Which functions do social media fill for non-state armed groups in countries with internal armed conflict? Building on conflict data, interviews and media monitoring, we have reviewed the use of ...social media by Myanmar's nine most powerful armed groups. The first finding is that they act like states, using social media primarily to communicate with their constituents. Second, they also use social media as a tool of armed struggle, for command and control, intelligence, denunciation of traitors, and attacks against adversaries. Third, social media serves for national and international outreach. Like Myanmar's national army, the armed groups have combined prudent official pages with an underworld of more reckless profiles and closed groups that often breach Facebook's official community standards. In February 2019, when Facebook excluded four groups from its platform, they lost much of their ability to reach out and act like states. Yet they kept a capacity to communicate with their constituents through closed groups, individual profiles and sophisticated use of links and shares. Finally, the article affirms that the Facebook company, in the years 2018-2020,took upon itself a role as an arbiter within Myanmar's internal conflicts, deciding what information was allowed and disallowed.
The South China Sea Tonnesson, Stein
Asian survey,
05/2015, Letnik:
55, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The article looks at three ways in which international law has affected government behavior in the South China Sea. It has exacerbated disputes. It has probably curtailed the use of force. And it has ...made it difficult to imagine solutions that violate the law of the sea.
Classic nationalism, aiming to merge statehood and ethnicity, remains very much a fact of life in East Asia. Over the last decade, both state nationalism and separatist ethnic nationalisms have been ...radicalized in some parts of the region while less assertive pluralist modes of national sentiment have taken hold in some of the most developed countries there. Is this ambiguous development likely to drive armed conflict in East Asia – a region that has enjoyed relative peace since the 1980s? When discussing this question, we shall look primarily at China, Taiwan and Japan as cases of state nationalism. For substate nationalism, Myanmar will serve as our main example. The seventy-year anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August–September 2015 provided an occasion for reviving and renewing nationalist ideologies in East Asia, through selective and conflicting memories.The events mirrored contemporary patterns of international alignment, with Russia reasserting its historical partnership with China against Japan, Taipei quarrelling with Beijing over which Chinese had won the war, South Korea repeating its call for Japanese apologies and Japan expressing remorse for having challenged the international order in the 1930s and 1940s in a way it fears that China may be about to do now.
Based on multiarchival research conducted over almost three decades, this landmark account tells how a few men set off a war that would lead to tragedy for millions. Stein Tønnesson was one of the ...first historians to delve into scores of secret French, British, and American political, military, and intelligence documents. In this fascinating account of an unfolding tragedy, he brings this research to bear to disentangle the complex web of events, actions, and mentalities that led to thirty years of war in Indochina. As the story unfolds, Tønnesson challenges some widespread misconceptions, arguing that French general Leclerc fell into a Chinese trap in March 1946, and Vietnamese general Giap into a French trap in December. Taking us from the antechambers of policymakers in Paris to the docksides of Haiphong and the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam 1946 provides the most vivid account to date of the series of events that would make Vietnam the most embattled area in the world during the Cold War period.
Based on conflict data, interviews and media monitoring, this study of Myanmar's non-inclusive ceasefires develops a four-step argument about the effect of ceasefires in complex conflict systems. ...First, non-state armed groups rarely co-ordinate their actions strategically. This makes it easy for governments to obtain ceasefires with some groups while fighting others. Second, when ceasefires ensure armed groups' survival, they mostly hold. Third, non-inclusive ceasefires do not reduce a country's overall level of violence, since fighting tends to escalate with excluded groups. On this basis we conclude that non-inclusive ceasefires do not present a viable alternative to an inclusive peace process.
This article examines the impact of the UN Law of the Sea Convention on conflict behavior and management in the South China Sea during four periods: during its negotiation (1973-1982); from its ...signing to the entry into force (1982-1994); from then until the China-ASEAN Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (1995-2002); and from the setting of a timeline for outer limits of continental shelf submissions to the events following the 2009 submissions (2003-2013). Ambiguous effects were found. On the one hand, the Convention has generated or exacerbated conflict by raising the stakes, failing to resolve key legal issues, and encouraging overlapping zone claims. On the other hand, it has provided obligations, language, and techniques for conflict management and resolution. The conflict-enhancing impact was found to have been more substantial than the peace-promoting effects. Nevertheless, the balance has shifted toward more emphasis on conflict management and also some utilization of the Convention's peacemaking potential. If this long-term trend continues and the Convention is more rigorously respected and applied, the Convention may in the end be found to have contributed to regional peace.
This open access book explains how PRIO, the world’s oldest peace research institute, was founded and how it survived through crises. In this book, twenty-four of its researchers and associates, ...including Johan Galtung, Ingrid Eide, and Mari Holmboe Ruge, who founded the institute back in 1959, tell the stories of their roles in inventing and developing peace research. They reflect on their personal experiences with peace and conflict, tell what drove their peace engagement, and discuss the balance sought in the field between the cold dictates from academic rigor and the hot pursuit of peace, a desire for research to make a positive difference. Most of the chapters are interviews where one colleague interviews another. Some are self-reflective essays, while others are memorial essays written about a peace researcher who has passed away. Taken together, the book presents a lively picture of a thriving world-leading research environment and a wealth of conflicting or mutually reinforcing perspectives on war, violence, conflict, conflict management and resolution, negotiations and mediation, peacemaking, peace building, and the contested concept of peace. “The Oslo Stories is an indispensable source to the history of peace research.” Dr. Olav Njølstad, Director, Nobel Institute, Oslo
With the annexation of the Crimea and the engagement in confrontation with the West, Russia has embarked on a course of making the military force into a useful instrument of policy. Moscow has ...effectively sacrificed the goals of modernization and development for the sake of geopolitical ambitions. The question about the price of Russia＇s revisionist enterprise is relevant for many states that are not satisfied with the unfair and often discriminating rules of the world order, first of all China. Russia hopes to inspire other states dissatisfied with the ＂unipolar＂ world order to challenge the West more boldly, but the result of its assault on the prin- ciples of nonintervention and territorial integrity might work in the opposite way. The states of East Asia could take a good measure of the risk inherent to embarking on the course of projecting power at the expense of modernization and become even more committed than before to upholding their unique prosperity-producing peace. China has a vested interest in Russian internal stability and must be worried by the prospect of a post-Putin crisis.
The article discusses if China will be inspired by its strategic partner Russia to use force as an instrument of its foreign policy. After a pro et con discussion the authors find that the ...disincentives created by the Russian example are likely to convince China that it should continue to show restraint under the 'peaceful development' formula, and avoid military adventures. The East Asian Peace is thus not seriously threatened, at least not by China-for now.
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