• PEACE OPERATIONS: Providing Security for Twenty-First Century Peace Operations • CHILDREN: Civil War, Crop Failure, and the Health Status of Young Children • HUMANITARIAN AID: Providing Aid in Insecure Environments: Trends in Policy and Operations • HEALTH: Health and Conflict Prevention: 2006 Edition • LANDMINES/SALW: Identifying Synergies Between Mine Action and Small Arms and Light Weapons • HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in North Korea • DEVELOPMENT: Conflict and Development: Peacebuilding and Post–conflict Reconstruction • CONFLICT MORTALITY: The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006 • ARMS TRADE: Arms Without Borders: Why a Globalised Trade Needs Global Controls • INTERNATIONAL LAW: Creating Conditions for Peace, Human Rights and the Rule of Law • POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION: Peace Conditionalities in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings • GENDER: Gender Mainstreaming and the Changing Nature of UN Peace Operations PEACE OPERATIONS Who Should Keep the Peace? Providing Security for Twenty-First Century Peace Operations Henry L. Stimson Center This volume examines the operational capabilities of present providers of security for PSOs. We start with an historical review of security support to peace operations—what kind, how much, by whom—and then turn to likely future demand for that support based on current trends in conflict, conflict resolution, and estimates of state vulnerability to violent internal conflict. We then examine how major security providers’ doctrine for and thinking about PSOs have evolved over a decade of experience with increasingly complex and dangerous operations. That discussion prefaces a detailed discussion of the strengths, weaknesses, and accomplishments of the United Nations, NATO and other alliances, regional and sub-regional organizations, states and coalitions, and private firms as security providers for PSOs. The final section compares providers on multiple dimensions, traces patterns of institutional cross-support in the field, and stresses peace as a public enterprise that is outsourced at great peril, as well as the critical importance to PSOs of civilian peacebuilding efforts and the risks that arise when the military takes on, by design or default, substantial peacebuilding tasks. Continue Reading More on Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Reconstruction CHILDREN Civil War, Crop Failure, and the Health Status of Young Children Households in Conflict Network There is growing concern among economists and practitioners that economic conditions prevailing in early childhood may have a persistent effect on child health and socioeconomic outcomes later in life. The shock’s effect may be such that children cannot catch-up even if they experience subsequent good years at later ages. Policy makers are aware of the distressing link between early childhood and adult well-being, making it one reason why the World Bank and non-governmental organizations view improvements in child health as a top priority. In this paper, the authors focus on how exogenous shocks at birth lead to worse health outcomes in the short-run several years after the shock. In particular, they look at the effect of crop failures and civil conflicts on the health of Rwandan children born between 1987 and 1991. They use an integrated household survey, combining health and agricultural data with event data from reports by non-governmental organizations. They exploit the local nature of the crop failure and the civil war to identify the effect of these exogenous shocks on child health, and they use the variation across birth cohorts to capture the child’s exposure to the shock. Their approach is to estimate the effect of these shocks on height-for-age while controlling for province of residence, month and year of birth as well as household, infant, and mother characteristics. Their crop failure results are robust to using rainfall or production shocks, which they have for a sub-sample of children. Continue reading More on Children and Armed Conflict HUMANITARIAN AID Providing Aid in Insecure Environments: Trends in Policy and Operations Humanitarian Policy Group There is a widespread perception within the international aid community that serious violence against aid workers has increased in recent years. This perception has prompted aid actors to change their approach to staff security and to the conduct of their aid operations. Yet no comprehensive empirical analysis exists to support or refute the claims of increasing violence against aid workers on a relative scale, that is, measured against the numbers of aid workers operating in the field. This gap in knowledge has meant that policy and operational responses to security conditions have been largely driven by impressions and anecdotal evidence, and important trends have not been identified. This report presents findings from a two-year study examining aid in insecure environments. Drawing on the most comprehensive global dataset to date of major reported incidents of violence against aid workers from 1997 to 2005, it provides a quantitative analysis of the changing security environment for civilian aid operations. It then examines the related trends in policy and operations over the last decade, in particular how perceptions of increased risk to aid operations have affected the development of security measures. Lastly, it explores the way in which aid operations have adapted to working in highly insecure contexts through a growing reliance on national staff. Continue reading More on Armed Conflict HEALTH Health and Conflict Prevention: 2006 Edition Anna Lindh Programme on Conflict Prevention Public health has captured the public mind as a security issue. Both the aftermath of the Christmas tsunami disaster in 2004 and the pandemic threat from avian flu in 2005 were of great concern to millions of people in different parts of the world. HIV/ AIDS was proclaimed a security threat already in the mid 1990s. There has been much violence and death. Still these are not issues of military security that can be confronted with traditional security and defence policies. The challenge of future outbursts of disease can not be met either by containment or by military preventive intervention. This edition, the third in a series of publications from the Anna Lindh Programme on Conflict Prevention, deals with health and conflict prevention. There are essays on public health as an issue of diplomacy and case studies of urgent health issues. Continue reading More on Health and Security SMALL ARMS, LIGHT WEAPONS AND LANDMINES Identifying Synergies Between Mine Action and Small Arms and Light Weapons Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining In 2004, the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) was asked by the United States (US) Department of State to conduct a scoping study on synergies between mine action and efforts to mitigate harmful effects of small arms and light weapons (SALW). While mine action has been an established humanitarian activity since the late 1980s, large-scale programmes to address the humanitarian and developmental impacts of SALW only started in the mid-1990s. To date, there has been little strategic exchange between the two sectors, despite some apparent similarities in both the problem and the determined responses. Based on available evidence, there are few examples of existing synergies between the SALW and mine action sectors. It is generally agreed that efforts to address the harmful effects of SALW are more complex than the discipline of mine action, and in the countries studied very little existing synergy was observed between mine action and SALW programmes at field level. That which does exist, generally occurs as a result of the daily realities of mine and explosive ordnance clearance and SALW mitigation in a post-conflict environment. These synergies tend to exist where mixed ordnance has been laid, fired, abandoned, stored and hidden, and where large numbers of SALW are present rather than following a strategic decision to tackle both issues together at an operational level. Continue reading More on Small Arms, Light Weapons and Landmines HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION Failure to Protect: A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in North Korea DLA Piper US LLP // U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea Citing the new UN doctrine that each state has "a responsibility to protect" its own citizens from the most severe human rights abuses, this report points to egregious violations of rights by North Korea and calls for immediate action by the UN Security Council under a parallel track to the UN's actions over North Korea's nuclear test. The report affirms that "the Security Council has independent justification for intervening in North Korea either because of the government's failure in its responsibility to protect or because North Korea is a nontraditional threat to the peace." The report focuses primarily on the active involvement of the government in crimes against humanity through: (1) Food Policy and Famine - North Korea allowed as many as 1 million of its citizens to die of starvation. "Hunger and starvation remain a persistent problem with over 37 percent of children chronically malnourished," says the report. North Korea still denies the World Food Program access to 42 of 203 counties in the country; (2) Treatment of Political Prisoners - Some 200,000 people are imprisoned in the North Korean gulag without due process of law and in near-starvation conditions. More than 400,000 are estimated to have died in the prison system over 30 years. The report also describes North Korea's involvement in the production of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, presenting this information as a context for the way North Korea misallocates its resources. Continue reading More on Humanitarian Intervention DEVELOPMENT Conflict and Development: Peacebuilding and Post–conflict Reconstruction Government of the United Kingdom // U.K. House of Commons International Development Committee Violent conflict has killed and displaced more people in Africa than in any other continent in recent decades according to the Commission for Africa. This severely challenges the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in these countries. Conflicts are also costly. It is estimated that the cost of each conflict almost equals the value of annual development aid world wide. New aid commitments made in 2005 could be cancelled out by an increase in conflict and insecurity in the developing countries. Development and security are intimately related — one cannot be achieved without the other. DFID's approach must be guided by this. The Committee visited Sierra Leone, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the lessons common to all three is that conflicts are not always contained within state boundaries. If this fact is ignored, aid given to one country may end up fuelling conflict in a neighbouring country. How a country deals with its neighbours and its role in regional tensions must form part of DFID's consideration about how much and what type of aid is suitable. Such decisions need to be reviewed regularly. While the link between conflict and development is a relatively new field, the Government must prioritise it in order to improve development outcomes among the poorest. Preventing and ending conflicts will do more to create a climate for poverty reduction than any amount of costly aid programmes. Continue reading More on Development and Security CONFLICT MORTALITY The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006 MIT Center for International Studies // Bloomberg School of Public Health // Al Mustansiriya University School of Medicine A new household survey of Iraq has found that approximately 600,000 people have been killed in the violence of the war that began with the U.S. invasion in March 2003. The survey was conducted by an American and Iraqi team of public health researchers. Data were collected by Iraqi medical doctors with analysis conducted by faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The results will be published in the British medical journal, The Lancet. The survey is the only population-based assessment of fatalities in Iraq during the war. The method, a survey of more than 1,800 households randomly selected in clusters that represent Iraq’s population, is a standard tool of epidemiology and is used by the U.S. Government and many other agencies. The survey also reflects growing sectarian violence, a steep rise in deaths by gunshots, and very high mortality among young men. An additional 53,000 deaths due to non-violent causes were estimated to have occurred above the pre-invasion mortality rate, most of them in recent months, suggesting a worsening of health status and access to health care. Continue reading More on Armed Conflict ARMS TRADE Arms Without Borders: Why a Globalised Trade Needs Global Controls Control Arms Campaign Military spending has risen steadily since 1999 and is expected to overtake peak Cold War levels by the end of 2006. This is the biggest market that the global arms trade has ever had. At the same time, the arms trade has become more ‘globalised’, with weapons assembled using components from around the world. This has exposed major loopholes in existing arms regulations that allow the supply of weapons and weapon components to embargoed destinations, to parties breaching international law in armed conflict, and to those who use them to flagrantly violate human rights. This paper shows how the changing pattern of ownership and production since the early 1990s means that national regulations are insufficient to prevent arms from reaching the hands of abusers. Faced with an arms industry that operates globally, governments cannot rely solely on traditional national or regional export control systems; effective control of a global arms trade requires new international standards and regulations based on international law. This paper concludes that existing arms regulations are dangerously out of date and that states must agree a legally binding international Arms Trade Treaty to address the problem. Continue reading More on Small Arms, Light Weapons and Landmines INTERNATIONAL LAW, JUSTICE AND ACCOUNTABILITY Dealing with the Past and Transitional Justice: Creating Conditions for Peace, Human Rights and the Rule of Law Swiss Confederation // Federal Department of Foreign Affairs The conference Dealing with the Past and Transitional Justice, Creating Conditions for Peace, Human Rights and the Rule of Law took place on October 24-25, 2005 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and was co-organized by the Political Affairs Division IV of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Center for Peacebuilding (KOFF) – swisspeace, and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). The goal of the conference was to deepen the issue of transitional justice as a bridge between peace promotion, human rights, and the rule of law. The conference focused on guiding principles and ethical issues in connection with transitional justice and shared lessons learned and best practices in this regard. The conference was attended by professionals from European governmental institutions, multilateral institutions, and international NGOs working in the different areas of foreign policy (conflict prevention and promotion), development cooperation, humanitarian aid, peace promotion, and human rights. It is hoped that the conference will be a first step toward the creation of a European network working on dealing with the past issues. The report contains the text of the presentations which were delivered during the conference. As such, the opinions expressed in the presentations are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Political Affairs Division IV. Continue reading More on International Law, Justice and Accountability POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION The Use of Peace Conditionalities in Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings: A Conceptual Framework and a Checklist Clingendael Institute As international aid donors and multilateral agencies get increasingly involved in peace operations and other conflict-related activities, both during and after violent conflict, an intensive debate is being waged on how such activities can be made more effective. Relatively little experience or documented evidence exists about the effectiveness of conflict-related interventions as many of these have only been developed and implemented in the last decade, or even the last couple of years. Many of these interventions have been, moreover, based on new institutional arrangements and partnerships between military, diplomatic, development and humanitarian actors, both governmental and non-governmental. The limited number of documented experiences so far has indicated a fairly poor track record, while in certain instances interventions have even helped increase tensions and violence instead of reducing them. Discussions about this have taken place in the context of larger debates about the need and desirability to intervene in contemporary conflicts and about aid effectiveness in general. In this connection, the question has arisen whether the application of so-called ‘peace conditionalities’ could be helpful towards increasing the effectiveness of conflict-related activities. Continue reading More on Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Reconstruction GENDER Reform or More of the Same? Gender Mainstreaming and the Changing Nature of UN Peace Operations York Centre for International Security Studies The last fifteen years have been a time of dramatic change in terms of reform of UN peace operations, major shifts in academic thinking around the issues of conflict, security, and development, and the recognition of women’s roles in conflict and their right to participate in peacebuilding processes. These three concurrent changes all have the same goal of creating the conditions for a more inclusive and sustainable peace in the face of the post-Cold War instability experienced in many parts of the world. However, the ongoing failure to effectively integrate gender issues into peacebuilding discourse and practice would indicate that this has not been achieved. This paper will explore the evolving rhetoric of the UN’s peacebuilding agenda, explaining the continuing exclusion of women as a result of the failure to see gender issues as a security concern, despite the increased recognition of the links between both gender and development and development and security. Continue reading More on Gender and Security 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. To subscribe to Human Security Research , send an email to hsc.list@ubc.ca with 'subscribe HS Research' in the subject field or click here. 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