Rhetoric versus reality in the rise of policing in UN peace operations: ‘More blue,less green’?

ABSTRACT

United Nations police (UNPOL) have become increasingly important to operational effectiveness of peace operations. For some time, their contribution to re-establishing the rule of law in conflict-affected states has been seen as a cornerstone for building sustainable peace and enabling mission exit strategies. In a departure from traditional peacekeeping and post-conflict assistance, recent years have seen UN peace operations directed to stabilise countries and protect civilians in the context of on-going violent conflict. As a result, UNPOL have had to undertake a range of expanded tasks, exacerbating long-standing challenges and producing new impediments to their operational effectiveness. At the same time, a ‘pragmatic turn’ is generating increased interest in more police-centric concepts of peacekeeping as a possible alternative to today’s expensive and military-focused peace operations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in multiple peace operations and at UN headquarters, this article examines the changing roles of UNPOL in a new breed of UN peace operations, identifies the major associated challenges and proposes a series of recommendations for overcoming them. It argues that if police are to respond to unfolding challenges while becoming more central to peacekeeping outcomes, then significant reforms and further research into their impacts will be required.     

Bodil Begtrup and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: individual agency,transnationalism and intergovernmentalism in early UN human rights

The article investigates the individual agency of the little studied transnational, Bodil Begtrup, in the subfields of women's and minority rights, and refugee and asylum policy. Begtrup fulfilled many roles – as state representative, expert advisor, member of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women, and president of a national NGO. This article shows how Begtrup enjoyed wide room for manoeuvre in the subfield of women's rights, and acted in this as a transnational norm entrepreneur and process entrepreneur advocating women's rights as an integral part of human rights and forging the change of the institutional design of the UN human rights institutions. In the subfield of minority rights, refugee and asylum policy, Begtrup acted under tight governmental control because the issue at hand was subject to national interest and domestic party politics. Her agency in the two subfields shows how internationalism was a predominant feature in the early shaping of UN human rights. Transnationalism occurred when the subfield in question was not affected by national interest.     

美英在联合国中国代表权问题上的分歧与协调(1950-1951)

有关中国在联合国的代表权问题,美国的基本立场是反对中国代表权变更,尽管在朝鲜战争爆发前后有微妙的区别,此前主要是私下操纵,此后则公开阻挠。英国的投票立场经历了从弃权、赞成中国代表权变更到最终支持美国在联合国搁置对中国代表权问题讨论的演变过程。而且,英国赞成新中国取得合法代表权并不意味着取缔国民党集团的非法代表,其政策转轨亦不同步。在1950年1-6月,英国开始由弃权走向有条件赞成新中国取得席位,美英分歧凸现,各自为自己的立场游说其他安理会成员国。1950年6月-1951年1月是美英分歧与协调的高峰时期,英国逐渐走向赞成接纳新中国代表同时驱逐国民党非法代表的立场。美国则不遗余力地反对中国代表权的变更。1951年2-6月,英国由赞成中国代表权变更转向支持美国在联合国搁置对这一问题的讨论,美英纷争基本平息。美英在这一问题上的分歧除了反映两国对华政策的差异外,也折射出两国对联合国组织的不同理念。     

The enforcement problem in Resolution 2094 and the United Nations Security Council sanctions regime: sanctioning North Korea

This article deconstructs United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2094 through the preambulatory statements, objectives, obligations, and implementation and enforcement provisions of UNSC Resolution 2094. The article proceeds in three parts. First, it reviews the academic literature on UNSC sanctions and their application in the North Korean case. Second, it deconstructs UNSC Resolution 2094 according to the common structural components of international legal instruments to assess the level of congruence between the objectives of UNSC Resolution 2094, its enforcement mechanisms and outcomes. Third, it explores the weaknesses of UNSC Resolution 2094, focusing on the gap between the objectives and enforcement mechanisms found in the resolution. The inability of the UNSC sanctions regime to prevent North Korea reaching the cusp of becoming a nuclear weapons power is evidence of the international community's weak leverage over Pyongyang, a situation arising from the vulnerability of South Korea to a North Korean attack and the cross-cutting strategic priorities of China; the absence of economic linkages between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the primary sanctions-sender state in the USA; and North Korea's commitment to a nuclear weapons capability as the foundation of its medium-term economic development strategy, its institutional governance structure and associated ideological commitments.     

Being international in times of war: Arthur Sweetser and the shifting of the League of Nations to the United Nations

Transnational actors are increasingly surfacing when it comes to understanding the global dimensions of the modern nation-state. Thinking of the modern state from the diversity of its personnel and its many intersections with private and semi-private actors or institutions with a transnational reach, the new diplomatic history acknowledges the embeddedness of states in border-crossing agencies. What has been conceptualized as ‘network diplomacy’ grasps both the role of transnational epistemic communities for the making of particular policy fields and the perception of diplomats as an integral part of transnational initiatives. Taking the League of Nations as a case study, this article analyses how its personnel attempted to spell out ideas of network diplomacy and to make their exposed position at the intersection of transnational civil society, state politics and international institutions work to effect political change. We focus on the transnational career of Arthur Sweetser (1888–1968) who, as a journalist, a long-term member of the League secretariat, the UN staff and the US administration, was at the forefront of developing new techniques of diplomatic practices beyond institutional mandates. Sweetser’s trajectory allows us to illuminate the mechanisms of network diplomacy by probing into multi-layered negotiation processes that engaged state practices, international institutions and the border-crossing agency of individuals. Characterizing him as transnational enables one to interlink his mobile trajectory with a particular scope of action that unfolded beyond the political demarcation of the nation-state and its instituted logics of rule and diplomacy. We further carve out the main features of a diplomatic practice that was formally non-existent yet crucial to the transfer of League principles, practices and personnel to the new United Nations.     

From the Past to the Future: Integrating Archaeology and Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Contested understandings about the past continue to reify the divided character of post-Troubles Northern Ireland. In particular, the unresolved legacies of the extension of English control over Ireland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through warfare and plantation continue to structure daily lives in the province. Yet the archaeological record of this period complicates the accepted dichotomous narratives through highlighting complexity. These nuances, however, have been lost in recent decades as an overly simplistic model of colonizer versus colonized has emerged as the dominant political paradigm. The management and presentation of sites associated with the process of plantation can arguably create the space necessary to bridge the divide, and to challenge accepted understandings. Cross-community engagement in the process of archaeological discovery and interpretation on plantation-period sites in Northern Ireland highlights the critical role archaeology can play in peace and reconciliation in post-conflict societies.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

Media and Ideology in the Middle East: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This study explores the ideologization of media discourse in the Middle East through investigating political influences over leading media corporations in the region. A critical discourse analysis was applied to news reports issued by prominent Middle Eastern media giants Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. The research data included eight news articles from both media outlets. Thus, four articles from each corporation have been studied and analyzed in an effort to realize the objectives of the study at hand. Blass’s Manipulative Strategies… and van Dijk’s Ideological Square… constituted primary methodological instruments within the framework of this research. The findings indicate an explicit impact of local political agendas on the discourse and editorial policies of each of the studied media corporations, which emerge in violation with the claimed journalistic commitment to objectivity and impartiality in terms of news reporting.     

The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

Transnational militancy in Cold-War Europe: gender,human rights,and the WIDF during the Greek Civil War

This paper examines the involvement of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the politics of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). The article’s specific focus is on the organisation’s international campaigns for the end of state-sanctioned persecution of leftists, especially women, and the re-instatement of democracy in Greece, utilising the expanding human-rights system at the United Nations. It draws on selected WIDF and United Nations (UN) documents, in addition to primary and secondary materials relating to the cold war and the Greek Civil War.     

Learning through Upheaval: Strategies for Analyzing and Construing Emerging Sociopolitical Transformations in the Middle East

The irreducible complexity and singular unpredictability of the upheavals that have roiled the Middle East since December 2010 challenge analysts—from university students to policymakers—to grapple with irresolvable questions; this, rather than analysts' superimposing their own visions of what might constitute the upheavals' driving forces, and what will, or should be the outcomes of the regional turmoil. Drawing on strategies gleaned from teaching about the Arab uprisings, this article asserts that the uprisings may be collectively read as comprising a text that contains signs of indeterminacy pointing to many possible meanings and sources of meanings. Focus is placed on those signs that embody the differing discourses through which the Middle East upheavals are, have been, or can be represented and assessed; and the fluid, multidimensional forms of political identity that have contributed to the upheavals, and are being further reshaped, in their wake. By reading these signs with intellectual openness and humility, interpreters can achieve greater insight into the profoundly contingent and unforeseeable dynamics at work across the region.     

Trajectories of Development: International Heritage Management of Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa

Archaeology and material heritage are increasingly being used for development projects aimed at producing economic growth and reducing poverty. I am interested in how these projects construct particular ‘developmental’ visions of heritage, orienting and circumscribing relationships both with the past and contemporary social contexts. Here I address these processes as developmental technologies that produce poverty as a ‘local’ affair, in need of intervention, set in contrast to the traveling and translational abilities of international expertise in heritage management and development. I trace the expansion of this expertise across the Middle East and North Africa region, in a variety of contexts where material heritage is mobilized to reduce poverty. Importantly, the question of the economic value of heritage is necessarily placed center-stage in such projects. I argue that as archaeologists we need to engage with the economic value of material heritage, in order to start examining how exactly material heritage works in the world: to what ends and results, in what contexts, who gains to profit, and who suffers.