	Taliban Expand Insurgency to Northern Afghanistan
	Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Security Sector Reform in Sri Lanka
	Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa

HSRP Publications
miniAtlas of Human Security
Human Security Brief 2007
Human Security Brief 2006
Human Security Report 2005

HSRP E-Resources
Human Security News
Human Security Weekly
Human Security Research
Afghanistan Security News
Afghanistan Conflict Monitor
Pakistan Conflict Monitor
Human Security Gateway

HSRP Launches the Pakistan Conflict Monitor

5 November 2009: Canada's Human Security Report Project (HSRP) at Simon Fraser University launched the Pakistan Conflict Monitor today. The new monitor will provide daily updates on the incidence of political violence in Pakistan, analysis of its causes and impact on the wider region. Related issues, such as health, development, displacement, governance, gender, small arms, landmines, human rights, peacemaking, and transitional justice are also covered. Read the full news release [PDF].

AID: From Crisis Response to State-Building: Services and Stability in Conflict Affected Contexts
The paper is divided into four sections. Section 1 defines the contexts of concern to this discussion, considers how the confluence of governance approaches in the international development community, and the growing �securitisation� of aid, has led to the emergence of common approaches to state-building in post-conflict contexts and outlines humanitarian critiques of these trends. Section 2 discusses the role of service provision in promoting stability, the contribution and limits of humanitarian action within this and some potential policy responses to possible gaps in service delivery during the winding down of a crisis response. Section 3 discusses the range of financing mechanisms and process developments that could facilitate the closing of this service gap. Finally, Section 4 raises some points for further discussion. The durability of post-conflict stability is dependent on a range of political and economic factors which are often outside the influence of donors. That said, further take-up and development of innovations in aid instrumentation would help overcome gaps in service delivery in post-conflict environments. In particular, a stronger focus on ensuring people�s access to basic social services can contribute to improved state legitimacy and stability over time. Humanitarian Policy Group // Overseas Development Institute (1 October)

More on Humanitarian Intervention |

SSR: "Fixing Broken Windows": Security Sector Reform in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen
As they emerge from conflict, states can rarely commence the arduous task of reconstruction and consolidate their governments until they undertake extensive restructuring of their security forces. Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen are all fractured, quasi-democratic states with divided societies, and deep disagreement over what constitutes the national interest. Successful reform in each will require security institutions that answer to democratically-elected civilian leaders, but the U.S. and European approach has thus far focused largely on providing military training and equipment, targeted toward counterterrorist capabilities. To enable real reform, the West must adopt a comprehensive approach which treats security reform as only one part of a broader political strategy, and encourage governments and security commanders in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen to buy into such a strategy. Donor states should invest resources commensurate with their declared objectives, improve coordination, and standardize practices. Above all, they should make it a priority to build the institutions and procedures that are essential for democratic governance of the security sector, without which reforms become bogged down in internal power struggles. Pursuing counterterrorism in the absence of the rule of law perpetuates the undemocratic governance of the security sector and undermines state building and post-conflict reconstruction. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (28 October)

More on Governance and Security |

LANDMINES: Landmine Monitor Report 2009: Special Ten-Year Review of the Mine Ban Treaty
More than three-quarters (156 countries) of the world�s states are party to the Mine Ban Treaty, although the most recent to join (Palau) was in November 2007. Major powers such as China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States have still to join, yet one of the treaty�s most significant achievements has been the degree to which any use of antipersonnel mines by anyone has been stigmatized throughout the world. During the course of the past decade, the use of antipersonnel mines, especially by governments, has become rare. In 1999, Landmine Monitor recorded probable use of landmines by 15 states. In the decade since then a total of 21 governments have likely used antipersonnel mines, but only four since 2004 (Georgia, Nepal, Myanmar, and the Russian Federation). This year�s report, as in 2007 and 2008, confirms use by only two states: Myanmar and Russia. The normative effect of the treaty�s comprehensive ban has also resulted in decreased use by non-state armed groups (NSAGs). Over the past 10 years, at least 59 NSAGs across 13 countries have committed to halt use of antipersonnel mines. There have been no confirmed instances of use of antipersonnel mines by States Parties to the Mine Ban Treaty. However, Landmine Monitor reported that there were serious and credible allegations that Ugandan forces used antipersonnel mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2000, and that Zimbabwean forces used mines in the DRC in 1999 and 2000, although both strongly denied it. International Campaign to Ban Landmines (31 October)

More on Small Arms, Light Weapons and Landmines |

CONFLICT PREVENTION: Still Under Construction: Regional Organisations' Capacities for Conflict Prevention
The international community has progressively tasked regional and sub-regional organisations with conflict prevention and peacekeeping. This is largely due to an overburdened UN system. At the same time regional organisations have increasingly come to accept that violence, interstate and intra-state wars normally affect the region through destabilizing spill-over effects and that promoting peace is in their own best interest. Yet, it is argued in this report that regional organisations� peace and security functions still do not amount to an effective regional conflict management regime. Furthermore, not all regional and sub-regional organisations have begun to take on this responsibility. This report contains three related articles: Herbert Wulf's The Role of Regional Organisations in Conflict Prevention and Resolution; Francine Jacome's Violent Conflict Prevention in Latin America and the Caribbean; and Akihisa Matsuno's Stability and Democracy in Post-Conflict East Timor. Institute for Development and Peace // University of Duisberg-Essen (1 October)

More on Conflict Prevention |

CONFLICT RESOLUTION: Mediation and Peace Processes
Today more than ever before, armed conflicts are likely to end in mediated settlements. As mediation activity has surged since the end of the Cold War, its dynamics have undergone significant change as well. New conflict drivers, such as climate change and organized crime, demand broader substantive agendas and the coordinated engagement of a wider range of mediators with specialized skills. To be successful, mediation processes need to be informed by an understanding of the broader regional context, given the frequent use of proxy forces in contemporary conflict. And to prevent a relapse into violence, mediation processes have to extend well beyond the cessation of open hostilities. At present, the mandates and resources for multilateral mediation and related political analysis are often inadequate to meet these challenges. Recognizing that every mediation process has its own peculiarities and avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach, improvements can be made at the United Nations and beyond to strengthen the toolbox at the disposal of international mediators. International Peace Institute (13 October)

More on Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking |

VENEZUELA: Oil in Venezuela: Triggering Violence or Ensuring Stability? A Context-sensitive Analysis of the Ambivalent Impact of Resource Abundance
This paper studies the causal factors that make the oil-state Venezuela, which is generally characterized by a low level of violence, an outlier among the oil countries as a whole. It applies a newly elaborated 'context approach' that systematically considers domestic and international contextual factors. To test the results of the systematic analysis, two periods with a moderate increase in internal violence in Venezuela are subsequently analyzed, in the second part of the paper, from a comparative-historical perspective. The findings demonstrate that oil, in interaction with fluctuating non-resource-specific contextual conditions, has had ambiguous effects: On the one hand, oil has explicitly served as a conflict-reducing and partly democracy-promoting factor, principally through large-scale socioeconomic redistribution, widespread clientelistic structures, and corruption. On the other hand, oil has triggered violence - primarily through socioeconomic causal mechanisms (central keywords: decline of oil abundance and resource management) and secondarily through the long-term degradation of political institutions. While clientelism and corruption initially had a stabilizing effect, in the long run they exacerbated the delegitimization of the traditional political elite. Another crucial finding is that the impact and relative importance of oil with respect to the increase in violence seems to vary significantly depending on the specific subtype of violence. German Institute of Global and Area Studies (30 October)

More on Venezuela |

NIGERIA: How Do Ethnic Militias Perpetuate in Nigeria? A Micro-level Perspective on the Oodua People�s Congress
Recent seminal contributions in the literature on civil conflicts have explored the micro-foundations of collective political violence. A great deal of attention is now paid to the non-state collective actors that organize violence and the specific constraints and challenges they face: gathering funds, recruiting combatants, enforcing rank and files' commitment. The strategies implemented to solve these challenges have been shown to influence crucial outcomes such as the intensity of violence or the sustainability of violent groups over time. The paper discusses the recently promoted view that organized insurgent violence should either be conducted by activists bonded together by social capital ties or selfinterested quasi-mercenaries, depending on the type of financial resources available to the group. We contrast this perspective with the study of an ethnic Nigerian militia, the Oodua People�s Congress (OPC). MICROCON (27 October)

More on Nigeria |

ECUADOR: Conflict Beyond Borders: Humanitarian Impact of the Colombian Conflict in Ecuador
In March, 2008, the Colombian armed forces attacked a FARC camp located in the Ecuadorian province of Sucumb�os. This attack resulted in the death of FARC�s second in command, Ra�l Reyes. This event, which turned around relations between the two countries, which to date continue severed, and received copious international attention, including a condemning resolution from the Organization of American States, merely evidenced what for years had been known to the people living near the Ecuador-Colombia border: that for many years, the Colombian conflict has been spilling over to Ecuador, and that in everyday life and for everyone all the same�armed actors, civilian population, and even government forces�the 600-kilometer border is not much more than an abstract political fiction. While for tens of thousands of Colombians Ecuador offers a much safer environment than the border departments of Nari�o and Putumayo, the extensive presence of illegal armed groups and high levels of insecurity increasingly threaten the stability of the Ecuadorian border provinces, especially Esmeraldas, Carchi, and Sucumb�os. In addition to the well-documented flow of Colombian asylum seekers, recent reports signal that internal displacement of Ecuadorians may be a growing phenomenon. Humanitarian aid on the Ecuadorian side is limited and the response from the Ecuadorian government, even though highly superior comparatively to Venezuela�s and Panama�s, is still insufficient. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (10 October)

More on Ecuador |

CHINA: "We Are Afraid to Even Look for Them": Enforced Disappearances in the Wake of Xinjiang's Protests
In the aftermath of the July 2009 protests in western Xinjiang province, Chinese security forces detained hundreds of people on suspicion of participation in the unrest. Dozens of these detainees, and possibly many more, have since 'disappeared' without a trace. The protests of July 5-7, 2009, in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, were one of the worst episodes of ethnic violence in China in decades. Information about the Xinjiang protests and their aftermath remains fragmentary. On July 5, protests by Uighurs, an ethnic minority group, against the killing of Uighur workers at the Guangdong toy factory appear to have begun peacefully. It remains unclear how the protest turned violent, with Uighur sources blaming the riot police for the excessive use of force against the protestors. Chinese authorities were quick to accuse a variety of external forces of masterminding and sponsoring the unrest. They specifically blamed Rebiya Kadeer, a former political prisoner in Xinjiang and a prominent Uighur rights activist living in exile in the United States, for planning and organizing the protests. No evidence, however, has been provided to support those claims, and many analysts believe that the root causes of the protests were largely related to China's longstanding discriminatory policies toward the Uighur minority. Human Rights Watch (20 October)

More on China |

UGANDA: Children of Rebellion: Socialization of Child Soldiers within the Lord's Resistance Army
The main purpose of this thesis is to explore the lives of child soldiers during their active involvement with the LRA. I will focus on the motivating factors for their life as a member of the group and attempt to explain why these children remain with the LRA at all as the majority have been forcefully recruited. As explained above, this is of great significance as there is not much literature available on this subject and reintegration programs mismatch their needs. The shortage of research concerning this issue enables me to contribute to a research environment evolving around an ever growing problem; children embodying the ultimate weapon in war. Due to the proliferation of armed conflict, increasing numbers of children are directly exposed to the effects of war. This indicates that a growing number of children are becoming engaged in conflicts. These children are recruited into armed groups and quickly transformed into soldiers. Unlike other scholars, I argue that one of the most significant processes in the transformation of a child into a soldier is socialization. I will highlight that socialization creates bonding between the members of a group and that it is used as a tool to create allegiance and keep child soldiers with the rebel group, preventing them to escape. As such, this thesis will focus on the rigorous developments coming about during the socialization process used by the LRA. Norwegian Institute of International Affairs // Department of Security and Conflict Management (21 October)

More on Uganda |

NEPAL: Explaining Maoist Control and Level of Civil Conflict
On February 13, 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPNM) attacked a number of police stations in different districts of Nepal starting the so called People's war. The conflict escalated after November 23, 2001, when the Maoists for the first time attacked military posts. After ten years of war it appears that the Maoists realized that they will not win by military means, and in November 2005 they signed an agreement with the democratic parties, and a year later they signed a peace accord with the new democratic coalition government of the Seven Party Alliance (SPA). CPNM sees the insurgency as a struggle against feudalism and monarchy, and for political and economic change in Nepal. The insurgency can be interpreted as a violent element of a larger economic, social, and political transition, as discussed by Muni (2003), Thapa (2003), and Mishra (2007). A number of factors have contributed to the insurgency, including the historical legacy of the communist movement and previous popular uprisings, and economic inequality and poverty, as well as caste based and ethnic frictions. While scholars emphasize the complexity of the issue, political actors and commentators tend to focus on a single factor, whether it is ethnicity, poverty, or inequality. In this paper we acknowledge the complexity, but we will still make an attempt to single out the most important factors among those that may have contributed to the insurgency. We apply multivariate regression analysis. Chr. Michelsen Institute (26 October)

More on Nepal |

ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN: Nagorno-Karabakh: Getting to a Breakthrough
A preliminary breakthrough in the two-decades-old Nagorno-Karabakh conflict � a framework agreement on basic principles � may be within reach. Armenia and Azerbaijan are in substantial accord on principles first outlined by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group in 2005. A basic principles agreement, while only a foundation to build on, is crucial to maintain momentum for a peace deal. Important differences remain on specifics of a subsequent final deal. Movement toward Armenia-Turkey rapprochement after a century of hostility has brought opportunity also for ending the Nagorno-Karabakh stalemate. Sustainable regional peace requires compromises on all the quarrels, but there is backlash danger, especially in Armenia, where public discontent could derail the Nagorno-Karabakh framework agreement. Presidents Sarkisian (Armenia) and Aliyev (Azerbaijan) need to do more to prepare their publics. The U.S., Russia and France, Minsk Group co-chairs, have stepped up collective efforts, but more is needed to emphasise dangers in clinging to an untenable status quo. Although a deliberate military offensive from either side is unlikely in the near future, the ceasefire that ended active hostilities fifteen years ago is increasingly fragile. International Crisis Group (7 October)

More on Armenia |

| More on Azerbaijan |

Human Security Research
HS-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 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.

You are receiving this newsletter because in the past you have provided the Human Security Report Project with your email address *|EMAIL|*. If you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please click unsubscribe to be removed. If you need assistance, please contact us at hsrp@sfu.ca or through our feedback form.