Category Archives: Research Agendas

September 8, 2012 · 1:21 pm

The EU must focus on human insecurity in the Arab World

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.

This post is part of the Security Studies research agenda series.

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. 

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the POLSIS blog, the Department of Political Science and International Studies nor the University of Birmingham.

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August 22, 2012 · 9:10 am

There’s still time to negotiate

Giving up on international negotiations over the Iranian nuclear issue would be a tragic mistake, write Dani Nedal and Nicholas J. Wheeler.

This article is part of our securities studies research agenda series.

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.

Dani Nedal
 is a Research Fellow 
in the Department of Political Science and International Studies and the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham. From September he will be a PhD student at Georgetown University.

Nicholas J Wheeler
 is Professor of International Relations 
and Director of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security 
at the University of Birmingham

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the POLSIS blog, the Department of Political Science and International Studies nor the University of Birmingham.

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August 15, 2012 · 12:40 pm

Sudan and South Sudan’s unresolved post-independence issues

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.

This article is part of our securities studies research agenda series.  The Article first appeared on Professor Wolff’s personal website.

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.

Stefan Wolff (stefan@stefanwolff.com | http://www.stefanwolff.com | @stefwolff) is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham, England, UK. A political scientist by background, he specialises in the management of contemporary international security challenges, especially in the prevention, management and settlement of ethnic conflicts and in post-conflict stabilisation and state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies. He has extensive expertise in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union, and has also worked on a wide range of other conflicts elsewhere, including the Middle East, Africa, and Central, South and Southeast Asia. Bridging the divide between academia and policy-making, he has been involved in various phases of conflict settlement processes, including in Iraq, Sudan, Moldova, Sri Lanka, and Kosovo.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the POLSIS blog, the Department of Political Science and International Studies nor the University of Birmingham.

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August 3, 2012 · 1:20 pm

R2P: Implications for World Order (Part 1)

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. 

This post is the second contribution to the research agenda series on polsis.org, which this month is focusing on Security Studies.

 

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.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the POLSIS blog, the Department of Political Science and International Studies nor the University of Birmingham.

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July 19, 2012 · 11:02 am

Lessons from the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities

To highlight the breadth of the research going on within POLSIS, the POLSIS Blog is today launching a series of month-long ‘Research Agendas’.  Each month, the blog will feature a series of posts showcasing some of the exciting theories and issues that POLSIS staff and PhD candidates are working on. The Research Agendas will be based around the Department’s research groups and thematic research clusters. The first will highlight some of the diverse issues that our scholars of Security Studies are focused on. Here, Professor Stefan Wolff discusses his views on the continuing relevance of the OSCE High commissioner on National Minorities for the future of conflict prevention and management. 

 

The mandate of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), agreed by the participating states of the July 1992 Helsinki Summit of the then Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, is about early warning and early action on minority conflicts across the OSCE area: ‘The High Commissioner will provide “early warning” and, as appropriate, “early action” at the earliest possible stage in regard to tensions involving national minority issues which have not yet developed beyond an early warning stage, but, in the judgement of the High Commissioner, have the potential to develop into a conflict within the CSCE area, affecting peace, stability or relations between participating States, requiring the attention of and action by the Council or the CSO.’

Over the past two decades, this has predominantly meant the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including Central Asia, because countries in Western Europe were generally less willing, and less susceptible to pressure, to allow HCNM engagement in conflicts in their jurisdictions. This is unlikely to change, and resistance to HCNM involvement is likely to increase in an era in which sovereignty concerns all too often trump concerns over human and minority rights. Yet, this does not make the institution of the HCNM itself irrelevant—on the contrary.I see three areas in which the HCNM has a future role to play: monitoring, preventive quiet diplomacy, and policy transfer.

1. Monitoring

The HCNM has significant expertise, tools, and experience in monitoring situations of potential and actual tension, to recognise signs of escalation, and to engage actors in governments and regional and interational governmental and non-governmental organisations to take appropriate action.

Situations involving minorities (and majorities) require specific knowledge and understanding to make sense of their complexity—not because they are more complicated than other social conflicts, but because their dynamics are often different, the drivers for escalation escalation and de-escalation are different and interact differently, and policy responses produce unintended and often unwanted consequences.

As a result, there is a clear need for a dedicated agency specialised in and focused on minority issues. This is also the case because there is no shortage of situations that require attention: from Abkhazia to Anatolia, from the Baltics to the Balkans, from Corsica to Crimea, tensions involving national minorities and majorities are frequent and have a tendency to escalate into violence if left unattended.

2. Preventive, quiet diplomacy

Knowing of trouble being afoot is one thing, doing something about it, quite a different matter. Thus, the early-action part of the HCNM’s mandate was almost revolutionary in 1992, albeit dependent on ‘approval’ by the Committee of Senior Officials (‘The High Commissioner may recommend that he/she be authorized to enter into further contact and closer consultations with the parties concerned with a view to possible solutions, according to a mandate to be decided by the CSO. The CSO may decide accordingly.’), and the practice that followed it in many cases highly successful.

This was also partly the case because the HCNM operated outside the limelight of publicity-seeking diplomacy and had, with Max van der Stoel and his advisors, a highly capable and effective first team of diplomats and legal and political experts to offer facilitation, mediation, and practical solutions to governments and minority representatives enabling them to resove differences by political rather than violent means.

The cumulative knowledge of the HCNM as an institution on issues of facilitation, mediation, and institution building is highly valuable, as are the network of experts on which the HCNM can draw and the six sets of thematic recommendations (on education, linguistic rights, participation, kin-states, policing in multiethnic societies, minority languages in broadcast media) that can form a useful starting point for engagement in situations of minority-majority tension and potential conflict.

This knowledge base and expertise on how to bring diplomacy and institutional design to situations in which local leaders would otherwise be overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation that they have to deal with continues to remain useful and it is necessary to draw on it in the management of population diversity  from Northern Ireland to Nagorno-Karabakh.

3. Policy learning and transfer

Geographically and historically, the OSCE region from Vancouver to Vladivostok is rich in examples of successes and failures of conflict prevention and management, and the same goes for the history of the HCNM itself. The institution made a significant and positive contribution to managing minority-majority relations in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, while also being constrained, or even prevented, to act in a number of cases.

This offers clear opportunities for cross-national and cross-institutional policy learning and transfer within the OSCE area and beyond: neither were the conflicts of the early 1990s that created some of the impetus to establish the HCNM unique, nor are they a specifically (eastern) European phenomenon, and there is no reason to believe that the HCNM’s experience would not be useful to organisations like the AU, OIC, or Arab League, to name just a few.

4. Looking ahead to the next decade (or two)

On the one hand, it seems that it will be business as usual for the HCNM in the next 20 years. On the other hand, there is a profound change in the context in which the HCNM is, and will be, operating. First, after a period of relative calm, or lack of serious violence, in relation to minority-majority relations, the past few years since 2008 have seen a return of violence on a number of occasions (Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia) and a serious, and often unfortunate, international politicisation of minority issues, perhaps most obviously embodied in the developments in and around Kosovo. Kosovo marks a secessionist moment in the post-colonial context and underscores the failure of the international community, in its organised form of the UN, to deal effectively with the Kosovo crisis.

At the same time, developments in the Arab Spring highlight very concretely the fact that minority issues are not a uniquely OSCE/European issue. Much like in the early 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe the expertise and will to handle such issues is thinly spread. And while it may be too late for early warning and early action in many cases in the Arab Spring, and across many other places in Africa and Asia, the HCNM’s problem-solving expertise—from both a perspective of process and substance—would be extremely valuable.

The HCNM is a ‘package’ institution, and there is an argument that elements of the package maybe easier to transfer than the whole. Yet, while constituent parts of the HCNM mandate are valuable in themselves, the success of the institution is in large part due to the fact that it is larger than the sum of its parts, that there is real added value in early warning and early action, in a toolkit and its quiet and preventive application.  This is not a plea for out-of-area missions, but for carfully considered, context-sensitive policy learning and transfer beyond the OSCE area.

One of the problems that the HCNM is facing in my experience is that it is an independent institution within the OSCE: the OSCE is dealing with a lot of minority-related issues, but this is not an exclusive domain for the HCNM, nor is the HCNM always involved or its knowledge and understanding drawn on, and it seems to me that this is an area of necessary improvement, that is the need for careful, closer integration of the HCNM’s work into the OSCE and European IO/RO mainstream.

Another issue to consider is the question whether the HCNM is (or should be) an instrument of democracy promotion. And here, similar to calls for out-of-area operations, the answer, in my view, has to be a clear no. This is not to say that the HCNM should stand in the way of democratic political practices, but the institution needs to remain focused on its existing mandate. Mandate focus is particularly relevant in periods of transition or regime change—after all, the HCNM was established to prevent conflicts involving national minorities at the time of, and in response to, post-communist democratic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the successor states of Yugoslavia. In executing this mandate, the HCNM will inevitably promote forms of good governance in majority-minority and inter-state relations that are compatible with existing understandings of democracy, but this is different from promoting a particular system of government. To do otherwise would further increase the resistance of governments to HCNM assistance.

Managing tensions between minorities and majorities, preventing their escalation into full-scale conflicts, and contributing to restoring and sustaining peace after violent conflict will remain a significant challenge for the international community in the years to come and in most parts of the world.

To deal successfully with the challenges that such self-determination conflicts pose requires leadership, diplomacy, and institutional design in equal measure. The work of the HCNM thus far offers both important lessons for future international conflict management and a set of tools, knowledge, and understanding that has relevance within and beyond the OSCE area.

We need to be realistic, however, what the HCNM can contribute and achieve. It can bring diplomacy and institutional design; that is, it can offer facilitation and mediation and it can draw on a wide knowledge base of institutions that can mitigate minority-majority tensions. It cannot, however, substitute for a lack of local leadership: where skilled and determined leaders with a vision for peace and co-existence are absent, the HCNM’s efforts may be futile. That said, the involvement of the HCNM itself bears the potential to change local attitudes. In this sense, the HCNM can very well be seen as the master of its own success, and it is this potential, and evident track record, of quiet self-made success that requires its continued existence and, it seems to me, replication beyond the OSCE area.

Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham, England, UK. A political scientist by background, he specialises in the management of contemporary international security challenges, especially in the prevention, management and settlement of ethnic conflicts and in post-conflict stabilisation and state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies. He has extensive expertise in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union, and has also worked on a wide range of other conflicts elsewhere, including the Middle East, Africa, and Central, South and Southeast Asia. Bridging the divide between academia and policy-making, he has been involved in various phases of conflict settlement processes, including in Iraq, Sudan, Moldova, Sri Lanka, and Kosovo. stefan@stefanwolff.com | www.stefanwolff.com | @stefwolff

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