Search

This article examines the theoretical foundations of international security and regime theory that lay strict conditions for the creation of international regimes to explain the nature of the cyber conflict and the reasons that prevent the creation of a global regime for cybersecurity. This article analyzes the cybersecurity concerns and interests of the world's leading powers in cyberspace--China, Russia, the European Union, and the United States--based on some key cybersecurity issues in dispute, inter alia, information sovereignty, militarization of cyberspace, and their politics of cyber norms. The article suggests that the absence of a dominant hegemon in the international system, and the perception of cyberspace not only as a domain that increases vulnerabilities and threats, but also as a domain for gaining a strategic advantage, does not meet the theoretical premises for the creation of an international regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summarizes the factors contributing to the division of several peacekeeping international organizations. Formation of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty; Innovation and achievement in human security issues; Establishment of an international advisory board to assist in the work of the commission.

Brian Urquhart was the second person to enter the international civil service of the United Nations. Looking back at these early years, Urquhart recalled a vivid interest in, and hope for, the League of Nations - the first institutional attempt to peacefully organize the world and establish a new international order after World War I. The fact that the League was created in the year Urquhart was born would turn out to be more than just a coincidence. His family had Scottish roots; Brian's father, Murray, was a painter and illustrator.[3] In 1925 Murray Urquhart left his wife Bertha (neé Rendall) and their two sons, eleven-year-old Andrew and six-year-old Brian. [Extracted from the article]

The article looks at the strategy of Secretary-General António Guterres for modernizing the United Nation (U.N.), and examines how he can help define the contemporary role of the intergovernmental organization and prepare it for the challenges of the future. Topics discussed include the organizational restructuring of the U.N., Guterres' efforts to build confidence in his leadership, and his advancement of a preventive platform that promotes global peace and security. Also mentioned are proposals in Guterres' 2018 report which include the appointment of a victims rights advocate, the adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and the establishment of a High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation.

This article offers an analysis of the influence of the anti-mercenary norm on the United Nations' use of services provided by private military and security companies (PMSCs). It follows a constructivist approach which focuses on violations of the anti-mercenary norm within the UN system and on the justifications and condemnations of these violations in official UN documents. The findings suggest that while the anti-mercenary norm is no longer puritanical, two key aspects of the norm--the lack of a proper cause and the lack of control--remain influential within the UN system. Although all parts of the UN system nowadays routinely use a wide variety of services of PMSCs and the UN Secretary-General officially sanctioned security outsourcing in 2011, the UN continues to insist that it is only using PMSCs as a last resort, when no other options are available. The continuing need to justify the use of PMSCs' services suggests that this practice challenges both the long-established identity of the UN as a key anti-mercenary norm entrepreneur and its ontological security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that UN Security Council responses to internal armed conflict are the product of the interests as well as the causal and principled beliefs of its engaged permanent members. As China has grown from a regional to a global actor, it has become a more active participant in Council deliberations. The cases of East Timor and Darfur highlight the ways in which Council decisions have come to reflect Chinese understanding of the causes of peace and conflict and appropriate peace strategies. The future of UN peace operations will depend on the ability of the Council's engaged participants to discover shared interests and points of convergence in their causal and principled beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum has introduced the Experts and Eminent Persons system as a security affairs-related epistemic community in Asia Pacific. However, its performance has remained rather stagnant. This article assesses its performance by examining achievements and limitations of the system and identifies barriers to its effective functioning. The findings attribute its dismal performance to skewed composition and poor quality of membership, lack of depth and diversity of expertise and knowledge, absence of knowledge sharing or diffusion function, and negligible policy impact. The article suggests ways to improve the performance of the ARF-EEPs, and concludes by offering theoretical, empirical, and policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers pessimistic outlook for the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, global governance and the United Nations. He argues that Trump's America First approach to foreign policy imposes the costs and burdens on others, like the 45 percent surcharge on Chinese imports. He suggests that Trump's impetuous decision style is not good for international security and U.S. foreign policy. He also argues that Trump's background as a chief executive officer (CEO) is not compatible with collaborative decision making.

This year marks the final year for the present editorial team. The four editors were chosen in part for their individual expertise in areas of global governance. For four years, as a matter of policy, the editors have refrained from submitting any of their own articles to the journal. In this final year, they have decided to write one Global Forum essay each as a way of saying farewell. This following is the first such essay by Ramesh Thakur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the review of the report "Uniting Our Strengths for Peace: Politics, Partnership and People," by the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) of the United Nations (UN). Topics discussed include the importance of the peace operations and the monumental challenges faced by the UN provided by the report, the influence of the overarching political realities on the deliberations of HIPPO, and the extension of the peace operations of HIPPO beyond the deployment of military peacekeepers traditionally.

This article examines the negotiation of security in landmark peace agreements brokered in Sudan (2002-2005) and Kenya (2008). It reviews the dominant literature on peace agreements, arguing that preoccupation with agreements' durability has led to the neglect of questions about whether and under what conditions agreements work to improve human security. The article calls for a different approach to analysis of peace agreements' quality that addresses how transformative they are of security conditions for ordinary people. Applying this lens to the Sudanese and Kenyan accords, it outlines the agreements' commitments to improved human security and the range of factors that shaped and undermined prospects for the realization of those commitments in practice, even prior to implementation. It concludes with lessons for international conflict resolution practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN asserts that local ownership boosts the legitimacy and sustainability of peacebuilding by preserving the principles of self-determination and nonimposition in an activity that can contravene them. At the same time, it also perceives local ownership to imperil the achievement of its operational goals, thus bringing its normative and operational obligations into conflict. This article evaluates the UN's discourse and operationalization of local ownership, showing that despite the UN's invocation of ownership discourse, it operationalizes ownership in restrictive ways that are intended to protect the achievement of operational goals but that consequently limit self-determination and increase imposition. Moreover, because of contradictions in the UN's practices of ownership, it also undercuts its ability to realize the very operational goals that it is trying to protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Cold War, NATO formulated its new role on the basis of broader political aims and new security objectives by assuming crisis management operations beyond its borders. This article argues from a constructivist perspective that keen Turkish involvement in NATO out-of-area operations constitutes a context of social interaction that has led to particular identities and certain security policy outputs for both. Turkey's participation in NATO's military operations as the sole Muslim ally, in the post-Cold War era, enabled NATO to build identity as a global security actor in crisis management while Turkey's active role in these operations served to keep Turkey's sense of prominence in the protection of the universal values and, thus, its claim to Western identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld's role in advocating international peace through interventions in ethnic violence in Congo and his support of sustainability initiatives. Topics include growing concern over national armament and arms production and how national security is threatened by increases in military technologies. Additional information is presented on economic development, efforts to mitigate hunger and mass poverty, and the dialectical relationship between peace and human rights.

This article presents a lecture given by former under-secretary-general of the United Nations (UN) Margaret Joan Anstee, given at the UN Office at Vienna in 2011. In the lecture, Anstee discusses international security in terms of global peace-building and peacekeeping. The speech also includes information on economic and social development, narcotics, and the role of women.

From Sierra Leone to Solomon Islands, developed powers have undertaken a range of state-building interventions in the early years of this century. Two influences appear to shape the emerging state of the art on state building: conceptions about the nature of the state in the developed world; and the postcolonial sensitivities and practicalities that attend the project of intervention. After examining the imperatives driving interventions in fragile states, I explore the remarkable consistency among approaches to state building applied by different states and coalitions in different contexts. I then examine the imperatives driving this convergence of approaches and conclude with some observations tracing the difficulties of contemporary interventions to the current dominant approach to state building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the extent to which international public health has become securitized and what effects this has on global health governance and the biological weapons control regime. Attempts to securitize public health are traced in the two multilateral discursive spaces of greatest relevance to biological weapons arms control and international public health; the community of state parties to the Biological Weapons Convention, and the World Health Organization. The conclusion is that with respect to public health, the identified securitization moves have led to a strengthening of the state as actor in the provision of international public health. For biological weapons arms control, the impact of the identified securitization moves depends largely on the overall development of the biological weapons control regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on U.S. and Asian state behavior, and UN and Asia-Pacific organizations, I explore the argument that a reputation for effectiveness in the counterterrorist campaign has become more significant than a reputation for defending human rights. I conclude that only where human rights issues had established a reasonably firm domestic and international institutional foothold before September 11, 2001, does a reputation built on concern for the protection of human rights retain an ability to constrain certain of the illiberal trends associated with the counterterrorist agenda. Nevertheless, even in these instances, counterterrorist requirements are shaping institutional behavior and rhetoric and depleting the resources available for dealing with human rights abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A century after the birth of a father of peacekeeping, Ralph Bunche, UN peace operations have changed dramatically. The narrowly defined, lightly armed, strictly neutral operations of Bunche's day have become complex, multidisciplinary state-building operations. Then, peace-keeping buttressed essentially self-enforcing cease-fires; now, it aims to build the foundations of a self-renewing peace. These changes reflect six deeper shifts: the end of the Cold War; engagement with "internal" conflicts; rising regional organizations; North-South politics; the U.S.-UN relationship; and changes in peace operation mandates. These shifts create three future challenges: state building; the reconception of sovereignty; and the need for realism. The December 2004 High-Level Panel report proposes modest steps toward meeting those challenges, but the burden of realizing the proposed framework rests squarely with UN member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the first global security problems to emerge in the post-Cold War period was the excessive and destabilizing accumulation of conventional weapons. The only truly global instrument to emerge to cope with this was the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms. This article is an assessment of how this transparency and confidence-building measure has contributed during its ten-year existence to the management and global governance of the negative consequences of the arms trade. The Register has developed an important norm and made arms transfers more transparent. But it still has a long way to go before it can play its inherent role in establishing a cooperative security regime that would address excessive and destabilizing arms buildups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circumstances and nature of humanitarianism have changed in recent years. The traditional ideals of neutrality, impartiality, and independence have become myth. Rather than being at the margins of conflict, humanitarianism is now embedded within contemporary conflict. States use humanitarian norms and actors for their own ends, frequently as a response to international pressure to intervene in conflicts. Such actions, as well as those on the part of international humanitarian organizations and other nonstate actors, have altered the terrain of humanitarian action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the international peace building efforts and also includes the example of human right culture in Kosova. More than 250 well-intentioned nongovernmental and governmental organizations have flooded into Kosovo offering a range of resources and promises. Elections have been held, homes have been rebuilt, schools have reopened and roads have been repaved. Police and judges have been trained and the Ad Hoc Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is well under way in its investigations into war crimes committed in Kosovo. Nonetheless, not one of the larger international goals that brought the international community to Kosovo in the first place has been reached. Kosovo is decidedly not a multiethnic and secure society and equal access to basic human rights protections remains illusory.

It is now conventional wisdom, reinforced by repetition, that the powerful institutions governing lives are afflicted by a democratic deficit. Despite a wealth of research on this issue — and some very detailed policy recommendations that have come out of the work of the World Bank, the International Peace Academy, the United States Institute of Peace, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Canada's International Development Research Centre, the Watson Institute at Brown University, and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — the policy conclusions of the report seem altogether hollow and banal.

Asserts that migration is one of the significant sites exhibiting the significant influence of globalization on framing security relations. Lack of effective migration policy in the nation-state, Turkey; Treatment of migrants from Southeast Asia and the Middle East as security threat; High rate of emigration to Europe; Asylum seekers from Turkey; Transit migration.

Discusses the collective security or the police power for the modern system of nationstates. Definition of collective security; Designation of agents to enforce actions; Instruments of enforcement.

The UN Charter describes him or her merely as the 'chief administrative officer of the organization,' yet today the Secretary-General is widely recognized as the UN's chief political representative. How [...]

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum has introduced the Experts and Eminent Persons system as a security affairs-related epistemic community in Asia Pacific. However, its performance has remained [...]