade alone. Born of war, these children are deeply affected by the social upheavals that brought about their conception, as well as their treatment by society on the basis of their biological origins. According to anecdotal reports and available evidence, these “children born of war” often face stigma, discrimination, abandonment and even infanticide as infants. Due to their extreme economic difficulty and lack of secure family networks, they may be particularly vulnerable to becoming street children or being trafficked. As older children they may be stateless, and efforts to secure their rights under international law may prove fruitless due to their ambiguous legal status. As adults, their ability to secure a sense of their own identity may be frustrated by legislation that impedes access to records about their birth parents. In all of these ways—physical, economic and psycho-social— war and post-conflict environments impact this category of child in particular ways. Continue reading More on Children and Armed Conflict TERRORISM The New Children of Terror Brookings Institution Terrorism, it is said, is the "weapon of the weak." But while our conception of warfare is often an assumption of men in uniform fighting for the political cause of their nation–states, it is a misnomer. The reality of contemporary conflict is that increasingly it has pulled in the "weak" of society, most specifically children, both as targets and participants. Although there is global consensus (based on moral grounds) against sending children into battle, this terrible practice is now a regular facet of contemporary wars. There are some 300,000 children (both boys and girls) under the age of 18 presently serving as combatants, fighting in almost 75 percent of the world's conflicts; 80 percent of these conflicts where children are present include fighters under the age of fifteen. Thus, while it may be disturbing, it should be no surprise that children are also present in the dark terrorist domain of modern global conflict. As on the world's battlefields, children are increasingly present in terrorist groups. Many of these groups have long had "youth wings" to provide broader support in the populace, but now youths are increasingly being used in actual operations to strike at targets behind the battle lines. This occurs for the same fundamental reasons that children are now on the battlefields: Children offer terrorist group leaders cheap and easy recruits, who provide new options to strike at their foes. Continue reading More on Children and Armed Conflict and Terrorism HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION Forcing a People to Be Free Harvard University Is forcing a people to be free possible, and if so, is it ever morally permissible? The question in some form is very much on our minds, provoked by the war in Iraq and one of its stated justifications: freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny. An account of normative peoplehood is presented under which a people can fail to be a competent group agent, and so be a justified target of paternalism, even though the natural persons who make up the people are competent agents who are not justified targets of paternalism. Connections between a competent group agent, a free people, and a legitimate government are drawn. In response to the worry that this view permits limitless and never-ending regime change, an asymmetry between criteria for initiating intervention and criteria for ending intervention is shown to follow from the account of minimal legitimacy presented. Continue reading More on Governance and Security and Humanitarian Intervention CONFLICT PREVENTION Ethiopia and Eritrea: Preventing War Crisis Group The fragile peace maintained by Ethiopia and Eritrea since they signed a comprehensive agreement at Algiers in December 2000 is fraying dangerously. With a costly two-year war now followed by nearly five years of stalemate, patience on both sides of the border has worn thin, and there are worrying signs that the countdown to renewed conflict may have begun. Neither side appears eager for war, but to dismiss the tensions as mere sabre-rattling could mean missing the last chance to preserve peace in the Horn of Africa. The two parties need help urgently from the Algiers Group – the African Union (AU), European Union (EU), UN and U.S. – who witnessed the original accords. Its members need to work together urgently to forge a “3-Ds” parallel process of de-escalation, border demarcation and bilateral dialogue, using both intensive diplomacy and the credible threat (and employment as necessary) of punitive measures. Continue reading More on Conflict Prevention DISPLACEMENT Global Appeal 2006 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees This Global Appeal is published to alert governmental and private sector donors, Executive Committee members and Standing Committee observers, Governments and their Permanent Missions in Geneva, the UN Secretariat, UN agencies, intergovernmental agencies, NGOs, regional organizations and other institutions and interested individuals to the plight of millions of refugees and other persons of concern falling within UNHCR's mandate. UNHCR's ninth Global Appeal outlines the Office's strategies and programmes for 2006. In this document, special efforts have been made to highlight UNHCR's work to protect and provide durable solutions for refugees and other persons of concern in relation to the wide range of challenges which the Office will have to face in 2006. UNHCR's operations are presented in 19 regional overviews which include 36 operations chapters relating to 34 countries, according to UNHCR's regional structure. Continue reading More on Refugees and Internally Displaced People Compiled by Robert Hartfiel Human Security Research is produced by the Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC. The Human Security Centre produces the annual Human Security Report and is funded by the governments of Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. For more information on human security visit the Human Security Gateway, an online research and information database that contains a broad range of human security-related resources. 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