Suchergebnisse

AbstractInternational actors engaged in peacemaking in armed conflicts are often confronted by a moral dilemma: whether to seek to oust the villains by coercive means, or to promote mediation that includes the villains and may lead to a power‐sharing deal with them. This article analyzes the peacemaking dilemma through a constructivist perspective on international norms. It contributes to the constructivist literature, which concentrates on contestation between "good" and "bad" norms, by developing a theoretical framework for understanding moral dilemmas as a "situational incompatibility of good norms". The peacemaking dilemma entails a situational incompatibility between the norm of promoting and maintaining peace and security on the one hand, and the norms of promoting justice, accountability and democratization on the other. The dilemma is difficult to resolve because all these norms are constitutive of the UN and because of strategic uncertainty in armed conflicts. The theoretical framework is applied to the conflicts in Côte d'Ivoire, Libya and Syria.

AbstractEnhancing the effectiveness of conflict prevention is a major preoccupation of the international community. This article focuses on operational prevention of conflict, which entails diplomatic efforts to avert imminent violence in crisis situations. The conventional understanding is that these efforts are short‐term and sporadic. In contrast, this article identifies and analyzes a type of operational prevention that has been institutionalized in order to engage in continuous preventive action in a particular conflict. I define 'institutionalized operational prevention' as a standing mechanism that aims to prevent a conflict from becoming violent and prevent low‐level violence from escalating into large‐scale violence. The article discusses a number of such mechanisms that have been successful in this regard, and offers an explanation for their success. Policymakers should consider establishing standing prevention mechanisms in other situations that have a persistent risk of large‐scale violence. Where structural reforms are required to reduce this risk but are politically unfeasible, the standing mechanisms may be the only viable means of avoiding violence.

This article focuses on the mediation mandate, a phenomenon that is neglected in the literature but extremely significant in practice. It aims to highlight the importance of the mandate and deepen conceptual clarity by presenting a typology of different kinds of mediation mandate and examining their functions, effects, and relationships. It shows that mandates can both constrain and empower mediators and that they are major determinants of the process, goals, and outcome of mediation.

This article explores the intelligence requirement of international mediation, a topic that is ignored in both the literature on conflict resolution and the literature on intelligence. A mediator's strategies and tactics ought to be informed by a deep understanding of the parties' internal calculations about the conflict and its resolution. Intelligence is needed to gain this understanding because the parties typically do not reveal their sensitive deliberations to outsiders. United Nations mediation teams should have a monitoring and analysis unit that endeavours to meet this need and reduce the ignorance that commonly afflicts international mediation. Adapted from the source document.

In 2011 the heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) disbanded the SADC Tribunal after the regional court held that the Zimbabwean government's land seizures violated the rule of law. The disbandment reflects SADC's hierarchy of values, in terms of which the organization's formal commitment to human rights and a regional legal order is subordinate to the political imperatives of regime solidarity and respect for sovereignty. The Tribunal saga demonstrates that the jurisdiction of regional courts derives not simply from their official mandates but from an interplay between domestic and regional law and politics.