Suchergebnisse

1. Aim and concepts -- 2. Theoretical premises of the argument -- 3. The phenomenon to be explained : the long peace of East Asia -- 4. The main argument : the contribution of the ASEAN/Chinese way to the long peace of East Asia -- 5. Developmentalism and the prevention of the onset of conflicts -- 6. Non-intervention and the prevention of the escalation of conflicts into wars -- 7. Face saving and the termination of conflicts -- 8. Generation of the successful ASEAN/Chinese approach -- 9. Will the long peace survive? How could it be made broader, positive and more sustainable? -- 10. What can the East Asian experience offer to theories of international relations, peace and conflicts?

This book investigates the reasons and consequences of military operations by Western powers. It focuses on interventions aimed at protecting civilians from terror, dictators and criminals in fragile states. By doing that it contributes to the cosmopolitan, feminist and post-colonial literature on interventions. By studying the 12 cases of protective interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Central African Republic, Somalia, Yemen, Mauritania, Libya, Mali and Syria, and by comparing developments in these conflicts with conflicts in fragile states, which have not been intervened by great powers, the book reveals that 1. The interventionist era after 1999 has been associated with an increase in conflict fatalities, while the non-interventionist era 1989-1999 was associated with declining conflict violence. States continued to strengthen their control over violence all though both periods. 2. States that experienced humanitarian interventions generally became more fragile and violent than before the intervention. On average their state fragility deteriorated. Fragile conflict states that were not intervened by protective great powers tended to strengthen their control over violence and their conflict violence developed more favourably and conflicts ended, on average, in a shorter time than in the case of protected fragile states. 3. Intrastate conflicts in fragile states that were intervened were escalated more than conflicts that were not intervened. The book also traces the discursive path to such failure by analysing quantitatively and qualitatively the interactive discourses of the proponents and opponents of humanitarian protection in these 12 cases. This analysis revealed that there were three main reasons why Western protection escalated conflicts. 1. The lack of strong global agency in the protection lead to the need to justify operations for national constituencies in a way that made operations look selfish in fragile states. The terrorist strike on 11 September 2001 dramatically deteriorated this problem as the victimhood of the US meant that discourse on protection had to assume even more nationalistic tones. 2. The willingness to conduct operations outside the UN mandate and global agency lead to view in the target countries that protection was really motivated by a hidden geopolitical agenda. The confusion of the UN role in the first protective operations created a precedence of unilateralist operations and this escalated conflicts. 3. Finally, there was a political need to signal strength and determination against violent impunity in fragile states, and this led to militaristic strategies of protection. Such strategies created a situation where proponents and opponents of protection justified their own violence by references to the violence of their opponent. The book concludes that the cosmopolitan protection is political and therefore it requires representative global agency and institutions to be legitimate and to avoid accusations of partisanship. Furthermore, the book concludes that protection is marred by militaristic stereotypical masculinity and power bias. There is a need to reveal the masculine gender bias in protection and to denaturalize the militaristic biases in protection. To avoid escalation, cosmopolitan protection requires what the book calls "democratic matriotism": an approach that emphasizes local ownership and feminine experience in dealing with violence.

This volume is a study that presents five paradigms of social sciences as logical progressive steps in the field of peace and conflict studies.It is written as a study that employs a constructivist pragamatist meta-theory that guides the assessment of the merits of different social science approaches to peace in a novel way, suggesting completely new ways of looking at peace and the theory of peace and war. It presents strong arguments as well as various scholarly positions arguing against their alternatives. As a pragmatist analysis of approaches to peace and conflict research this book poses the pertinent question "What should we know and consider as real in order to end wars?" and follows that question into the depths of philosophy of social sciences and theories of peace and conflict. Yet true to the ideals of pragmatism the theories presented in this book are kept in touch with praxis by presenting a variety of examples in which the theory materializes in conflict situations. If a theory cannot be related to real-life examples, it does not relate to real life itself and thus it is useless. And usefulness for the real-life problem of conflicts and violence is what this book is all about. Instead of considering relevance as one of the objectives of peace research, this research program serves praxis and nothing else. Pragmatism in this book takes off from the idea of classical pragmatists, Peirce, James and Dewey. However, the book updates the pragmatist meta-theoretical program by offering a constructivist twist to classical pragmatism. Knowledge, theories, concepts and paradigms will not only be assessed for their instrumental value for peace action. Instead, ideas are also assessed for the peacefulness of the realities they themselves constitute.

The rise of China has sparked new type of geopolitical considerations and a debate in East Asian security studies. The neighboring countries of China can soon find themselves in a similar geopolitical situation as Finland found itself after the Second World War: there was a great power in the vicinity and the balancing force of this giant was far away. Since we do not have empirical experience of East Asia's future, we will have to use empirical cases that seem similar to the one East Asia is heading at. Finland's experience is one of such cases and it is a case that has been well theorized to allow distilling of lessons from this case to cases that might be similar from the point of view of power politics. This article will use the Finnish experience as a tool for the analysis of the possible futures of the emerging political asymmetry in East Asia. This will be done by analytically and conceptually investigating the dimensions of asymmetry identified in the relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union, by empirically seeking lessons from the Finnish experience and by comparatively applying the lessons to the East Asian context.

Academic Diplomacy means activity where international experts, rather than other states, try to broker peace as moderators, mediators or facilitators, by using means and methods that are advised by the theory of conflict resolution. Academic diplomacy has been associated with positivist approaches of peace research and it has aimed at creating exogenous conditions that science has proven as useful for peace, and removing exogenous conditions that analysis has associated with the onset or continuation of violence. Peace diplomacy by scholars is therefore based on knowledge rather than power, but it uses only knowledge that is practical; knowledge that puts the academic diplomat on top of things in conflict resolution. Since academic diplomacy is normally associated with very positivistic "social engineering" of peace, I will in this paper look at how post-positivist approaches could be useful for academic diplomacy and how post-positivist approaches could reveal problems of traditional peace research approaches in the social engineering of peace. The empirical case of this paper is in academic diplomacy in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, where the author conducted conflict resolution training among the leaders of the former conflicting parties. What the case reveals about approaches to academic diplomacy was not what was expected, i.e. generalizations on exogenous conditions of peace. Instead, it taught about the opportunities to denaturalize and criticize social constructs that were necessary for the legitimation of violence, opportunities to challenge and deconstruct them and to offer alternative constructs that constituted less violent realities. In short practice of academic diplomacy in West Kalimantan taught about the pragmatism of critical and constructivist peace research.

This article uses the example of West Kalimantan to show some new ways of studying opportunities for violence, contributing especially to the so-called 'sons of the soil' conflict debate. By showing that the opportunity structure in West Kalimantan was not primarily material, but social, related to ways to circumvent fear of and norms against violence, this article attempts to update the theoretical premises of the traditional security studies approach to obstacles to conflict and opportunities for violence. The intention is to show how socially constructed realities are relevant in offering and denying opportunities for violence, and how the study of the meanings of actions reveals ways in which opportunities for violent demonstrative argumentation are born in local conflict discourses. The case study shows how powerful narratives enable the justification of violent action and how identities and violent policies mutually constitute each other. This way the empirical evidence calls for understanding the generative and constitutive sources of violence, which are not simply mechanistic causes of conflict. Adapted from the source document.

If the assessment of ASEAN's success in the past is difficult, speculations on whether ASEAN will be a success will be close to impossibility. Yet this is what is intended in this article. However, this is done by first defining robust criteria of success of conflict prevention. Conflict prevention is successful if conflicts and battle deaths can be avoided, either by means of conflict resolution or transformation, or simply by means of conflict avoidance. By starting with this criterion the article will argue that ASEAN peacefulness cannot be explained by durable objective conditions. Instead, it is built on imagined realities. The imagined realities of the ASEAN Way are getting more difficult to sustain due to their interaction with material and normative/institutional developments. Many of the constructed foundations of the ASEAN Way are unsustainable in the new realities where communication has become easy and uncontrollable, and societies have become wealthier and more democratized. However, the article will show that evidence of existing conflict violence suggests that ASEAN has started to reformulate its approach to conflict prevention and that this has largely been successful. Adapted from the source document.