by Richard Gowan | Sep 14, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system
I’ve just returned from a very interesting presentation at the International Peace Institute (of movie fame). Christoph Mikulaschek was outlining the first results of a long-running project of new research on the UN Security Council and civil wars. You can download the findings here. I was struck by this passage:
Between 1989 and 2006, the Security Council engaged in the resolution of a growing portion of civil wars. At the same time, it did not address a single resolution to seventeen of the forty-four civil wars that were ongoing during this period (39 percent).
During the first eighteen years following the Cold War, the Security Council tended to engage more quickly and more actively with civil wars in Africa and Europe than those in the Americas and Asia. Between 1989 and 2006, 59 percent of all civil wars took place in Africa and Europe, but the Security Council addressed 88 percent of its civil-war related demands to warring factions in these two regions. The civil wars that figured most prominently on the active agenda of the Security Council in this period were those in Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Georgia.
Countries whose civil wars were addressed by Security Council resolutions tended to be less populous and have less military capacity than civil-war-affected states in which the Council did not undertake such efforts. There was almost no difference between the level of economic development of civil-war-affected countries addressed by Security Council resolutions and those that were not.
There’s nothing wildly unexpected in these results, although I was really struck by the point about the relative irrelevance of economic development to Security Council engagement in wars (I would previously have guessed, along with your average bar-room Leftist, that the UN would interfere more heavily in poor countries’ fights).
But this overview – and the details in the main IPI report – left me wondering whether we couldn’t outline the borders of a “UN-sphere”. Mark Leonard of ECFR once coined the term “Eurosphere” to describe those countries where EU has clout. The UN-sphere is the geopolitical space in which the Security Council is (or, in the Balkans, was) a major force in regulating security affairs. IPI’s resesrch suggests that this boils down to Europe, Africa and outlying islands like Haiti and East Timor. If you played with the parameters of the study you’d bring in the Middle East. But it excludes most of the Americas and, critically given global power shifts, virtually all of Asia.
There are lots of ways of explaining this sphere. One, mentioned by Christoph at IPI today, is the fact that European states are over-represented on the Security Council. The Council thus concentrates on places that worry the Euros, like their own continent and former colonies in Africa. In this sense, the UN-sphere and the Eurosphere are actually rather similar spaces. This argument doesn’t take America’s leading role in the Council into account, however. Still, it does raise some interesting questions about how Security Council reform would affect the UN’s priorities. (more…)
by Richard Gowan | Sep 14, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, Off topic
Has an office away-day ever gone as badly wrong as the recent policy retreat for Ban Ki-moon and top UN officials in Alpbach, Austria (above)? Everyone is cringing at the story about China’s senior man in the UN Secretariat getting tired and emotional. On top of that, someone slipped the background papers for the retreat to Fox News. As Colum Lynch notes over at Foreign Policy, the theme that runs through these papers is the UN’s diminished influence, especially on the financial crisis and climate change.
Admittedly, the papers do tend towards hyperbole. Lynch quotes one purple passage:
“Are we ready to empower the Secretary General with our collective ideas on a vision of sustainable development, one that will enable growth and prosperity, while respecting planetary boundaries?” according to Ban’s climate team’s paper. “The planet and the world are both waiting for it.”
Seriously? Climate policy people may want to know what Ban’s next move will be. But is the planet really waiting for this news as one living, breathing, sentient whole? It’s hard to say… I can hear the sea faintly from where I type. As far as I can ascertain, the tremulous cadence of the tide is not murmuring “Empower the Secretary-General with collective ideas on a vision of sustainable development, yee foolish sons of Man” or anything like that. I also met a cat on the way home, and he didn’t raise the issue.
Where do the UN’s drafters get their ideas? Flicking through the papers, I was struck by the opening sentences of the contribution on mediation and conflict prevention:
A respected think-tank recently published a report, which claimed that conflict prevention is getting harder. We certainly do not see it getting any easier.
Well, if the respected think-tank isn’t the Center on International Cooperation, and the report my recent paper with Bruce Jones on taking UN preventive diplomacy “back to basics”… I see now that these papers are intellectual masterworks, informed by only the finest thought. I just hope they aren’t what drove the senior UN official to drink…
Now, if you’ll excuse me, the planet and world are waiting.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 13, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Off topic
It’s time, the Associated Press reports, for multilateralism with teeth:
UNITED NATIONS — They have the scars and missing limbs that make it hard to forgive, but these victims are tougher than most. And now they want to save their attackers.
They are shark attack survivors, a band of nine thrown together in an unlikely and ironic mission to conserve the very creatures that ripped their flesh, tore off their limbs and nearly took their lives.
Calm down, Associated Press, calm down! What’s going on here?
They want nations to adopt a resolution that would require them to greatly improve how fish are managed, including shark species of which nearly a third are threatened with extinction or on the verge of being threatened.
“If a group like us can see the value in saving sharks, can’t everyone?” asked Florida shark bite victim Debbie Salamone, 44, whose Achilles tendon was severed in a 2004 attack that temporarily halted her ballroom dance hobby.
This makes it sound like the shark was on the dancefloor, but anyway…
Salamone, a former journalist, initially made plans to eat shark steaks in revenge. Then, she said, she turned tragedy to something productive by joining the Washington-based nonprofit Pew Environment Group and recruiting like-minded shark attack survivors to work for shark conversation. Organized by Pew, the group is gathering at U.N. headquarters Monday hoping to win new protections globally for the ocean’s top predators.
I only wish that the Pew Group had imitated the NGOs that parked a helicopter outside the UN a couple of years ago to protest the lack of choppers in Darfur… the sight of Great White snapping at the General Assembly would be rather exciting…
[H/t David Bosco.]
by Richard Gowan | Sep 12, 2010 | Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks
Jeffrey R. Young, an expert on higher education, is touring Asia to see how the region’s universities are using information technology – and he’s blogging about it. He’s found a lot of interesting stuff, but this story from Singapore grabbed my attention:
Next month a major undergraduate division of the National University of Singapore will ask students to stay out of the classroom for a whole week—and force professors to teach online instead. It’s an unusual drill to prepare for any unexpected campus shutdown, and it was inspired by the SARS outbreaks of 2003 and last year’s concerns about H1N1.
Last week the National University of Singapore staged a series of workshops for the division (the faculty of arts and social sciences) to make sure every professor knows how to use tools that let them teach from home using audio chat, video lectures recorded from their laptops, or other virtual-delivery methods. Later in the semester, other divisions will take their turn switching to online for a week, and most every class at the university will participate sometime this academic year.
Professors have not complained about the exercise—called e-learning week—according to officials. The lack of protest is mainly because professors see such shutdowns as a real possibility, and they want to be prepared, argues Shyam Narayanan, associate director of the university’s center for teaching with technology. “The small size of Singapore really plays a role—a few cases can spread fast,” he says.
If you want to keep up with your studies after the apocalypse, move to Singapore.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 11, 2010 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, South Asia
Earlier this week, I noted that India had decided to withdraw its military helicopters from the UN missions in the DR Congo and Sudan, and suggested this “could signal a broader Indian disengagement from UN ops, with serious consequences for the organization’s overall operational abilities.” Here are some updates on the problem.
(To clarify: we’re talking about 25 helicopters in total.)
Yesterday, I had a fascinating chat with Erin Weir of Refugees International, who has just returned from the Congo. She explained that although the Indian helicopters are still there, they are already pretty much out of action. When UN forces want to set up a new base in tricky country, they can no longer send in helicopters to secure the area. The peacekeepers have to go in overland – which is obviously slower and riskier.
But why is India pulling its choppers out? My grumbling on the topic has engendered a detailed response over at Pragmatic Euphony, an insightful blog on Indian security. There is, the post argues, “no conspiracy to snub the UN”. India simply doesn’t have enough helicopters to meet all its needs:
Firstly, all the Indian helicopters on UN duty come from the fleet of the Indian Air Force. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India in its audit report has brought out a deficit of 26 per cent in the total availability of helicopters compared to the numbers required for achieving current operational projections. Category-wise shortfalls were most apparent in the case of attack helicopters where the holdings were 46 per cent below the actual requirement. The report comes down harshly on IAF for diverting its helicopters to the UN when its own operational requirements were not being met.
[ . . . ]
Secondly, India desperately needs more helicopters for its internal security operations against the Maoists. Although there might be no firm proposal as of now to divert these UN-returned helicopters for anti-Maoist operations, it is highly plausible that some of them may be diverted for anti-Maoist operations.
[ . . . ]
Finally, contrary to the commonly-held belief, India is actually making financial losses by deploying helicopters on UN peacekeeping assignments.
Check out the original for links to all the sources involved. This adds up to convincing case that Indian policy in this case is driven more by “India’s own security goals than by any attempts to snub or undermine the UN or UN peacekeeping.”
I accept that, but I still have questions. If and when India manages to fill its helicopter gap, will it consider sending more air assets to UN missions? Or will it conclude that such deployments are more trouble than it’s worth? If the first scenario proves correct, fair enough. But the second seems rather more plausible – bad news for the UN.
