Category: Peace and Conflict

Under a Divisive Peace, Wartime Rifts Hobble Hope in Bosnia

August 10, 2021

The Dayton Accords, which ended fighting in the country 25 years ago, created a dysfunctional system that put power in the hands of politicians stoking ethnic division.

His refusal to put identity politics at the center of his business, however, has put him sharply at odds with a system created by the 1995 peace settlement that revolves around ethnicity and loyalty to one ethnonationalist authority or another. It has also crippled one of the few success stories in a country blighted by what reports to the United Nations Security Council in April and May described as “chronic dysfunctionality” and “the pandemic called corruption.”

After War Between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Peace Sees Winners and Losers Swap Places

August 10, 2021

Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived side by side when both countries were part of the Soviet Union, but century-old ethnic enmity reignited when communism collapsed. Nagorno-Karabakh, mainly ethnic Armenian, ended up as part of Azerbaijan. Armenia won a war over the territory in the early 1990s that killed some 20,000 people and displaced a million, mostly Azerbaijanis.

Azerbaijanis were expelled not only from Nagorno-Karabakh itself but also from seven surrounding districts, including Kelbajar, that had been mostly inhabited by Azerbaijanis. The entire region became the internationally unrecognized, ethnic Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Azerbaijan’s desire to return its citizens who had been displaced from their homes became a driving force in its politics.

We are finally getting better at predicting organized conflict

August 10, 2021

New techniques have made predictions more useful, and we used one to look at violence in Ethiopia since the election of Abiy Ahmed, the new Nobel Peace Prize winner.

In the world of conflict prediction, there is a truism: the best predictor of violence is a history of violence. One illustration is the Early Warning Project’s 2019 predictions for the sites of new mass killings, defined as the death of over 1,000 civilians in a year due to the deliberate action of armed groups (2020 figures weren’t available at press time): the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, India, and Myanmar rank among the 30 highest-risk countries.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/24/238426/predicting-organized-conflict-ensemble-modeling-ethiopia-ahmed/?utm_source=engagement_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=05.19.subs&mc_cid=aef8827775&mc_eid=902948ef8d

The Extraordinary Trial of the Child Soldier Who Became a Brutal Rebel Commander

February 18, 2021

Kidnapped at 9 by Joseph Kony’s notorious guerilla army, Dominic Ongwen was groomed to kill. Is he a lost soul deserving of mercy, or a cold-blooded war criminal who must face justice?

He didn’t look at her for a long time. He stared at the edge of the table in front of him, holding his hands in his lap as if he was praying, visibly tense as this small woman with dark blonde hair spoke in a confident, cool, posh English accent. It was March 19, 2018, as Gillian Mezey testified before the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the trial of Dominic Ongwen, a former commander of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, the LRA, one of Africa’s oldest and cruelest rebel groups. Mezey, a professor of psychiatry in London, was testifying because nothing was more important and more controversial in this trial than the mental state of the accused, a former child soldier.

The Extraordinary Trial of the Child Soldier Who Became a Brutal Rebel Commander

Colombia’s peace tribunal issues a crushing judgment against the FARC ($)

February 9, 2021

A system established to achieve “transitional justice” proves its mettle

The jep’s revelations show that Colombia’s unique “transitional-justice” system can succeed. Most such tribunals have been established by international bodies, such as the un. The jep is the first such body for prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity to have been created by the warring parties through a peace accord. It adjudicates such crimes through “restorative”, rather than retributive, justice. This seeks to reconcile victims with offenders, mostly by uncovering the truth. The tribunal talked to more than 2,500 kidnapping victims. Colombia’s ordinary justice system had not done that when it tried some farc members in absentia during the war. The jep took testimony from the hostage-takers, who under the peace agreement are obliged to confess. Some spoke for 16 hours.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/02/02/colombias-peace-tribunal-issues-a-crushing-judgment-against-the-farc

 

BUILT TO FAIL Despite vows the U.S. wouldn’t get mired in ‘nation-building,’ it’s wasted billions doing just that

March 16, 2020

Instead of bringing stability and peace, they said, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on U.S. military power for its survival. Assuming it does not collapse, U.S. officials have said it will need billions more dollars in aid annually, for decades.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-nation-building/

Was America’s assassination of Qassem Suleimani justified?

March 16, 2020

The American authorities dislike the word “assassination”, because it implies a flouting of international and humanitarian law. Indeed, some human-rights lawyers see the use of drones to kill people as almost always unlawful. Agnès Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has argued that “outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal….lethal force can only be used where strictly necessary to protect against an imminent threat.”

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/01/07/was-americas-assassination-of-qassem-suleimani-justified?cid1=cust%2Fdailypicks1%2Fn%2Fbl%2Fn%2F2020017n%2Fowned%2Fn%2Fn%2Fdailypicks1%2Fn%2Fn%2Fe%2F373711%2Fn