Suchergebnisse

On 23 June 2021, after months of deliberations, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) approved the establishment of the SADC Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM) in response to escalating violent extremism and insurgency by an Islamist armed group, Al-Shabaab or Al-Sunnah wa Jama'ah (ASWJ), in Mozambique's northern Cabo Delgado province, which posed the risk of regional contagion. SAMIM was deployed under scenario 6 of the African Standby Force (ASF) with a mandate focused on supporting the Mozambican government to combat terrorism and violent extremism in Cabo Delgado. Its mandate also centred on strengthening and maintaining peace and security; restoring law and order; and assisting the government and humanitarian agencies to provide humanitarian relief to the affected population. This paper contributes to raising public understanding of the regional and continental policies and principles underpinning the SADC decision-making process regarding the deployment of peace missions and the effectiveness of SAMIM in fulfilling its mandated tasks until its first anniversary. It identified the relative pacification of Cabo Delgado as a crucial strategic and operational impact of SAMIM's exceptional military intervention, which facilitated its segue into a multidimensional peacebuilding mission. Six principal constraints-cum-opportunities of SAMIM, which had a significant bearing on its effectiveness, are discussed.

This article explores the application of complexity theory to UN peacekeeping. To date, peacekeeping has been dominated by linear models of change, assuming that conflict settings can be addressed by elite-driven peace processes, gradual improvements to state institutional capacity, and development programming. However, this article argues that complexity theory offers a far more accurate and useful lens through which to view the work of peacekeeping: conflict settings represent complex, interdependent socio-political systems with emergent qualities giving them the capacity to self-organize via feedback loops and other adaptive activity. Self-organization means such systems are highly resistant to attempts to change behaviour via top-down or input-output approaches. In fact, peacekeeping itself is endogenous to the systems it is trying to change, often displaying the same kinds of self-organization typical of complex systems elsewhere. Drawing on experience working and conducting fieldwork in the UN peacekeping mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article argues that UN peacekeeping operations should view themselves as actors within the complex conflict ecosystem, looking to enable transformational change from within, rather than impose liberal Western models from without.

Although United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) produce positive outcomes for peace, some missions are strategically replaced by cheaper and smaller UN political missions (PMs). This article explores why certain peacekeepers are replaced by UN PMs and unpacks the exit strategy of UN PKOs. The logic of demand-side and supply-side perspectives is evaluated using data on the deployment of UN peacekeepers and UN PMs in post-civil war countries between 1993 and 2016. Signing comprehensive peace agreements (CPAs) increases the chances of UN PKOs being replaced by UN PMs because as the willingness to develop politically increases, the demand for civilian personnel after demilitarization also rises. On the supply side, as the preferences of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council concerning target states become more heterogenous, UN PKOs are more likely to be replaced by UN PMs because coordination problems encourage members to choose less burdensome missions.

The European Union (EU) repeatedly expresses its support to principles and values of the United Nations (UN), seeing the UN as the core of a rules-based global order. How does the EU perform in contributing personnel to UN peacekeeping operations, and what factors affect their personnel commitments? Recent work shows that the size of the deployed personnel matters for peacekeeping effectiveness, and personnel commitment is a crucial effort by the UN member states to prolong peace. This article's contribution is to conduct the first analysis on the EU member states' contribution rates on 53 UN peacekeeping operations throughout the last 30 years. By testing arguments of two general explanations for factors that affect peacekeeper contributions, the empirical findings reveal that although the EU members tend to contribute less to UN peacekeeping operations, they contribute significantly higher in the case of rising peacekeeper fatalities. However, the EU member states are less likely to contribute with humanitarian impulse or international security threat concerns. The findings suggest that no single theory can explain the contribution motives; instead, a wide range of interacting factors determine the decision to commit personnel to an operation.

In the final analysis, is the security dilemma inescapable? Or can the protagonists in world politics learn to live with never-ending insecurities and the risk of attack without producing precisely the outcomes that they wish to avoid? This article explores this fundamental problem for International Relations theory by performing a thought experiment, in which it applies lessons from aikido to world politics. A form of Japanese budo, or martial art, aikido provides practitioners with a method for harbouring insecurities, and for dealing with attacks that may or may not occur, by empathically caring for actual and potential attackers. The article builds on practice theory in assuming that any social order is constructed and internalised through practices, but also capable of change through the introduction and dissemination of new practices. Although an unlikely scenario, aikido practice could serve as such a method of fundamental transformation if widely applied in world politics. Empirical examples ranging from international apologies and security cooperation to foreign aid and peacekeeping operations are discussed, suggesting that contemporary world politics is at times already performed in accordance with aikido principles, albeit only imperfectly and partially.

Peace operations and associated peacekeeping research have changed dramatically over time. This article reviews the extent to which two prominent strands of peacekeeping research – behavioral-quantitative/quantitative and critical – have reflected changes in peacekeeping practice. Following critiques of how these approaches have fallen short, the article provides a research agenda for each research approach. The article concludes by addressing ways in which the two approaches might be bridged and the barriers to such collaboration therein.