12 results
Search Results
2. FPIC as Peacebuilding Tool?: Land Conflict and the Batwa in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Author
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Mitchell, Matthew I. and Wagner, Landon
- Subjects
- *
INDIGENOUS rights , *PEACEBUILDING , *INDIGENOUS peoples , *NATIONAL parks & reserves - Abstract
Although wide-ranging in scope, a core principle embedded throughout the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Given the widespread nature of protracted struggles over land involving Indigenous peoples, some argue FPIC could provide a powerful tool to prevent and resolve land conflicts. Using a case study of the Indigenous Batwa in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the paper examines the promises and perils of employing FPIC as a peacebuilding tool. Specifically, it contrasts two land-related conflicts involving the Batwa: (1) the Batwa's recent attempts to reclaim territories lost via the creation of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park and (2) the decade-long conflict pitting the Batwa and Luba people. In so doing, the analysis explores the role of the proposed 'Organic bill', which aims to recognise Indigenous peoples' right to FPIC. This serves to highlight both the limitations and potential dangers of adopting an Indigenous rights framework to resolve land conflict in certain political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
3. American Hegemony and Peacekeeping: Sources and Consequences of US Diplomacy at the UN Security Council.
- Author
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Holt, Victoria K. and MacKinnon, Michael G.
- Subjects
- *
INTERNATIONAL police , *DIPLOMACY - Abstract
Although UN peacekeeping has never found favour in the Bush Administration, the United States remains the most important Member State when decisions are made in the Security Council. The current war on terror has obviously changed the political circumstances in which such diplomacy is conducted, but how and to what extent? This paper will seek answers to these questions by exploring the nature and impact of contemporary US influence over Security Council decision-making on peacekeeping issues through two steps. First, it will discuss the various sources of US policy in Washington and how they interact in the policy-making process. Of primary interest in this section will be the inter-play between the executive and legislative branches of the US government. The second step will shift the focus from Washington to New York in an effort to discern the consequences of the Washington policy-process on the outcome of Council deliberations, especially in terms of the mandates and compositions of new missions. To this end, the paper will pay special attention to the cases of Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the possible mission to Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004
4. How the war economy centred in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is fuelling the conflict in the Great Lakes Region (1998-2016).
- Author
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Mokose, Manapo Tebello and Solomon, Hussein
- Subjects
- *
ECONOMICS of war , *PEACEKEEPING forces - Abstract
Millions have been killed in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Despite various mediation efforts and having one of the largest United Nations/African Union peacekeeping forces in the world, the carnage continues to claim more victims. What this paper argues is that the underlying war economy must be seen as the basis of the ongoing violence and only its eradication and replacement by a peace economy will there be any hope for sustainable peace both in the DRC and the broader Great Lakes Region. To this end, the paper provides a historical background to the conflict, and then proceeds to contextualize this economy within the war and peace economy literature. The intricacies in the war economy are then unravelled followed by certain policy recommendations to end the violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. The Factors Behind Successes and Failures of United Nations Peacekeeping Missions: A Case of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Author
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Bayo, Ogunrotifa Ayodeji
- Subjects
- *
PEACEBUILDING , *INTERNATIONAL security , *GUERRILLA warfare , *SOCIAL unrest - Abstract
The political trajectory that characterised post-cold war epoch underscores a dangerous centrifugal trend in the nature of violent conflict; civil unrest and guerrilla warfare that undermine the charter of United Nations of promoting international peace and security, and the discourse of peace coexistence at the forefront of international cooperation agenda in Africa, South East Europe and Middle East. The international response to this new wave of conflicts has been articulated through the structural mechanism of United Nations as peacekeeping intervention. Despite the successes and failures associated with UN peacekeeping interventions, the trickle of studies spawned by this quest has, developed into a flood of normative and empirical analyses of various aspects and process of International peacekeeping, while limited in unravel the factor that responsible for these successes and failures. This paper argues that the national interests of the super-powers are the potent factors that will determine the success and/or failure of UN peacekeeping operations, using peacekeeping experience in the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC) as a potential case. In this paper, an attempt is made to look at the framework of global politics within which peacekeeping unfolds and how it applies not only in DRC but also in Macedonia, Liberia and Somalia, thereby making it possible to develop an analytical construct for International peacekeeping successes and failures. The paper then concludes that given the contemporary geopolitics and the established structure of UN Security Council, if all super-powers are overtly and strongly committed to any UN peacekeeping operations and genuinely committed to resolving disputes in the trouble spots of the world without any primary or secondary interest in the conflicts involved, then the UN peacekeeping operations will be successful in restoring and sustaining permanent peace in the affected state(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
6. Fit for what? Towards explaining Battlegroup inaction.
- Author
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Marchi Balossi-Restelli, Ludovica
- Subjects
- *
PEACEKEEPING forces , *CRISIS management - Abstract
The thrust of this paper concerns the case of the European Battlegroup (BG) non-deployment in late 2008, when the United Nations requested European military support for the United Nations Organisation Mission peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The argument is built on the fact that when, in official documents, the EU approaches the European security and ESDP/CSDP's military crisis management policy and interventions, it makes strong references to the United Nations and the UN Charter Chapter VII's mandate of restoring international peace and security. Such references make it seem that supporting the UN when it deals with threats and crises is a primary concern of the EU and the member states. These allusions lead to the main contention of this paper, that there is much ambivalence in these indications. The paper develops its argument from one key hypothesis; namely, that the non-deployment of a European BG in the DRC, at the end of 2008, constitutes a useful case study for detecting a number of ambiguities of the EU in respect of its declarations in the official documents establishing the European military crisis management intervention structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
7. THE UNITED NATIONS, DECOLONIZATION, AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN COLD WAR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1960-1994.
- Author
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O'Sullivan, Christopher
- Subjects
- *
DECOLONIZATION , *NATIONAL self-determination ,AFRICAN politics & government, 1960- - Abstract
The article examines the role of the United Nations (UN) in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper explores African decolonization and the era of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold between 1953-1961. It looks at the United Nation's 1960-1964 intervention in the Congo. The paper also discusses the role of the UN in the Cold War struggle for self-determination in Southern Africa.
- Published
- 2005
8. Intelligence at UN headquarters? The information and research unit and the intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996.
- Author
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Dorn, A.Walter
- Subjects
- *
MILITARY intelligence , *INTERNATIONAL police - Abstract
For most of its history the United Nations was reluctant to deal with intelligence and major powers were reluctant to share intelligence with it. But as the UN's peacekeeping operations intensified in some of the world's hot spots in the early 1990s, the UN found it both necessary and wise to create an information analysis capability at UN headquarters in New York. To funnel selected intelligence to the headquarters, several countries (including the US, UK, France and Russia) loaned intelligence officers to the UN's Situation Centre on a secondment basis. This paper describes the activities of the SitCen's Information and Research (I&R) Unit that existed from 1993 to 1999 under the informal motto ‘Keeping an Eye on the World’. Using a case study of I&R reporting on the situation in Eastern Zaire (1996), where UN-run refugee camps were under attack, it is possible to examine the nature and utility of the intelligence provided by the intelligence officers to UN decision-makers and the planners of the Canadian-led multinational force in the region. It reveals that the Unit provided significant and useful intelligence about arms shipments, belligerent activities, and the status of refugees and made several prescient predictions and warnings. The Unit sought to minimize national bias and incomplete information, though both problems were still in evidence. Still, in many ways, the I&R Unit remains a useful model for the development of a future intelligence capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2005
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
9. Peacekeeping, Statebuilding and Strategic Planning.
- Author
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Chandran, Rahul
- Subjects
- *
PEACEBUILDING , *ELECTIONS , *INTERVENTION (International law) - Abstract
This paper is based on field research in the DRC and in Afghanistan and addresses three key questions: (i) what does a peacebuilding strategy need to look like in the early phases of a mission; (ii) what capacities are needed that are currently lacking in he UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) to deliver on the outputs of such a strategy, and where could they come from; and, (iii) what do electoral transitions mandate in terms of a peacebuilding strategy. The paper will be anchored in literature on state formation processes. The hypothesis is that even though state-formation is the end goal of international intervention, the specific set of skills necessary to support state-formation are absent in most international organizations. These skills are necessary in both the pre-transition phase, and particularly when a UN mission loses its political teeth. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
10. Causal Stories and Humanitarian Intervention.
- Author
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Walling, Carrie Booth
- Subjects
- *
INTERVENTION (International law) , *MILITARY assistance , *HUMAN rights , *HUMANITARIAN assistance - Abstract
During the 1990s the the United Nations Security Council authorized military interventions into several sovereign states to halt gross human rights abuses. Yet during this same time period humanitarian interventions did not occur in contexts where the scope or scale of mass killing was arguably as significant, or greater than the conflicts in which the use of force was undertaken. Why do great powers fail to protect human life in some places but intervene militarily to stop human rights abuses in others? In order to answer this question, the paper does a discourse analysis of Security Council meeting records on a case of intervention (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and a case where intervention was possible but did not happen (Democratic Republic of Congo). The paper builds a theory of causal stories and humanitarian intervention based on the work of Deborah Stone who argues that difficult conditions only become problems to be solved once they are seen as amenable to human action (Stone, 1989: 281). In short, the paper argues that in order for humanitarian intervention to occur, permanent members of the UNSC must adopt a particular frame for understanding the character of conflict, an intentional causal story with clear victims and identifiable and intentional perpetrators. It argues that there is a connection between the ways in which Security Council members conceptualize conflicts and their decisions to intervene in cases of ethnic cleansing. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2006
11. ?Hand in Hand with the Government?? Assessing the UN?s Role in Establishing a State-Monopoly on Violence in the D.R. of Congo.
- Author
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Pouyé, Raphaël
- Subjects
- *
NATION-state , *PUBLIC administration , *PEACE - Abstract
Since 2003, the United Nations have been engaged in rebuilding the textbook classic of ?collapsed states? studies: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Away from the public eye, this operation, known under its French acronym of ?MONUC?, has achieved a series of vastly under-reported victories. Distinct both from the headline-catching operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where short-term security measures prevail over longer term institution-building and from the classic UN ?transitional administrations? of Namibia and East Timor that amounted to little more than multilateral trusteeships, MONUC embodies what comes closest to the ideal-type of postconflict state-building. My paper, based on a year-long field inquiry in Kinshasa and Eastern DRC, documents a key paradox of the ?light footprint? approach: whereas international and government forces are unable to assert government control in Iraq and Afghanistan, MONUC?s exceptional headways into ensuring Congolese state control of ?legitimate violence? over its sovereign territory raises a relatively novel set of questions for postconflict peace-building. When successful in arming the ? preferably democratic ? local government, peace operations must ensure that they simultaneous engineer the implementation of judicial reform, democratic control of armed forces and community empowerment. In the absence of such emphasis, state-building may well amount to arming the state, while keeping civil society deeply vulnerable. I suggest in this article that MONUC?s welcome shift in its use of force since 2005 must not result in ?authoritarian-state building?. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
12. International State-Building in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Challenges of Security, Elections and Civil Society: Notes from the Field on a Complex Paradigm.
- Author
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Barrios, Cristina and Ahamed, Said-Abass
- Subjects
- *
INTERVENTION (International law) , *INTERNATIONAL security , *PEACEKEEPING forces , *PEACEBUILDING - Abstract
The United Nationsâ international mission in theDemocratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has most openly targeted the goals of security, elections and civil society development. At the same time,experts agreed that the countryâs main problem is its failed-state, so âstate-buildingâ has been added as an overarching goal. This has resultedin a sort of âinternational paradigmâ where goals are not complementary; moreover, they often imply trade-offs, and decisions and programs for oneare likely to undermine the other. On the one hand, the internationals substituted the state in the provision of security, bypassed it in the organization of elections, and created anartificial civil society, all of which undermined state-building with interventionist policies and overall control of funds and programs. On theother hand, for the sake of respecting sovereignty during this âtransition processâ, they co-opted the state of DRC in the plans to provide security,undertake elections, and develop civil society. However, this state was, and still is, a politically-biased authority taken over by corruption and elitism, and not a neutral set of institutions. The international missionis thus trapped in a complex paradigm based on wishful thinking but facing enormous challenges in the DRC reality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
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