Suchergebnisse

The winter of 2011 and spring of 2012 in Russia bore witness to a series of anti-regime protest actions against the fraudulent conduct of the Parliamentary and Presidential elections that resulted in the re-election of Putin as President for a third term. Within the context of opposition activity, one act of protest has arguably been the international headline grabber, namely, the 'Punk Prayer' performed by members of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot in Christ the Saviour's Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. It is perhaps unsurprising that a group of young women clad in bright balaclavas and tights, proclaiming a radical feminist agenda and performing riotous punk in Russia's main Orthodox Cathedral captivated international audiences. On the positive side, the case has renewed international attention on human rights in Russia. Yet, while their feminism is often mentioned in international coverage, it is rarely the subject of serious analysis and further consideration of how it can be viewed as particularly radical and oppositional in the context of contemporary Russian gender politics, where hostility to feminism and a regression of women's human is evident (Johnson & Saarinen, 2012; Elder, 2013a). This is a worrying omission as any analysis of the reaction to Pussy Riot from the Russian authorities and general public shows that their punishment not only represents a silencing of opposition activists engaging in freedom of artistic expression, but that the reaction to and punishment of the members can be used as a lens through which to view the wider gender climate, where women engaging in political activism in public are seen as deviant and transgressive. This threatens not only women engaged in activism, but poses significant barriers to women's realisation of their human rights in all aspects of life (Racioppi & O'Sullivan See, 2009). Thus, discussions of Pussy Riot as human rights activists should not be gender blind and this article is intended to situate this case in the wider gender politics of contemporary Russia.

Trump's stinging electoral rhetoric regarding Europe has profoundly challenged the foundations of the transatlantic relations. Exploring the link between electoral rhetoric and US foreign policy, this article focusses on a key feature of transatlantic policy-making, that is, the multi-levelled architecture of European Union (EU)–US dialogues, involving diplomats, legislators, and civil society. While research shows that dialogues help promote cooperation, their relevance and specific functions in times of elections have not been explored so far. To what extent do dialogical interactions change at the approach of elections and right afterwards? Why do dialogues keep going, in spite of fierce presidential rhetoric suggesting otherwise? To fill this gap, this article explores the EU–US dialogues following Trump's election to determine the extent to which these dialogues endorse new functions that have so far been overlooked. Adopting a socio-psychological approach, it shows that one of the functions that dialogue fulfils in times of elections is the reassurance that the relationship identity of the actors will be respected to meet their ontological security needs. Drawing on interviews and official documents, this article sheds a new light on the importance of dialogical engagement at these critical points in the life of liberal democracies.

For unrecognised states in the international system recognition of sovereign statehood is the ultimate goal. Not being 'a state' means being excluded from global networks. However, even in the most basic definitions and criteria for unrecognised states there is a period of relative autonomy accorded due to non-recognition. This is a period when political actors can use isolation to establish the state's narrative, identity and structure. It is this period that provides the foundations for external interaction. It is in this period that the state is born. This article examines another side to the politics of recognition: the politics of non-recognition. Drawing on the contemporary examples of Somaliland and Kurdistan, the article assesses the benefits as well as the costs of non-recognition.

Resilience seems to have become "the everyday" covering many aspects of our lives and the policy agenda of major international institutions. However, despite the upsurge in its popularity, are we sure we understand resilience well enough to make full use of its potential? Is resilience just about an entity and its qualities, the knowledge of which could help us improve its response to adversity? Or is it more about resilience as governance-thinking which could enable local communities to self-organize to build life they have reason to value, with external assistance as necessary? Tackling these fundamentals is important, not least to ensure that resilience is not another buzzword but an opportunity to make governance more adaptive. This article argues that resilience cannot be engineered externally, and requires local communities, aware of their own strength and capacities, to actualize their own potential in their strife for "good life," the way they specify.

Brexit has transformed the EU–UK relationship into a foreign-policy challenge for both sides. The negotiations on the EU–UK future relationship have been a process in which both sides have been learning about the other as a third-party negotiator. The UK has taken a very different attitude to the Political Declaration, agreed alongside the Withdrawal Agreement (covering the terms of the UK's departure from the EU), treating it as a guide rather than a roadmap for negotiations. And the UK has decided not to pursue negotiations with the EU on a future foreign, security and defence policy relationship. This is in a context in which the EU's member states have committed to deepening security and defence cooperation. At present, and despite shared international challenges, a formal agreement on EU–UK foreign, security and defence policy looks set to be replaced by an approach of 'muddling through'.

This research advances the critical literature of humanitarian governance by demonstrating how 'risk management' is reproduced within the governance and regulatory structures of humanitarian institutions and, crucially, how it distorts patterns of emergency assistance coverage. Focusing on the impact of post-disciplinary forms of control, it reveals how humanitarian resources are disciplined by banks' responses to regulatory changes initiated by the adoption of counter–terrorist financing legislation designed to counter flows of money to terrorists. This has resulted in the systematic shedding of NGO customers and the routine blocking of their international transactions - known as derisking. In an effort to limit this, NGOs have adopted a 'precautionary approach' to managing risk in their own activities, limiting their ability to reach some of the most vulnerable populations and curtailing innovation. Furthermore, the impact of this on the governance and structure of the humanitarian system has spread beyond contexts of conflict into situations more conventionally labelled as natural disasters such as drought, enabling the exercise of new techniques of power over significant parts of the humanitarian system.

How can ritual help to understand the practice of deterrence? Traditional deterrence scholarship tends to overlook the active role of deterring actors in creating and redefining the circumstances to which they are allegedly only reacting. In order to address the weight of deterrence as a symbol, collective representation and strategic repertoire, this article proposes to rethink deterrence as a performative strategic practice with ritual features and critical binding, releasing and restraining functions. I posit a ritual account of deterrence to better grasp the performance, credibility and the presumed effect of this central international security practice. An understanding of deterrence as a ritual-like social practice probes the scope of rational deterrence theory, replacing its 'I think, therefore I deter'-presumption with a socially and politically productive 'I am, therefore I deter'-logic. Drawing on the example of NATO's Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP), the proposed conceptualization of extended deterrence as an interaction ritual chain in allied defence, solidarity and community-building offers novel insights about the deterrence and collective identity nexus. Extended deterrence has much more than deterrence at stake: how an alliance practices deterrence tells us more about the alliance itself than about the nature of threats it responds to. The tripwire posture of the eFP highlights the instrumentality of ritualization for mediating ambiguity in extended deterrence.

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) as an Agency of the African Union was established in 2001 by the African leaders with the view of eradicating poverty in Africa.The NEPAD programme initiatives encompasses the political, economic and social-cultural development of the African states through partnership with the private and public sectors, the international community and countries in and outside Africa.Through thematic areas of NEPAD such as, democracy and political governance has encompassed the peace and security programme initiative of NEPAD as a priority to be achieved. This then forms the objective of this paper to be studied considering the insecurity challenges that faced the Nigerian state as a member of the African Union and co-initiator of the NEPAD programme initiative.Since 2009, the Nigerian state is faced with the activities of the Boko Haram militant group whose engagement has led to activities such as burning and bombing of people's houses, churches, Mosques and public buildings, killing of innocent lives including but not limited to both Christians and Muslims, attack on security operatives and schools which include bombing of structures.This paper therefore, is to study the strategic plan of NEPAD in implementing the peace and security objective for the purpose of promoting peace and political stability in Nigeria.The methodology adopted in this research is the review of previous literature, the use of descriptive, historical, and interpretative methods of analysis, with the available research materials. The findings thus reveal that, issues such as zoning of political and elective positions should be addressed in the Nigerian constitution in order to accommodate the six geopolitical zones so as to promote unity, political stability, peace and security within the Nigerian state.

The demands and practicalities of researching in conflict contexts are multifaceted and unpredictable. This task is increasingly shouldered by local researchers on the ground and there is much to learn from the ways they perceive and navigate the research environment. Global inequalities and power dynamics generally place southern researchers at the forefront of research projects under relatively higher risks than their colleagues and employers in the Global North. Sometimes they gain comparatively little from the research outputs and until recently their experiences have remained mostly hidden. In general, their contributions have been significantly under-reported.1 This report focuses on the work of the Bridge Network, whose seven members were responsible for gathering interviews and observations for the Conflict Research Programme (CRP) in South Sudan. We formed the network in November 2017 and have researched from within our own communities in five case study locations: Gogrial, Malakal, Leer, Nimule, and Abyei. Since 2017, we have been researching the logics of governance in South Sudan, a violent and turbulent political arena. Our research has explored not only the transactional politics of the 'political marketplace', but also how authority is changing, as well as civic authority and actions.2 The research was implemented under the broad CRP concepts of public authority, civicness, and the Political Marketplace Framework. We have conducted several interviews with a broad mix of South Sudanese, highlighting their stories, experiences, and views. It should be 1 Mwambari, D. (2019). Local Positionality in the Production of Knowledge in Northern Uganda. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1609406919864845. 2 The research was co-designed by Rachel Ibreck, Naomi Pendle, Hannah Logan, and The Bridge Network members. The tax research was designed by Matthew Benson. The team met annually for joint analysis between 2017-2020, including with Flora McCrone, Jimmy Awany, and Matthew Benson in January 2020. noted that due to ongoing active conflict, access to certain locations was challenging, such that the themes and volume of data were not collected systematically across the five locations. This publication reflects on our struggles and showcases our achievements. In what follows, we firstly reflect on the research process and secondly present some of our research findings, including a series of original interviews. The report includes extracts from conversations between members of the Bridge Network and CRP researchers between 2018 and 2020. The discussions were in part aimed at providing the necessary support to the members to ensure their safety, address logistical and ethical challenges, and to document their lessons and experiences for other scholars to learn from. Our conversations reveal some of the difficulties encountered, but also demonstrate the possibilities and skills of a diverse research team working in a conflict zone. We provide new insights into the demands of research in South Sudan and highlight the specific dilemmas involved in being not only a participant observer, but also a member of the community under 'observation', whose lives and families were personally affected by many of the issues we were documenting during a critical time of war and political uncertainty. The report is structured along common themes that arose from the discussions.

Based on two case studies from Syria, this article argues that unilateral external intervention in protracted conflicts is not only about military and financial support to one or other warring party. Unilateral external actors often get involved in the negotiation of local agreements, creating a hybrid form of intervention that combines the roles of warfighting, mediation, and policing. In this context, external actors are able to transform their military, financial and logistical support to states and non-state armed groups into leverage and negotiating power that determines the outcome of local negotiations, thereby gearing the dynamics of the conflict towards their own interests and away from the local agenda. This hybrid external intervention may, in some circumstances, contribute to an unjust and uncertain stabilisation process, while in other circumstances, it can undermine local peace efforts. The clear implication is the need for a greater role and mandate for multilateral actors.

This article aims to contribute to the evolving dialogue between foreign policy analysis and public policy with reference to John Kingdon's multiple streams approach. It problematizes how one of the key concepts of MSA—policy windows—has been used in applications to foreign policy and suggests that policy windows may be more difficult to exploit than illustrations of successful foreign policy entrepreneurship indicate. Indeed, the article argues that policy windows can be either small or large; their size will likely differ not least because policy windows are situated within numerous contexts. With reference to instances of foreign policy redirection, the article highlights four such contexts: the placement and access of foreign policy entrepreneurs; the level of contestation surrounding a problematic but prevailing policy; geopolitical pressures; and ideas guiding foreign policy. The article moreover suggests that by contextualizing policy windows and considering also how contingency may affect policy windows, it seems possible to integrate insights from foreign policy analysis into current theorizing about foreign policy entrepreneurship drawing on the multiple streams framework. The empirical illustration examines the policy window that opened up for policy entrepreneurs to recast longstanding US policy toward military-run Myanmar as the Obama administration took office.

We argue that rebel groups with a higher share of female fighters carry out more lethal terrorist operations using more female perpetrators. Rebels have incentives to exploit gender-specific tactical and propaganda advantages of their female operatives in terrorist operations to cause more damage to the opponents and to attract support. Gender stereotypes make female fighters more effective in terrorist operations, and common media narratives on female perpetrators discredit the government and allow rebels to shame men and encourage other female sympathizers to take up arms. We test this mechanism using casual mediation analysis against new data on the prevalence of female fighters in terrorist operations on a sample of 186 rebel groups fighting in civil wars. We find robust empirical evidence that rebels with a higher prevalence of female fighters employ a higher share of females in terrorist attacks leading to more lethal terrorist violence.

Previous research has examined biomedical metaphors in discourses on military intervention, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. Starting from the observation that such metaphors also occur in the contemporary conflict prevention discourse, this article inquires into their intellectual origins and implications for the understanding of war and prevention. Drawing on archival analysis, it finds that they manifest in two ways in prevention discourse. In the cataclysmic notion, war is likened to an epidemic or plague. This metaphor was popularised by Christian pacifists in the 19th century and carried forth into 20th-century prevention documents. The more recent risk factor notion is couched in terms of enabling conditions for threats to the body politic. By engaging imagery on immunity and public health, it draws parallels between social and political organisation and functions of the body. The article argues that while both notions of biomedical metaphors of war in conflict prevention discourse are firmly rooted in modernist thinking, this intellectual legacy manifests differently. The cataclysmic notion associates war and disease with barbarism and thus paints prevention as a civilisational objective. The risk factor notion, on the contrary, represents war as a technico-scientific problem and thus shifts the focus towards governing and controlling war through knowledge and technology. Furthermore, both notions converge in the idea of a body politic that is to be protected and in the implicit assumption of world order in which war-as-disease is a temporary deviation from the 'healthy norm', while peace-as-health is the desired and default state of affairs.

This paper aims to develop the study of remote warfare's constitutive "remoteness." It proposes a novel definition of remoteness as the degree of the American public's socio-psychological detachment from the realities of political violence fought at a physical distance from the continental United States, as mediated through spectatorship of the use of military force. The remoteness of remote warfare has physical, psychological, and social properties. We argue that it exists on a continuum subject to change over time and should not be approached as a fixed condition measured solely by the physical distance separating combatants involved in armed fighting or as the use of various weapons technologies. The numerous dynamics associated with the remoteness of remote warfare are illustrated through an examination of American military intervention in Libya during Obama's presidency. From the height of the 2011 NATO intervention in the country onwards, US military operations in Libya became more "remote" for the American public. Whilst other contextual factors contributed toward this outcome, we argue that the diminished spectacle surrounding the 2016 Operation Odyssey Lightning helps explain the American public's increasing remoteness from military intervention in Libya.

In the present context of intensifying competition between the major trading economies and potentially game-changing technological developments, the European Union is generally seen as the weaker party. Lacking the 'hard power' derived from military capabilities, it has laid claim to a 'soft power' of normative influence externally, yet even that is only partially utilised. Nor has Europe been able to exercise the power to coerce – 'sharp power' – commensurate with its economic weight as a trading bloc equivalent in size and reach to the US or China, its most prominent global competitors. How can Europe strengthen its position, and in what fields? Through a scenario exercise, we develop eight policy proposals aimed at countering Europe´s vulnerabilities and enabling it to assert its sharp and soft power more effectively. Specifically, we consider the feasibility, means and scope for their realisation. Together, they provide a transformative agenda for the EU's position in the world.