Cyberphysical societies are becoming reliant upon the cyber domain for everyday life. With cyber warfare increasingly becoming part of future conflicts, new and novel solutions are needed to assist ...governments in securing their national infrastructure. Cyber peacekeeping is one such solution: an emerging and multi-disciplinary field of research, touching upon technical, political, governmental and societal domains of thought. In this article we build upon previous works by developing the cyber peacekeeping activity of observation, monitoring and reporting. We take a practical approach: describing a scenario in which two cyberphysical societies experience the negative effects of cyber warfare and require cyber expertise to restore services their citizens depend upon. We explore how a cyber peacekeeping operation could start up and discuss the challenges it will face. The article makes a number of proposals, including the use of a virtual collaborative environment to bring multiple benefits. We conclude by summarising our findings, and describing where further work lies.
•Cyber peacekeeping is an emerging field of research, touching upon technical, political and societal domains of thought.•Cyber fits easily into existing structures and processes.•Cyber OMR will bring most value at CNI, with a focus on protection of civilians and state stability.•Technical obstacles towards monitoring CNI are being broken down as new products and tools come to market.•Our proposals do not violate established UN peacekeeping principles.
This article argues that UN peace operations play a central role in the nexus between policing and counterinsurgency, and constitute one of the underappreciated sites and circuits of counterinsurgent ...knowledge. It posits that the convergence between peace operations and counterinsurgency has been driven not only (or even primarily) by these mission's more assertive military posture under 'stabilization', but also by the turn to 'polickeeping', the growing role of police forces and increasing importance of policing tasks in peacekeeping. The stabilization/policekeeping mindset rests on the assumption of a continuum from minor instances of disorders to full-blown armed conflict, leading to an expansive understanding of what may constitute a threat to stability and require international intervention. The articles teases out the macro and micro manifestations of this mindset through the lens of UN peace operations' response to civil unrest and demonstrations. It shows that, because peace operations are a point of cross-fertilization for the creation and transmission of global policing practices, UN protest policing reverberates beyond the specific countries in which peace operations are deployed. Peace operations create a global demand for and supply of specific skills and tools, in particular paramilitary police forces.
Norms can be adopted without modifications or adapted to regional contexts for strategic or principled reasons. Norm adoption and adaptation can also happen by chance. When adoption takes place ...without consideration of the norm's effectiveness or appropriateness, we speak about imitation. When adaptation takes place in such a manner, we lack conceptual tools to analyse it. We propose a novel concept of incidental adaptation - divergence between promoted and adopted norms due to fortuitous events. This completes the typology of scenarios leading to norm adoption and adaptation. We apply the typology to the transmission of the protection of civilians norm in peace operations from the United Nations (UN) to the African Union (AU). The AU adopted the UN's approaches in pursuit of interoperability and resources, and out of recognition of the UN's normative authority. It also happened incidentally when the AU temporarily followed the UN's approaches. The AU engaged in adaptation to reflect the nature of its operations and normative orientations of AU member states. Incidental adaptation accounted for the presence of the rights-based tier in the AU's protection of civilians concept. These findings nuance our understanding of norm diffusion, inter-organisational relations and the role of chance in international affairs.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
To protect people under attack, what kinds of tools do peacekeepers need? The United Nations is gradually gaining valuable experience with sophisticated technologies for protection of ...civilians (POC). However, most remain underused and underevaluated, especially attack helicopters, night vision devices, and nonlethal weapons. This article presents case studies of these three crucial tools to examine their utility and to identify their shortcomings. Attack helicopters are demonstrated as a powerful through ironic symbol and an important means of robust peacekeeping in Central African Republic. Night vision devices proved essential for POC in protecting Haitians from gangs in 2007. Nonlethal weapons, like those developed on the spur of the moment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, helped the UN deal with civilian threats without recourse to lethal force. All these proven technologies have helped peace operations save lives and thus need detailed study to gain lessons. Some novel but untested technologies are also introduced, including laser signaling and digital simulation.
This article examines sensemaking in complex peace operations. The article's key argument is that adaptation to 'the local' and its complexity requires sensemaking, and that sensemaking helps to ...disrupt conflict dynamism and prevent conflicts. The study's theoretical underpinnings are linked to the concept of sensemaking and its further development. The findings are based on eleven in-depth interviews with commanders who have concrete command experience in peace operations. The research findings describe four processes - sensegiving, sensebreaking, sensedrawing and sensekeeping - that are part of the sensemaking entity. Each process entails practices in which sense is embedded, negotiated and regenerated to be shared, in order to work with change, adapt to local necessities and sustain peace. Theoretically, the article contributes to the existing understanding of complex, ongoing and longstanding crises in general and adaptive and proactive sensemaking, in which 'the local' is emphasized, in particular.
Global politics impact on UN peacekeeping and four trends are worth noting. UN peacekeeping is being downscaled, there is less emphasis on human rights, more multilateral support to use UN ...peacekeeping in situations of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, and an increasing frequency of support to parallel regional and ad hoc coalitions. Pragmatic peacekeeping in practice comprise these four trends and will entail increasing support to regional and ad hoc coalitions, in the form of a new category of UN Support Missions. The article outlines key financial, legal, operational and accountability issues that emerge with UN Support Missions.
Legitimacy has become a widespread term within policy documents of international organizations, not least international peacekeeping. But legitimacy is also a contested concept, so it matters greatly ...how it is understood on the ground. In this article, I ask what meanings the UN Department of Peace Operations attributes to the concept of legitimacy. Using a qualitative content analysis to study policy and training documents published by the department, I argue that the department understands the local legitimacy of UN peacekeeping missions as a (mis-)perception of its international legitimacy and underappreciates how other actors might undermine UN and state legitimacy.
Purpose
The purpuse of this study is to answer the following two questions. Do conflict management efforts mitigate the recurrence and severity of civil conflict? If so, how? Do some conflict ...management strategies fare better than others in these tasks? This study theorizes about the connection between the costliness of a conflict management strategy – with respect to both the disputants and third parties – and civil conflict outcomes. This theory produces two contradictory predictions: that more costly strategies either increase or decrease violence. This study not only adjudicates between these two possibilities but also incorporates the role of timing. The early use of more costly strategies, for example, may encourage disputants to reduce violence in civil conflicts.
Design/methodology/approach
To evaluate the predications that the authors derive from their theoretical argument, the authors quantitatively analyze the effect of conflict management strategies’ relative cost on various measures of civil conflict recurrence and severity. The authors first identify the set of international–civil militarized conflicts (I-CMCs) during the period 1946–2010. I-CMCs contain two dimensions – interstate and intrastate – making them the most complex and dangerous form of militarized conflict. To each I-CMC, the authors then link all third-party attempts to manage the I-CMC’s civil conflict dimension. Finally, after developing quantitative indicators, a series of regression equations explore the relationships of primary interest.
Findings
Two main findings emerge. First, when third parties use a relatively more costly conflict management strategy to manage a civil conflict (e.g. a peace operation or military intervention, as opposed to mediation), the severity of the conflict increases, while conflict recurrence rates remain unchanged. Second, this study uncovers a trade-off. The early use of a relatively more costly management strategy lowers a civil conflict’s severity in the short-term. It also, however, increases the likelihood – and speed with which – civil conflict recurs. The timing of certain conflict management strategies matters.
Originality/value
Scholars typically isolate conflict management strategies in number (i.e. consider efforts as independent of one another, even those within the same conflict) and kind (i.e. examine mediation but not peace operations). This study, in contrast, includes the following: the full menu of conflict management strategies available to third parties – negotiation, mediation, adjudication/arbitration, peace operations, sanctions and military intervention – over a lengthy time period (1946–2010); theorizes about the relative merits of these strategies; and considers the timing of certain conflict management efforts. In so doing, it highlights a policy trade-off and proposes promising areas for future research.
Complexity theory offers a theoretical framework for analysing how social systems prevent, manage and recover from violent conflict. Insights from complexity suggest that for a peace process to ...become self-sustainable, resilient social institutions need to emerge from within, i.e. from the culture, history and socio-economic context of the relevant society. Peace operations are deployed to contain violence and to facilitate this process, but if they interfere too much, they will cause harm by inadvertently disrupting the very feedback loops critical for self-organization to emerge and to be sustained. To navigate this dilemma, the paper proposes employing an adaptive approach, where peace operations, together with the communities and people affected by the conflict, actively engage in an iterative process of inductive learning and adaptation. Adaptive Peace Operations is a normative and functional approach to peace operations that is aimed at navigating the complexity inherent in trying to nudge societal change processes towards sustaining peace, without causing harm.
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