• HEALTH: Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review • CONFLICT PREVENTION: Using Quantitative and Qualitative Models to Forecast Instability • HUMANITARIAN AID: Global Humanitarian Assistance 2007 - 2008 • POST-CONFLICT: Post-conflict Recovery: Resource Mobilization and Peacebuilding • ARMED CONFLICT: Chad: Summary of Conflict January - March 2008 • INTERNATIONAL LAW: Courting Conflict: Justice, Peace, and the ICC in Africa • CRIMINAL VIOLENCE: Can Production and Trafficking of Illicit Drugs be Reduced or Merely Shifted? • GOVERNANCE: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance • DISPLACEMENT: Iraq: Five Years Later, A Hidden Crisis • INTERNATIONAL LAW: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and War Crimes Tribunals in Africa • DEVELOPMENT: Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict and Convergence in Rwanda • GENDER: Youth, Gender and the Changing Nature of Armed Conflict HEALTH AND SECURITY Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review Conflict and Health In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. The subsequent number, rates, and causes of mortality in Iraq resulting from the war remain unclear, despite intense international attention. Understanding mortality estimates from modern warfare, where the majority of casualties are civilian, is of critical importance for public health and protection afforded under international humanitarian law. The authors aimed to review the studies, reports and counts on Iraqi deaths since the start of the war and assessed their methodological quality and results. Their review indicates that, despite varying estimates, the mortality burden of the war and its sequelae on Iraq is large. The use of established epidemiological methods is rare. This review illustrates the pressing need to promote sound epidemiologic approaches to determining mortality estimates and to establish guidelines for policy-makers, the media and the public on how to interpret these estimates. Continue Reading More on Health and Security CONFLICT PREVENTION Using Quantitative and Qualitative Models to Forecast Instability United States Institute of Peace The United States Institute of Peace’s Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention commissioned this report for its ongoing project examining new approaches to early warning for political instability and mass violence. Analysts generally agree that the policy process benefits from both results of statistical models and qualitative expert judgment. But where judgments from qualitative and quantitative models diverge, decision makers are frequently left without a sound strategy for preferring one result over the other or resolving differences between them. Drawing on his experience in developing and using qualitative structural analogy models and quantitative statistical models (including for the Political Instability Task Force), Jack Goldstone provides practical guidance on how different models can be used together to generate more accurate forecasts. Continue reading More on Conflict Prevention HUMANITARIAN AID Global Humanitarian Assistance 2007 - 2008 Development Initiatives Total humanitarian assistance from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reached US$9.2 billion in 2006 in current prices. While there was a small decrease in both total humanitarian assistance (-6%) and official development assistance (ODA, -5%) compared to 2005, both volumes are significantly higher than for any previous year – and the long-term trend is still upwards. And while total ODA has increased substantially in three of the last four years, humanitarian assistance has maintained a fairly constant 9% share. At US$1.2 billion, Sudan received the greatest share (18%) of total humanitarian assistance for the second year running in 2006. It represented by far the largest UN consolidated appeal process (CAP) appeal requirement in both 2005 (in spite of the tsunami and the South Asia earthquake) and 2006 – and was the largest recipient of bilateral humanitarian assistance from DAC donors in both years. Meanwhile, assistance to Iraq again fell significantly, underlining the fact that ongoing support is now being funded from development rather than humanitarian budgets. Continue reading More on Development and Security POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION Post-conflict Recovery: Resource Mobilization and Peacebuilding Political Economy Research Institute In war-torn societies aid can play an important and constructive role in building a durable peace. However, are positive outcomes the automatic result of good intentions? Furthermore, are donors motivated entirely by the objective of peacebuilding? The paper addresses three key areas: how economic assistance and aid conditionalities can be realigned to better serve peacebuilding objectives; how peacekeeping operations and peacebuilding assistance can better support economic recovery, in particular by helping to build state fiscal capacities; how the interests and incentive structures that shape the behaviour of aid donors, suggesting that their actions can be part of the problem as well as part of the solution. In relation to these questions the author reviews evidence on the impact of aid in “post-conflict” settings and offers suggestions for making aid more effective in supporting efforts to build a durable peace. Continue reading More on Peace Operations and Post-conflict Reconstruction INTERNATIONAL LAW Courting Conflict: Justice, Peace, and the ICC in Africa Royal African Society The International Criminal Court is a permanent international body, established to prosecute those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It has a global mandate but its activities have concentrated on African countries marked by ongoing violent conflict. Crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), northern Uganda, Darfur and Central African Republic are the subject of its first investigations and prosecutions. The ICC’s operations in Africa have encountered significant difficulties. While the work of the Court has taken concrete shape, so have its challenges. The title of this collection, Courting Conflict?, alludes to the inherent problems of pursuing justice in the midst of violence. It also points to the tremendous controversy generated by the ICC’s work to date – not least the charge levelled at the Court that its actions risk prolonging conflict by jeopardising peace deals. Continue reading More on International Law, Justice and Accountability ARMED CONFLICT Chad: Summary of Conflict January - March 2008 Safer Access The dynamics of conflict in Chad today are essentially four-fold. At one level it can be seen as a simple struggle for power and wealth. Factions are often recruited among a single ethnic group, and organised in a politico n politico-military fashion by their leader. The faction contests against the government in order gain control or to obtain a lucrative and influential position within its government. Secondly, the conflict is profoundly local, with different ethnic groups/political parties having formed armed civil defence groups. These groups then clash either in legitimate self-defence or in conflict over access to natural resources. The conflict is also a spill-over from the conflict in Darfur, in which eastern Chad is subject to the attacks from militias and rebel movements who recognise no international boundaries. Out of the inter-play of these factors has emerged a fourth dynamic in which the governments of Chad and Sudan, and their allies fight out regional differences in Darfur, eastern Chad and parts of Central African Republic. The local groups noted above are often used as proxies by regional powers in this conflict. Continue reading More on Armed Conflict CRIMINAL VIOLENCE Can Production and Trafficking of Illicit Drugs be Reduced or Merely Shifted? World Bank The production of cocaine and heroin, the two most important drugs economically, has been concentrated in a small number of poor nations for 25 years. A slightly larger number of developing nations have been affected by large-scale trafficking in these two drugs. This paper reviews what is known about drug control programs and considers non-traditional options. The usual array of programs for suppressing drug problems, enforcement, treatment, harm reduction and prevention have been assessed almost exclusively in wealthy nations. Although treatment has been shown to be costeffective, it is of minimal relevance for reducing the drug problems of nations such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico or Tajikistan, which are primarily harmed by production and trafficking rather than consumption. Efforts to reduce drug production and trafficking have not been subject to systematic evaluation but the best interpretation of the available evidence is that they have had minimal effect on the quantities produced or trafficked. It is reasonable to conclude that international drug control efforts can do more to affect where these drugs are produced rather than the quantity. If that is the case, and given that spreading a specific level of production or trafficking to more rather than fewer nations probably decreases global welfare, it may be appropriate to consider a less aggressive stance to current producers and to make strategic decisions about the location of an industry producing a global bad. Continue reading More on Criminal Violence GOVERNANCE AND SECURITY Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance Human Rights Watch The scale and speed of the violence that engulfed Kenya following the controversial presidential election of December 27, 2007 shocked both Kenyans and the world at large. Two months of bloodshed left over 1,000 dead and up to 500,000 internally displaced persons in a country viewed as a bastion of economic and political stability in a volatile region. The ethnic divisions laid bare in the aftermath of the elections have roots that run much deeper than the presidential poll. No Kenyan government has yet made a good-faith effort to address long simmering grievances over land that have persisted since independence. High-ranking politicians who have been consistently implicated in organizing political violence since the 1990s have never been brought to book and continue to operate with impunity. Widespread failures of governance are at the core of the explosive anger exposed in the wake of the election fraud. Continue reading More on Governance and Security DISPLACEMENT Iraq: Five Years Later, A Hidden Crisis International Rescue Committee The war that was launched in Iraq five years ago has produced one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time. Yet this crisis is largely hidden from the public and ignored by the international community. More than four million Iraqis of different religions, ethnicities and backgrounds are estimated to be uprooted by horrific violence and death and are in dire need of help. About half have fled to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region. Because they are not huddled together in a camp or traveling as a group across a windswept plain, these refugees are not receiving the attention and help they deserve from the international community. Much of the reporting about them has been wrong, perpetuating myths that they are wealthy or that the crisis is over and that many are returning to their homes in Iraq. The solutions put forward by major donors have been wholly inadequate. Meanwhile, many of the refugees have been severely traumatized and now lead desperate lives in foreign cities such as Damascus, Amman, Cairo and Beirut. Continue reading More on Refugees and Internally Displaced People INTERNATIONAL LAW Peace Versus Justice: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and War Crimes Tribunals in Africa Centre for Conflict Resolution The Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR), Cape Town, South Africa, held a policy meeting in Cape Town on 17 and 18 May 2007 on the theme, “Peace versus Justice? Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and War Crimes Tribunals in Africa”. The Cape Town policy seminar was attended by around 40 participants, including past and present senior officials from truth and reconciliation commissions and war crimes tribunals on the continent, civil society activists and academics. The development of peacebuilding initiatives in Africa in the last decade is reflected in the proliferation of numerous models of transitional justice. Recent experiments on the continent range from judicial to nonjudicial approaches, including United Nations (UN) tribunals, “hybrid” criminal courts, domestic trials, and truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs). War crimes tribunals and TRCs have been in operation in Africa since 1974, with varying degrees of success. At an international level, the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), which came into existence in 2002, was established as a court of last resort to prosecute offences where national courts failed or were unable to respond. An analysis of the variety and relative success or failure of these approaches can add much to our current and future understandings of peacebuilding in Africa. A key concern for the Cape Town seminar was to analyse the dilemmas posed by peace without justice, as opposed to justice without peace. Continue reading More on International Law, Justice and Accountability DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict and Convergence in Rwanda MICROCON Civil war and genocide in the 1990-2000 period in Rwanda - a small, landlocked, densely populated country in Central Africa - have had differential economic impacts on the country’s provinces. The reasons for this are the death toll of the genocide, the location of battles, the waves of migration and the local resurgence of war. As a result, the labour/land and labour/capital ratios at the provincial level changed considerably during that period. Using two cross-sections, we find empirical evidence for convergence between provinces following the conflict shocks: previously richer provinces in the east and in the north of the country experienced lower, even negative, economic growth compared to the poorer western and southern provinces. This has in turn affected significantly the dynamics of household poverty in Rwanda in the same period. Using a small but unique panel of households surveyed before and after the conflict period, we find that households whose house was destroyed or who lost land ran a higher risk of falling into poverty. This was particularly the case for households who were land-rich before the genocide. We do not find this for the loss of household labour. In the latter case the effect depends on the violent or non-violent character of the loss. Continue reading More on Development and Security GENDER AND SECURITY Youth, Gender and the Changing Nature of Armed Conflict Peacebuild Contemporary armed conflicts have come to be characterized by a number of traits that have not generally been associated with earlier armed conflicts. Conflicts today tend to occur more within states, where the rules of engagement tend to be defined at the local level. Armed challenges to state power by non-state actors is a defining feature of contemporary conflict, while transnational, multilateral, regional and bilateral actors also play ever more significant roles. Other features include the targeting of civilians and the prevalence of gender-based violence as weapons of war. The widespread availability of small arms and light weapons has also led to greater civil engagement in combat, further blurring the lines between civilians and combatants. Continue reading More on Gender and Security Human Security Research is produced by the Human Security Report Project at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. The Human Security Report Project 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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