Jack Copley, who graduated from POLSIS in July 2012 with a first class degree in Political Science, has recently had an article published on the Irish current affairs website Politico.
The article, which is based on his prize-winning undergraduate dissertation, analyses the impact of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon on a working class district of Dublin. You can read Jack’s article here.
Filed under Uncategorized
On Tuesday 4th September, the University of Birmingham hosted the Third Annual Symposium on “The Challenges to Trust Building in Nuclear Worlds” entitled “Trust, Cooperation and the Global Nuclear Future”.
Building on the success of previous years, the symposium aims once again to bring together early career researchers, established academics and practitioners working in the fields of trust research and/or nuclear politics. The event was designed to facilitate interaction between all three groups while also enhancing collaboration between researchers across various social scientific disciplines such as international relations, psychology, and sociology.
The conference was jointly hosted by the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (ICCS) of the University of Birmingham and the Intelligence, Security and Strategic Studies group (ISSS) of University of Leicester.
Nick Ritchie (York), “’Nuclear weapons, value and legitimacy”
Heather Williams (KCL), “The trust spectrum: options and prospects in arms control”
Jason Douglas (Cork), “Deterrence and trust building amongst nuclear rivals”
Michael Urban (Oxford), “Operationalizing Trust; a first cut at identifying the micro-level mechanisms of trust building”
Daniel Salisbury (KCL), “Trust in the UK-US nuclear relationship: the Trident purchase 1978-1982”
Hugh Chalmers (RUSI), “Trust among friends: nuclear confidence-building in NATO”
Vincent Keating (Durham) and Jan Ruzicka (Aberystwyth), “An unlikely trusting relationship? The United States and Japan since 1945”
Andrew Futter (Leicester) & Ben Zala (Birmingham), “Trust, cooperation and the Asia-Pacific nuclear balance”
Nicola Horsburgh (Oxford) & Kate Sullivan (Oxford), “Explaining India & China’s small nuclear arsenals”
Francesca Giovannini (Oxford), “Indonesia & Singapore: rivalry and ASEAN regional nuclear cooperation”
David Cliff (VERTIC), “Trust and nuclear warhead dismantlement verification”
Matthew Moran (KCL) & Christopher Hobbs (KCL), “Exploring the role of trust in Iranian nuclear diplomacy”
Patricia Shamai (Portsmouth), “Nuclear terrorism and trust: understanding the significance of the categorization of WMD”
Ingmar Zielke (KCL), “Doomed to failure: US-Russia BMD cooperation”
Wyn Bowen (KCL)
Patricia Lewis (Chatham House)
Paul Schulte (KCL)
Filed under Audio / Video, Past Events
Human insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) arises from the intersection of diverse threats, including environmental problems, food and water scarcity, and ethnic and cultural conflicts. If the European Union is to pursue comprehensive security in the MENA, it must learn from its past mistakes of endorsing authoritarian regimes and develop a new approach in its relations with the polities and societies emerging from the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, writes POLSIS’s Michelle Pace.
The formulation and development of a new paradigm in Brussels – one that is people-based with a focus on human security – is much called for if the EU is to pursue comprehensive security in the European-Mediterranean/MENA region. In the past, the EU has placed its emphasis on conventional understandings of security, namely stability, the protection of its borders, management of migration flows and its economic interests vis-à-vis its southern neighbours. It also claimed to be a democracy promoter in the region. Will the EU take a step back and become a facilitator of the drastic political changes taking place in the MENA rather than promoting its own conceptions of order and society? The processes underway in the MENA are all to do with the development of a new relationship and social contract between citizens(hip) and the state based on the people’s calls (during the protests of 2011/2012) for dignity, justice, freedoms, social rights and the rule of law. Will the EU listen more closely to the emerging voices from the south and enter into a dialogue about their own home grown conceptions of freedom and democracy?
One of the things that the so called ‘Arab Spring’ has taught us is that we need to recognise that there are new and multiple dimensions of human security as well as the compounded impact of all the new threats to populations. How do environmental problems, food problems, water problems, ethnic problems, cultural problemsaffect populations, as a whole, at a given time and place? We are dealing here with a vast region, which has gone through very complex and different processes of state-building since decolonization and so far different revolutionary processes towards their path to democracy. We have to recognise not just the great diversity of the Arab States but also their great creativity.
The Arab Human Development Report of 2009 stipulated that water shortages, a lack of representative government, security and rising hunger and malnutrition were key threats to human security in the Arab world. It noted, “In the Arab region, human insecurity – pervasive, often intense and with consequences affecting large numbers of people – inhibits human development.” According to the UN, Arab countries will be populated by approximately 395 million people by 2015, 60 per cent of which will be under 25 years of age.
The European Commission has also been promoting human security explicitly. In her speeches, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who served as European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy from 2004 to 2009, often invoked the concept to carve out an EU normative position and a broad view of security emphasising freedom from want and freedom from fear. World Bank data shows that the economies of Arab nations are very vulnerable. The oil wealth of Arab countries has not been distributed equally and fairly amongst populations but held by the very privileged few. The real economic situation of the majority of the peoples of many Arab states is one of structural weaknesses and resulting insecurities of countries and citizens alike. No wonder many unemployed young people felt disillusioned and took to the streets of Cairo, Tunis, etc during 2011/12 – they want and demand a future and a sense of security.
So if any lessons must be learnt by external actors like the EU, their support must be directed at supporting Arab nations moving from a state of dependence on oil to a more diversified, knowledge-based economy that creates employment opportunities especially for the young. The tendency in the EU and the US has been to think of security in the MENA region only in hard, military or state security terms. But the security of Arab peoples themselves has been threatened not just by conflict and civil unrest, but also by environmental degradation, discrimination, unemployment, poverty, lack of freedoms and of social and civil rights and hunger. So EU support should be directed at stepping up efforts to end hunger, expanding access to affordable, quality education and health care, changing laws and attitudes that discriminate against minorities and women, enforcing laws that protect the environment, etc. It is to the EU’s credit that some new resources have been allocated for these purposes in the midst of its own economic crisis. The EU should continue with its efforts at supporting demand-driven political change in the MENA.
Michelle Pace is Reader in Politics and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Filed under Research Agendas, Security Studies
Giving up on international negotiations over the Iranian nuclear issue would be a tragic mistake, write Dani Nedal and Nicholas J. Wheeler.
Optimism regarding nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States and Germany) and Iran has come and gone, and now the familiar drums of war are beating again. The latest round of negotiations initiated little over three months ago seems to have once again stalled. Doves and hawks alike, from lead European negotiator Catherine Ashton to Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, are announcing that the time for negotiations is short and receding. Crippling economic sanctions are taking their toll on Iran’s economy and covert cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear program have forced Iranian Government agencies off the internet. But, still, Iran does not look ready to give into Western demands and suspend its enrichment activities.
In explaining this stalemate, there’s quite a bit of blame to go around. As we have argued elsewhere at some length, the failure of recent negotiations is not attributable solely to Iranian intransigence, but also, and crucially, to Western negotiating positions that have been both ill advised and counterproductive. In fact, negotiations have never been given a real chance to succeed by either side. In the first phases of negotiations in the 2003-5 period, Europeans countries were mildly hopeful that negotiations could succeed, but opposition from key neoconservatives in the Bush administration seriously hampered their efforts. As reported in a new book by David Crist, the Bush administration failed to act on successive opportunities to improve relations with Tehran. Even Obama, who supposedly came into office proposing to turn a new leaf in US-Iran relations, approached negotiations as “a single roll of the dice”. Indeed, as soon as the Iranian Government failed to reciprocate what Obama saw as a genuine cooperative move, the United States retreated back into a strategy of coercive diplomacy. Even if the President had wanted to make additional conciliatory moves, he had hardliners in Congress constantly pushing his administration to adopt ever-tougher measures. Adding to that pressure was Israel and the threat – sometimes hidden sometimes explicit – that if the pressure was not ratcheted up against Tehran, then Jerusalem might act unilaterally to stop its nuclear programme.
Peter Jenkins, a former British Ambassador to the IAEA recently lamented that Iran stopped complying with the IAEA Additional Protocol before inspectors had a chance to proclaim their program clean of “undeclared nuclear activities or material”. The problem is that to believe, as Jenkins does, that such a declaration would have mitigated the nuclear crisis is to forget that conservatives in Washington and Israeli leaders don’t exactly hold the norms and rules of international organisations like the IAEA in the highest regard. They are simply not persuaded that these institutions can safeguard US and Israeli security in the face of what these groups perceive as the potential existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Moreover, nor are they shy about their dreams of regime change in Tehran; in fact, they see this as the only long-term guarantee of US and Israeli security. The West demands that Iran fully and indefinitely suspend its enrichment activities, but there are political leaders in the Iranian national security decision-making process, including the Supreme Leader himself, who worry that any major Iranian concession on the nuclear issue would simply whet the appetite of those in the United States and Israel seeking regime change. Consequently, it is hard to see any Iranian leader, even those from the moderate wing of Iranian politics, making the kind of concessions that would end the nuclear crisis. Even if a moderate is elected in the 2013 presidential elections, he would have to calculate how far any concessions would jeopardize his political survival
Negotiations can only work if both sides are open to the possibility that a mutually agreed solution is possible and will be adhered to. Neither side has done a good job of convincing the other of this. For the past ten years, alarmists have declared vehemently that time is short and should not be wasted on negotiations. Moderates seem almost ready to give up. But this would be a tragic move, not because negotiations stand a chance of succeeding given the dominant mind-sets shaping policy on both sides, but because they are the only thing that stands a chance of preventing the worst possible outcome: war.
Filed under Research Agendas, Security Studies
Little more than a year after its secession from Sudan, South Sudan remains crippled by twin economic and security crises. Leaders north and south of the new international border need to rise to the challenge of reaching a comprehensive settlement, writes Professor Stefan Wolff.
On 2 August 2012, a deadline set by the African Union and endorsed by the Un Security Council for Sudan and South Sudan to reach a comprehensive settlement on unresolved issues stemming from their separation in 2011 passed without an agreement being achieved. Negotiations, however, continued. Despite some apparent progress, they were initially announced as having been called off without an agreement, but within hours an agreement on oil and an extended deadline for resolving the remaining issues was made public. This may seem bizarre, but it fits a pattern of brinkmanship and last-minute deals brokered with international mediation, accompanied by sticks and carrots, that has plagued the relations between the two sides over the past several years and is at the heart of many challenges that especially South Sudan is facing.
South Sudan gained independent statehood according to provisions in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the Government of Sudan that put an end to a civil war between North and South. Independence may not have been a foregone conclusion, but it was foreseen as an option in the CPA, and eventually came about in a three-step process in 2011: a referendum on 9 January confirmed the South Sudanese people’s overwhelming desire to separate from the rest of Sudan, on 9 July independence was officially declared, and on 14 July South Sudan was admitted to the United Nations as its 193rd member state. Yet, if anything, this was the continuation (and in some cases the beginning) but not the end of problems between North and South.
The CPA lacked detailed provisions if Southern secession was to occur; it was never fully implemented, and both sides failed to achieve a comprehensive, negotiated settlement of issues pertaining to the management of their separation. In the run-up to, and during the first year after, Southern independence, disputes between North and South have thus centred on the status of Abyei and the demarcation of the common border, the question of citizenship (primarily for Southerners in the North), and financial arrangements (including those related to the oil dispute). More than a year after the South gained independence, not only do most of these issues remain unresolved, but relations between the Sides considerably worsened bringing them close to a return to all-out war in the spring of 2012.
The unresolved North-South issues are, in many ways, also at the heart of South Sudan’s wider state-building challenge: several inter-communal conflicts, political disputes, and insurgencies, a complex humanitarian crisis, and a near collapse of the economy compounded, and were exacerbated by, the lack of constructive relations between the now neighbouring countries.
The Abyei crisis is symptomatic for the way in which North-South tensions negatively affect state-building in South Sudan. A referendum in Abyei, mandated in the CPA to take place in parallel to the referendum in the South, was cancelled because North and South could not agree on criteria for voter eligibility, despite intense international mediation and pressure, thus leaving the dispute over Abyei unresolved at the time of Southern independence with both North and South claiming the territory as theirs. Abyei has ever since been plagued by violence, predominantly between local communities, as well as by direct clashes between regular Northern and Southern forces—despite the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to Abyei (UNISFA) and agreements between North and South achieved before and after their separation.
With no progress on the implementation of security agreements on Abyei another major spat of violence occurred there in March and April 2012. The Sides accused each other of being responsible for starting the clashes and for supporting insurgent fighters as proxies on the other side of the border. As a result, a meeting between the presidents of Sudan and South Sudan scheduled for 3 April 2012 in Juba was cancelled, and with it a major opportunity was missed to address problematic issues in the relationship between the states, from the question of Abyei, to citizenship and oil. The increasingly aggressive rhetoric and actions on both sides, eventually led South Sudanese forces to capture and hold the area of Heglig between 10 and 20 April 2012, alleging that it had been used by the SAF as a staging ground for attacks aimed against the South, thus capturing one of the last remaining oil sources for the North.
A parallel dispute over oil-related payments escalated in January 2012 and led South Sudan to shut down all of its oil production. This has had a major impact on both countries. South Sudan’s resource wealth includes roughly three-quarters of pre-2011 Sudan’s proven oil reserves, yet at present all refinement and export infrastructure is in the North thus maintaining a high degree of interdependence between North and South even after their separation. As oil exports funded 98% of public spending in post-independence South Sudan, government’s decision to shut down its entire oil production not only impeded South Sudan’s economic development but also had a significant, and negative, impact on the country’s state-building project as a whole. At the same time it deprived Sudan of significant revenue.
The oil dispute added to border tensions between North and South, which in turn are linked to insurgent movements on both sides of their new international border. Clashes along the North-South border and insurgent violence in border states in the North and South alike escalated from late March onwards and negatively affected long-established trade links, leading to higher food and fuel prices. Depleting foreign currency reserves, due to the loss of oil-related revenue, limited both countries’ ability to import basic commodities and increased inflation.
The lack of revenue meant delays to building institutions and capacity within South Sudan to deal with a worsening humanitarian situation and increased the new country’s dependency on the international donor community. The already desperate situation in conflict-affected areas especially in Jonglei and along the North-South border, which had created over 500,000 IDPs in South Sudan by the end of the first year of independence, was further compounded by an influx from conflict-affected refugees from Abyei (numbering in their tens of thousands) and from the states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan in Sudan (170,000), as well as from Southerners returning from Sudan (390,000) and refugees returning from neighbouring countries (330,000).
South Sudan’s internal and external security challenges and their consequences, mass displacement and return migration, and the country’s economic crisis, as well as a serious rain shortfall that led to a crop failure, combined to create a food insecurity crisis affecting approximately half of the country’s population of 9 million. The country’s lack of capacity to respond to this humanitarian crisis will continue to remain limited until the parallel economic and security crises are resolved. These are, in turn, intrinsically linked to the complex web of North-South problems.
Within days of South Sudan’s capture of the Heglig area, the AU adopted a Roadmap on 24 April 2012 ‘for implementation by both Sudan and South Sudan, in order to ease the current tension, facilitate the resumption of negotiations on post-secession relations and the normalization of their relations.’ The AU Roadmap was endorsed by the UN Security Council in a resolution on 2 May 2012, threatening sanctions if the parties failed to reach agreements by 2 August 2012. While talks between the sides are continuing and proposals for a comprehensive settlement are being circulated, this deadline has now passed. Given the severity of the crisis and its regional implications, this is not just any old deadline. It clearly indicates the limitations of the African Union and the United Nations to facilitate sustainable, constructive outcomes in this dispute: while major violent crises were swiftly contained and diffused fundamental issues remain unresolved and thus retain their potential for future conflict escalation.
The expiration of the deadline of the AU Roadmap, and its subsequent extension in light of at least a partial agreement, is thus indicative of the dilemmas that South Sudan faces one year after achieving independence. Two rather sobering conclusions are difficult to escape. The first is that the situation in South Sudan has hardly improved for the majority of its population during the first twelve months of independence. In light of the tremendous human suffering endured by people north and south of the new border during the 1983-2005 civil war, this is particularly depressing. The second conclusion is that the overwhelming majority of challenges that have plagued South Sudan in its attempts to build a viable independent state have their causes in local leadership failures. While institutional shortcomings in the CPA, especially a lack of contingencies in the case of separation, clearly played a role, they were exacerbated by a lack of political will to resolve the major North-South post-independence crises. Until this lack of political will is overcome and leaders north and south of the new international border rise to the occasion of reaching a comprehensive agreement, the threat of a return to war will continue to loom over the people of Sudan and South Sudan.
Filed under Research Agendas, Security Studies
The West’s intervention in Libya and the on-going violence in Syria have placed a renewed spotlight on the principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P) human life. In this first post of a two part series, Dr Edward Newman argues that far from emerging into an new international ‘norm’, R2P is exposing fissures in a changing global order.
After a decade of academic and policy debate the principle of the responsibility to protect human life (R2P) appears to have won broad support around a clear definition that is relevant to a narrow and specific range of atrocities: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The 2005 UN World Summit Outcome, in theory representing all UN members, defined R2P strictly in the context of the UN Charter and Security Council authority, on a case by case basis, and emphasized the need for early warning and the prevention of such atrocities. The UN Secretary-General, in turn, formulated a proposal to implement R2P around three themes: the protection responsibilities of the state, international assistance and capacity-building, and timely and decisive response. According to this, R2P is “firmly anchored in well-established principles of international law”, including the bedrock of state sovereignty and – except in the most exceptional circumstances – non-interference. The emphasis is upon prevention and capacity building, and away from the use of armed force for human protection. It is therefore hoped that R2P will finally shed its association with the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Recent diplomatic and academic debate has also had the effect of testing and defining the scope and limits of R2P, especially in terms of its interventionist connotations: it thus cannot be legitimately invoked in response to issues of poor governance or the denial of democracy, or in situations of natural disasters where governments are unwilling or unable to meet the humanitarian needs of victims, or in relation to human rights issues more broadly, or – as in the cases of the US-led intervention into Iraq or Russia’s intervention into Georgia – as a thin veil for geostrategic hegemony. It works best – for example in Kenya following contested elections and communal conflict in early 2008 – when it galvanizes the international community to assist local actors to peacefully resolve crises through a range of concerted activities. R2P, although it does make reference to action through the Security Council if national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from atrocities – as happened in Libya in 2011 – is more about promoting and assisting states to implement existing legal obligations and human rights, and strengthening the norm of human protection.
Defined in this way, R2P – unlike humanitarian intervention – should not be seen as being in tension with existing norms of world order; as the Secretary-General’s report suggested, in line with the World Summit Outcome, “the responsibility to protect seeks to strengthen sovereignty, not weaken it.” The principle should therefore be seen firmly within the rules of procedure and the Charter of the UN, the embodiment of the Westphalian, pluralist society of states.
However, R2P remains controversial in the way that it is conceptualized, defined and invoked, and the nature of these controversies suggest that R2P is indeed problematized by its normative implications for world order. Despite the efforts of R2P advocates – who spend a considerable amount of their time refuting the idea that R2P is about humanitarian intervention and that it is in tension with sovereignty – many governments and commentators raise fundamental objections to R2P. Following the celebrated 2005 UN endorsement of R2P a number of governments have raised concerns and reservations about the principle, and it is notable that these reservations are seen in states – such as China, India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, amongst others – which are both increasing in influence internationally and which do not reflect the prevailing liberal axis of states which promote norms such as R2P.
The controversies surrounding R2P – including the implementation of Resolution 1973 on Libya – can be related to different ideas of world order. R2P continues to have implications for world order in a number of ways. Firstly, it is ultimately unrealistic to define the application of R2P primarily in terms of assistance and capacity building because the majority of atrocities continue to be perpetrated by states or state-sponsored actors – or as a result of state incapacity or indifference – and so an effective response to genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity would often necessarily involve confronting states and using coercion, including force, with implications for state sovereignty. Moreover, since these atrocities often occur in situations of upheaval or insurgency, intervention inevitably becomes associated with regime change because it influences the outcome of local conflict. In the most egregious cases the first two pillars of the Secretary-General’s agenda – promoting the protection responsibilities of the state, and international assistance and capacity-building – will not apply because the states concerned will be recalcitrant, as Syria was in 2011 and 2012. This leaves us with pillar three – reaction and in theory intervening to prevent or stop atrocities – which raises a range of perennial controversies associated with humanitarian intervention, including a tension between justice and international order. Whilst most world leaders might support R2P in its most abstract form, there are fundamental disagreements about its implementation, especially in relation to difficult cases. Ultimately this points to a tension between pluralist approaches to human rights challenges – which are underpinned by a Westphalian, statist worldview – and a more solidarist worldview which has a contingent view of sovereignty.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, the way that R2P debates have been conducted and decisions have been taken in organizations such as the UN Security Council has raised problems relating to collective decision-making and influence in international politics. From this perspective controversies regarding R2P are not necessarily about the implications it holds for the Westphalian international order, but rather in terms of how power is legitimately exercised – or illegitimately abused – in an evolving international balance of power. Thus, the concerns of China, India, Russia, South Africa and Brazil, and others, relate to how R2P is defined and implemented in organizations such as the UN, reflecting broader tensions about the legitimacy and authority of norm diffusion and institutions in international politics. Therefore, rather than R2P emerging into a new norm or world order, it is in fact exposing broader fissures in a transitional world order characterized by rising and declining power and influence. Remaining reservations about R2P around the world are therefore not merely a reflection of lingering concerns or confusion about the principle’s interventionist connotations. Moreover, R2P has become hostage to broader tensions relating to international order that make progress on the protection agenda difficult.
Dr Edward Newman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. His current research and teaching focus upon security studies, including critical approaches and ‘human security’; intrastate armed conflict, civil war, and political violence; international organizations and multilateralism; and peacebuilding and reconstruction in conflict-prone and post-conflict societies. His personal website is available here.
Filed under Research, Research Agendas, Security Studies
POLSIS’s Dr Jonathan Grix appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed this week to discuss his new book Sport under Communism: Behind the East German ‘Miracle’, co-authored by Mike Dennis from the University of Wolverhampton.
Jonathan discussed the factors that helped propel East Germany into the top-three in the Olympic medals table for over two decades. He argues that aside from its notorious doping programmes, the GDR developed an integrated system for identifying and nurturing elite sporting talent that was forty years ahead of its time. Could the GDR offer lessons for Team GB? The programme is available here.
Filed under Audio / Video, Research
