• GOVERNANCE: Failed States Index 2008 • POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION: Afghanistan Index - Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security • HUMAN RIGHTS: South Asia Human Rights Index 2008 • ARMED CONFLICT: Survey on Attitudes about Peace, Justice, and Social Reconstruction in Eastern DRC • ARMED CONFLICT: Russia's War in Georgia: Causes and Implications for Georgia and the World • TERRORISM: The Dynamic Relation Between Terrorism and the Factors Leading to Terrorism • PEACE OPERATIONS: The Strategic Context: Peacekeeping in Crisis, 2006-08 • DRUGS: Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008 • INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS: Global Governance and the Role of NGOs • CHILDREN: The State of Asia Pacific Children 2008 - Child Survival • MERCENARISM: The Extent of Mercenarism and Its Impact on Human Security and Human Rights • PEACE OPERATIONS: Extra-Territorial Interventions in Conflict Spaces GOVERNANCE Failed States Index 2008 The Fund For Peace When troops opened fire in the streets of Mogadishu in early May, it was a tragically familiar scene in war-torn Somalia. Except on this day, soldiers weren’t fighting Islamist militias or warlords. They were combating a mob of tens of thousands rioting over soaring food prices. On top of the country’s already colossal challenges, a food crisis seems an especially cruel turn for a place like Somalia. But it is a test that dozens of weak states are being forced to confront this year, with escalating prices threatening to undo years of poverty-alleviation and development efforts. The unrest in Mogadishu echoes food riots that have erupted on nearly every continent in the past year. Tens of thousands of Mexicans protested when the price of corn flour jumped 400 percent in early 2007. Thousands of Russian pensioners took to the streets in November to call for a return to price controls on milk and bread. In Egypt, the army was ordered to bake more loaves at military-run bakeries after riots broke out across the country. Kabul, Port-au-Prince, and Jakarta experienced angry protests over spikes in the price of staples. Because it is crucial to closely monitor weak states--their progress, their deterioration, and their ability to withstand challenges--the Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and FOREIGN POLICY present the fourth annual Failed States Index. Using 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, we ranked 177 states in order of their vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration. To do so, we examined more than 30,000 publicly available sources, collected from May to December 2007, to form the basis of the index’s scores. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings. Continue reading More on Governance POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION Afghanistan Index - Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security in Post-9/11 Afghanistan The Brookings Institution The Afghanistan Index is a statistical compilation of economic, public opinion and security data. This resource will provide updated and historical information on various data, including crime, infrastructure, casualties, unemployment, Afghan security forces and coalition troop strength. The index is designed to assemble the best possible quantitative indicators of the international community’s counterinsurgency and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, to track them over time, and to offer an objective set of criteria for benchmarking performance. It serves as an in-depth, non-partisan assessment of American and international efforts in Afghanistan, and is based primarily on U.S. government, Afghan government and NATO data. Although measurements of progress in any nation-building effort can never be reduced to purely quantitative data, a comprehensive compilation of such information can provide a clearer picture and contribute to a healthier and better informed debate. Continue reading More on Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Reconstruction HUMAN RIGHTS South Asia Human Rights Index 2008 Asian Centre for Human Rights The South Asia Human Rights Index 2008 covers key human rights events of 2007 in the South Asian sub-region. This is the second regional report by ACHR. This series is the first of its kind by any organisation or institution in the South Asian sub-region. The report indexes the human rights records of the member States of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) - the subregional inter-governmental organisation. Indexing human rights records of the governments is a controversial exercise as there are no foolproof or universally acceptable yardsticks to measure records. Given the scale of the task, this report is not exhaustive but rather aims to chronicle patterns, practices and the implications for the concerned countries. While this report is an index, it also demonstrates that all South Asian countries have serious human rights problems. A regional analysis also shows a high level of commonality in human rights patterns. Discrimination is endemic, institutionalised and in many cases legalised. Human rights violations are integral to counterinsurgency operations conducted by the military in the sub-region. Human rights are routinely violated in police detention including the routine use of torture. National security laws tend to be poorly framed, routinely abused and used as blanket cover to silence legitimate dissent rather than tackle security. These are not the assertions of one organisation but repeatedly confirmed by national and regional and international NGOs and the various UN bodies established to monitor human rights. Continue reading More on Human Rights ARMED CONFLICT Living With Fear: A population-based survey on attitudes about peace, justice, and social reconstruction in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Human Rights Center // University California Berkeley Two years after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) held its first elections since independence, the country is at a crossroads. Among the key challenges facing the DRC today is the question of how the country will address the massive human rights atrocities of its recent past to establish a foundation for peace and security, the rule of law, and respect for human rights to prevail in the future. The 2006 elections capped an era of international armed conflict and massive violence in the DRC that began with Laurent Desire Kabila’s 1996 - 1997 campaign to liberate Congo from decades of repressive rule under Mobutu Sese Seko. The advent of an elected government sets the stage for state-building initiatives focusing on governance and critical long-term institutional reform in the security and justice sectors. Yet armed conflict and mass violence continue to plague eastern DRC. This report presents the results of a population survey undertaken by the Human Rights Center (HRC) at the University of California, Berkeley, the Payson Center at Tulane University, and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). Focusing on areas most affected by conflict in eastern DRC, surveys were conducted from September to December 2007 among a sample population of 2,620 individuals in the Ituri district in Oriental province and the provinces of North and South Kivu. The report concentrates its analysis on the survey results in eastern DRC, but comparative interviews were also conducted among a sample population of 1,133 individuals in Kinshasa and Kisangani. The survey sought to assess exposure to violence among the population; understand the priorities and needs of Congolese civilians affected by the conflicts; and capture attitudes about peace, social reconstruction, and transitional justice mechanisms. Continue reading More on Armed Conflict ARMED CONFLICT Russia's War in Georgia: Causes and Implications for Georgia and the World Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program In August 2008, Russia launched an invasion of Georgia that sent shock waves reverberating - first across the post-Soviet space, but then also into the rest of Europe and the world, as the magnitude of the invasion and its implications became clear. This invasion took the world by surprise. But what should have been surprising about it was perhaps the extent of Russia’s willingness to employ crude military force against a neighboring state, not that it happened. Indeed, Russia had for several years pursued increasingly aggressive and interventionist policies in Georgia, and had employed an array of instruments that included military means, albeit at a smaller scale. In the several months that preceded the invasion, Moscow’s increasingly blatant provocations against Georgia led to a growing fear in the analytic community that it was seeking a military confrontation. Yet western reactions to this aggressive behavior remained declaratory and cautious in nature, and failed to attach cost to Russia for its behavior. After invading Georgia on August 8, Russia did score some initial successes in portraying the invasion as a response to a Georgian decision to militarily enter Tskhinvali, the capital of Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia. Yet a growing body of evidence rapidly emerged, implying that Russia's invasion was premeditated, not reactive – or in the words of a leading Russian military analyst, planned, not spontaneous. Indeed, as the chronology included in this paper shows, Russia had been meticulously preparing an invasion of Georgia through the substantial massing and preparation of forces in the country's immediate vicinity. Continue reading More on Armed Conflict TERRORISM Inside a Wave of Terrorism: The Dynamic Relation Between Terrorism and the Factors Leading to Terrorism Journal of Global Change and Governance The homegrown terrorists we see in the West, the Bali bombers, and the perpetrators of September 11 attacks are all somehow connected to, and are part of, a broader phenomenon of global Islamist Militancy, which includes transnational terrorists, insurgents, and guerillas. Terrorism and political violence in general is not evenly distributed, in temporal or geographic terms; rather it occurs in waves of heightened activity inside parameters of space and time. In modern history we have seen three waves of terrorism: the Anarchist, Anti-colonial, and left-wing waves which were all parts of broader waves of contention. The onset of the fourth wave of Islamist terrorism is generally considered to have been set in motion in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution and Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Not only do we know that the current phenomenon of Islamist terrorism is a wave, or at least part of a wave, we also know that there have been previous waves of contention and waves of terrorism. It is therefore remarkable that most explanations of why and how individuals become terrorists do not take into consideration the dynamics that go on inside a wave of terrorism. The analysis that does take the wave phenomenon into consideration tends to treat waves as an almost mystic phenomenon, using metaphors like energy, for example, 'similar activities [which] occur in several countries, driven by a common energy that shapes the participatg groups.' In this article I will examine the wave phenomenon by looking at the dynamic relation between terrorism and the factors that cause terrorism. Continue reading More on Terrorism PEACE OPERATIONS The Strategic Context: Peacekeeping in Crisis, 2006-08 International Peacekeeping The 2005 Report on Integrated Missions spotted a basic but sizeable flaw in the UN’s attitude to integration. It defined an integrated mission as 'subsuming various actors and approaches within an overall political-strategic crisis management framework'. But it was 'clear that the UN lacks a system-wide "strategic culture"'. The organization's planners seemed to be struggling to achieve a 'context-driven' approach to peace operations - an approach based on identifying key challenges and aligning military, civilian and financial resources to address them. This diagnosis was widely accepted, and when the then Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, approved guidelines for the Integrated Mission Planning Process (IMPP) on 13 June 2006, the words 'strategy' and 'strategic' made a combined total of 62 appearances in the space of 20 pages. The guidelines explicitly (if inelegantly) defined integration in terms of a strategy-making process. But if this looked simple on paper, events conspired to make it seem irrelevant that summer as the UN stumbled into a series of missions in an increasingly ad hoc fashion. As argued immediately below, events in Timor-Leste and the Middle East in the weeks before and after the launch of the IMPP guidelines sparked a period of crisis for the UN that continued into 2008. The second and third sections of the article claim that this crisis is not just a matter of a series of difficult missions coming in quick succession. Rather, it is both a systemic and paradigmatic crisis - and a fundamentally political one. Continue reading More on Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Reconstruction DRUGS Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime The opium flood waters in Afghanistan have started to recede. This year, the historic high-water mark of 193,000 hectares of opium cultivated in 2007 has dropped by 19% to 157,000 hectares. Opium production declined by only 6% to 7,700 tonnes: not as dramatic a drop as cultivation because of greater yields (a record 48.8 kg/ha against 42.5kg in 2007). Eradication was ineffective in terms of results (only 5,480 ha and about one quarter of last year’s amount), but very costly in terms of human lives. Also the data collection for this Afghan Opium Survey turned into tragedy as one of our colleagues perished in a suicide attack. Hence the decision to dedicate this work to him, and all those who have died in Afghanistan for the cause of democracy and security. Since last year, the number of opium-free provinces has increased by almost 50%: from 13 to 18. This means that no opium is grown in more than half of the country's 34 provinces. Indeed, 98% of all of Afghanistan's opium is grown in just seven provinces in the south-west (Hilmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Farah, Nimroz, and to a lesser extent Daykundi and Zabul), where there are permanent Taliban settlements, and where organized crime groups profit from the instability. This geographical overlap between regions of opium and zones of insurgency shows the inextricable link between drugs and conflict. Since drugs and insurgency are caused by, and effect, each other, they need to be dealt with at the same time - and urgently. The most glaring example is Hilmand province, in the south, where 103,000 ha of opium were cultivated this year - two thirds of all opium in Afghanistan. By contrast, Nangarhar, Afghanistan’s second highest opium producing province in 2007, has become poppy free. Continue reading More on Criminal Violence INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Global Governance and the Role of NGOs in International Peace and Security American Institute for Contemporary German Studies // John Hopkins University Global governance and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are becoming increasingly more important as the world grows more connected, less state-based, and more multinational. Issues that once fell under the purview of state sovereignty, including peace and security concerns, are now also influenced by NGOs. The United States and Germany are two -- of many -- countries with NGOs active in the realm of international peace and security issues. They operate in different causes and arenas, focus on different regions, are regulated by their varying sizes and bureaucracies and government regulations, and are funded in separate ways, but international NGOs still all strive to create and enforce expectations of global governance. Realizing these expectations can prove challenging, however, as NGOs are confronted with moral and ethical, funding, and accountability dilemmas. In this Policy Report, two experts on NGOs and global governance issues discuss these challenges. Looking at the number, types, and roles of NGOs in the U.S. and Germany, they also examine NGOs on a global level, addressing NGOs’ roles in agenda-setting, negotiation, monitoring and implementation, and enforcement and noncompliance of global governance policies. NGOs are growing in number, especially after 1990, with greater resources, more challenges, and a more open environment after the end of the Cold War. Thus, there are more advocacy NGOs working to influence policy and shape rules and regulations and more operational NGOs implementing programs and policies, striving at improving services 'on the ground'. Continue reading More on International and Regional Organizations CHILDREN The State of Asia Pacific Children 2008 - Child Survival United Nations Children's Fund The Asia-Pacific region spans 37 countries and two hemispheres - from the arid mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan bordering Iran in the west to the frigid upper reaches of China and Mongolia in the north to the tiny island archipelago state of Tonga in the South Pacific. Over half the world's inhabitants, totalling approximately 3.5 billion people, live in this vast region, with around 2.5 billion of them concentrated in the world's two most populous countries, China and India. These two population giants complicate efforts to aggregate Asia-Pacific's progress and challenges, since their absolute numbers and rates for key indicators tend to dominate and skew regional and subregional trends. The Asia-Pacific region also defies aggregation in terms of its culture, history and economic trends. At the same time, economic growth in Asia-Pacific has been the fastest in the world since 1990, with a GDP per capita average annual growth rate of 3.9 per cent for South Asia and 6.7 per cent for East Asia and the Pacific, which encompasses the subregions of Eastern Asia, South-Eastern Asia and the Pacific. This growth has been accompanied by a strong reduction in poverty as measured by the proportion of people living on less than US$1 per day. Although rapid economic growth in much of Asia-Pacific has resulted in far few people living in poverty and raised average living standards in many parts of the region, it has not ameliorated the harsh economic and social realities faced by hundreds of millions of Asian children and families. Continue reading More on Children MERCENARISM The Extent of Mercenarism and Its Impact on Human Security and Human Rights Institute for Security Studies One of the key challenges to the emerging African security architecture is that of dealing with 'new mercenarism' as the 'darker' manifestation of the privatisation of security. The 'traditional mercenary' was easier to identify as a 'dog of war' and a 'soldier of fortune'. The 'new mercenary' is harder to define and speaks of defending African sovereignty. The traditional mercenary emerged within the terrain of African struggles for independence and mainly fought on behalf of colonial regimes. The new mercenary has emerged in a complex new environment which is marked by privatisation and liberalisation together with the hegemony of the market. Within this environment, security has undergone privatisation and the state has lost its traditional monopoly over control of the resources and means of violence. At the centre of the discourse of privatisation of security are legitimate private security companies (PSCs), private military companies (PMCs) and private military contractors or private military firms. Within this terrain dominated by non-state providers of security, the key issue is that of the darker manifestations that lend credence to the continued relevance of the concept of mercenarism in Africa. Four challenges have emerged from the new African security architecture. The first challenge is how to define mercenaries in a terrain dominated by legal private providers of security that are viewed very negatively in some quarters and very positively in others. The second challenge is how to establish the extent of mercenarism in Africa within an environment in which military activities remain part of the ‘top secret’ list. The third challenge is how to assess the impact of mercenarism on human security under the current circumstances where the definition of mercenary is not yet clear. The final challenge is how to regulate operations and activities of the private security sector and how to eliminate/ abolish those aspects of private security that amount to mercenarism. Continue reading More on Armies, Paramilitaries, Non-State Armed Groups PEACE OPERATIONS Extra-Territorial Interventions in Conflict Spaces: Explaining the geographies of post-Cold War peacekeeping London School of Economics // Neumayer, Eric The period since the end of the Cold War has witnessed considerable growth in the number of multilateral peacekeeping operations (PKOs) (Chopra, 1996, Solomon, 2007, Welsh, 2003). Much of this expansion has taken place in the world's 'geopolitical blackholes' (O Tuathail, 2000: 170), spaces of instability where rising levels of conflict have been accompanied by economic collapse, human rights abuses and loss of life (Mullenbach, 2005, O'Loughlin, 2005, Silberfein, 2004). PKOs have sought to bring an end to hostilities, prevent further conflict, provide humanitarian assistance and facilitate post-conflict state-building (Diehl, 1988: 487, Ku and Jacobson, 2003). The central aim of this paper is to provide new understanding into the geographic factors which shape states’ uneven participation in post-Cold War PKOs. Our contribution advances on previous research in three ways. First, we examine the influence of a far wider set of geographic attributes on countries' uneven participation in PKOs, including aspects of spatial and relational proximity largely overlooked in previous work. Second, departing from previous monadic analyses, we analyse a novel dyadic dataset which records individual countries’ participation in specific PKOs. And third, unlike a number of past studies, which have focused exclusively on NATO (Shimizu and Sandler, 2003) or United Nations (UN) (Khanna et al., 1999) operations, we examine peacekeeping under the auspices of both the UN, regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and ad hoc 'coalitions of the willing.' Our results suggest that more democratic and human rights respecting countries have a higher probability of providing troops for multilateral PKOs. Aspects of spatial proximity (physical distance, same region) and relational proximity (colonial ties) between (potential) sending and receiving states are also found to raise the likelihood of participation in post-Cold War operations. Continue reading More on Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Reconstruction 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. To subscribe to Human Security Research, send an email to hsilist@sfu.ca with 'subscribe HS Research' in the subject field, or click here. To unsubscribe, please reply to this message with 'unsubscribe HS Research' in the subject heading. |
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