Diplomacy & Defense Think Tank News

DIIS Podcast stiller skarpt på Europas nye forsvarsalliancer og diskuterer, hvilke visioner, der er for sikkerhedssamarbejde i Europa - og hvilke danske dilemmaer, det rejser

US paleoconservatism and ideological challenges to the liberal world order

international theory and the new right

Depuis plusieurs semaines dans le débat public, la question de la suppression de l’école nationale d’administration (ENA) est de plus en plus présente. Paradoxal, pour une école qui ne forme qu’une quarantaine de jeunes femmes et hommes aux métiers de la haute administration publique chaque année. Symbole de la particularité de l’administration française, “l’école du pouvoir” qui forme les élites gouvernantes depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale…

Saskia Gamradt 2019-05-23T06:30:00Z

Saskia Gamradt 2019-05-23T06:00:00Z

Federico Steinberg. Comentario Elcano 15/2019 - 23/5/2019

Cada vez parece más claro que el mundo está volviendo rápidamente al juego imperial, donde las reglas globales se olvidan, los nuevos imperios dictan sus normas en sus áreas de influencia y los países pequeños se someten.

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Twenty years ago, the United Nations Security Council established the first explicit Protection of Civilians (POC) mandate, resolving that the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.

On May 22nd, during the week in which the Security Council held its annual POC open debate, IPI, in partnership with the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and the Permanent Missions of the Netherlands and of Uruguay to the UN, held a policy forum taking stock of these two decades of direct attention to POC in peacekeeping operations. The event provided an opportunity to explore the progress made and the reforms that are still needed to ensure the protection of local populations relying on peacekeepers.

“We know that peace operations have striven to do more to protect, but they are also facing many challenges,” said IPI Senior Fellow Dr. Namie Di Razza. “Peacekeepers are being asked to do more with less…and a number of reviews have highlighted persistent shortcomings and a general lack of accountability for POC.”

Since 1999, 14 missions have been mandated to protect civilians from physical violence, and today eight of the fourteen active UN peacekeeping operations have a POC mandate, constituting the vast majority of civilian and uniformed personnel deployed to these operations around the world.

Speaking to the centrality of POC to peacekeeping, Jean-Pierre LaCroix, UN Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping Operations, said, “I would argue that all peacekeeping operations, whatever the mandate, ultimately are about the protection of civilians…POC, in addition to being one of the greatest achievements of peacekeeping, is probably our greatest challenge as well.”

In meeting that challenge, he said, one had to be conscious of the outside expectations and the inside limitations. “We are never able to put peacekeepers in every village, in every location, in every place where civilians are under threat,” he said. “But by being deployed, we create and raise expectations to a level that is very difficult to meet in practice.”

He said that peacekeeping missions had developed a number of tools to acquire the “situational awareness” necessary for advancing the protection agenda in peacekeeping environments. “We engage better with local communities to have better information to be able to better deter, prevent, and preempt threats, and making sure that we can, if needed, react before these threats come to the civilian population,” he said.

Karel Van Oosterom, the Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the UN, listed ten points that he said reflected that “we have to do more.” Among them were the need to internalize POC as standard operating procedure, to improve and expand the training of peacekeepers in protecting civilians, and to make sure that the host country takes primary responsibility. He also stressed that resources had to be sufficient to make POC an “achievable result.”

David Gressly, Deputy Special Representative for Operations and the Rule of Law, UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), spoke of the successive generations of POC practice. He stressed the importance of telecommunications in “reinforcing the intelligence architecture” so peacekeepers can track threats before they develop into armed conflict. He particularly stressed the innovations pursued by the peacekeeping mission in the DRC, where 65 community alert networks were established, and cover more than 900 communities. He explained the value of protection through presence and projection, as “showing up and being there…[causes] an immediate freezing of the situation.” He added, “We need to end the conflict, that’s the ultimate protection.”

Bintou Keita, Assistant Secretary-General for Africa, UN Departments of Peace Operations and Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, said that including women was a crucial element of protection of civilians activities. To illustrate the point, she told a story about her work for the peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) that was suddenly overwhelmed by thousands of internally displaced persons, most of whom were women and children. “On the day when we arrived, we came to a place where it was important for women to be there,” she said. “Most of the peacekeepers were men, they could not go and engage and see within the site what was happening with women because they had to protect their privacy.”

It was also a situation that required the attention of humanitarian workers, and Ms. Keita said, “Another aspect of protection is having all humanitarians and all components of the mission in one meeting.”

The importance of having women involved in POC also figured in the remarks of Lieutenant Commander Marcia Braga, former Military Protection of Civilians and Gender Adviser, UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA). “When I have female peacekeepers, it’s a little bit easier to talk about the special needs of different groups. Our presence is less offensive, and we can approach the local population, which is very important.” Having this kind of engagement with the local population built up the level of acceptance by them and made it easier for the peacekeepers to protect them, she said.

Alison Giffen, Director, Peacekeeping Center for Civilians in Conflict, lamented that international enthusiasm for peacekeeping was declining and warned against shortchanging peacekeepers. “If we’re going to issue mandates to protect civilians, we have to give them the means,” she said. “That’s not just the trained troops and civilian personnel. It’s not just the capabilities and the enablers. It is the financial cost of peacekeeping. Protecting civilians has a cost. It is an investment worth making.”

In concluding remarks, Elbio Rosselli, Permanent Representative of Uruguay to the UN, commented, “We also have to remember that armed protection is not necessarily the only way of protecting civilians. Unarmed methods are incredibly effective.”

Jake Sherman, Director of IPI’s Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations, made welcoming remarks, and Ms. Di Razza moderated the discussion

L’avenir de l’Europe passe-t-il par le retour des frontières ? Emmanuel Macron a accordé un long entretien à neuf journalistes de la presse régionale. Parmi ses propositions, on trouve la mise en place d’une « convention refondatrice » et d’un nouveau pacte entre États européens. Il a également affirmé vouloir reconstituer l’espace Schengen dans sa globalité. Il […]

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The most recent round of fighting that erupted in Libya in April, even as a national conference to find elements of consensus in the country was imminent, threatens to widen into an enduring civil war unless the international community acts now to halt it, said Ghassan Salamé, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL).

“I believe this conflict, left to itself, can only deteriorate and expand, and can lead to a true civil war,” he said.

He urged the international community to “not only contain this conflict,” arguing that letting it continue would have consequences throughout the region.  “Leaving this conflict festering before us is a danger for the Libyans first, but also for their neighbors and for peace and security throughout the region,” he said.

He was speaking at a May 22nd IPI “Leading for Peace: Voices from the Field” event a day after warning the UN Security Council that the ongoing battle mounted by renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar and the factional Libyan National Army was “just the start of a long and bloody war.” More than 75,000 people have been driven from their homes in the fighting, and 510 have been killed, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

General Haftar launched the offensive against the internationally and UN-recognized Government of National Accord on April 4th, and though he has covered lots of ground across the vast country, the effort to capture the capital, Tripoli, has stalled, and there is a military stalemate. “The frontline hasn’t changed an inch in the past month,” Mr. Salamé said.

Though Gen. Haftar has not succeeded in advancing further, he still stands in the way of any settlement, Mr. Salamé said. “If you are looking for a peace formula, you cannot ignore somebody who is not in control but who is to a large extent the largest influence over 75 percent of territory…and 70-75 percent of the oil fields. You cannot say, ‘He does not exist, I do not want to deal with him.’”

Mr. Salamé, a seasoned UN official who has been a professor of international relations at Sciences Po and is the founding dean of its Paris School of International Affairs, lamented what he said was an excessively cynical outside view of the Libyan conflict. “The way people see Libya is more concentrated on Libya as a prize for the shrewdest, the strongest, the most patient and very much less Libya as a country of 6, 7 million people who deserve a decent life after four decades of dictatorship and a decade of chaos. There is not enough of a moral motivation to put an end to this war, and therefore there is less of a political predisposition to take the extra mile to find a solution.”

He suggested this attitude had affected Security Council thinking. “I am not sure that some leading countries in the Security Council are aware enough of the risks they are taking by allowing the conflict to fester,” he said. “This particular conflict can transform, it could mutate in way that we could in a few months truly regret that we did not stop it in time.”

He said that UN credibility had also been put at stake by highly publicized recent breaches of the UN arms embargo, violations that used to be done “quietly, discreetly” but are now boasted about as evidence of armed strength. “The Security Council members should know that the Security Council is not taken seriously when the violations are so blatant and exhibitionist,” he said.

The blunt-spoken Lebanese diplomat noted that Libya, with its oil riches, did not have to rely on outsiders to finance war within its borders. “The truth is that Libya can pay for its own suicide,” he said. “They are committing suicide with their own money. You do not need external fuel for this war…This country is producing 1.2 million barrels of oil a day. This is big money. The country is very wealthy…The conflict does not depend on financial transfers from outside.”

For that reason, he said “if you want a textbook case for a war on resources and how it can turn extremely vicious, Libya is your example.”

The national conference that Mr. Salamé had been organizing since assuming his current post in 2017 was to have taken place on April 14th and 15th. It has been indefinitely postponed because of the conflict.

But on a positive note, he said the UN has had success introducing “political fluidity” in local areas, holding elections in 28 large cities and promising to conduct more regardless of the pressures of the conflict. “We will continue to do as much as we can in these municipal elections between now and the end of the year, whatever happens to the war itself,” he said.

The discussion was moderated by IPI Vice President Adam Lupel.

Related coverage:
Al Jazeera: UN envoy: ‘Libya a textbook example of foreign intervention’
The Guardian: UN envoy attacks lack of ‘moral motivation’ to end Libyan war

Europa-Parlamentet har strammet reglerne for, hvordan man kan danne en politisk gruppe i parlamentet. Det kan især ramme de nye højrepopulistiske bevægelser. Det er et tiltag, der er taget ud af den militant demokratiske værktøjskasse, skabt efter Anden Verdenskrig for at bekæmpe antidemokrater. Men skal populisterne stækkes via regulativer og bestemmelser snarere end gennem en åben politisk kamp med argumenter og mobilisering?

La Fondation pour l’innovation politique, a publié une étude sur l’état de nos démocraties. Elle a été menée dans 42 pays avec un think tank américain et brésilien. Que révèle-t-elle ? Autre sujet : Eléctions européennes, l’Europe est-elle en danger ? Dominique Reynié, directeur général de la Fondation pour l’innovation politique, invité par Hedwige Chevrillon […]

The post Quid de l’état de nos démocraties ? appeared first on Fondapol.

Lundi 13 mai, l’Institut Montaigne a réuni François-Xavier Bellamy, candidat Les Républicains et Nathalie Loiseau, candidate La République en Marche aux élections européennes, pour un débat. Les échanges, modérés par Dominique Seux, directeur délégué de la rédaction des Echos, ont permis de souligner les points communs et divergences entre les deux personnalités.

Les deux candidats ont notamment exposé leur vision de la…

Dans son dernier rapport Système de santé : soyez consultés !, l’Institut Montaigne émet dix propositions concernant la mise en place d’indicateurs de qualité pour notre système de soins. Les indicateurs de qualité, et notamment les indicateurs de résultats, sont indispensables pour permettre une bonne évaluation des soins prodigués et une meilleure…

When talking about health risks in developing countries, many people think of events such as the Ebola virus epidemic in 2014 and 2015 in West Africa. The effects of trade in falsified and substandard medicines are far less known. Developing countries are particularly affected since they are easy targets for the illegal trade due to insufficient regulations and controls as well as limited access to health care. The health and (socio-)economic consequences are severe. Moreover, criminal net­works make large profits, usually without having to fear any significant punishment. The German government can push for a stronger focus on the issue at the World Health Assembly in May 2019. Germany’s bilateral engagement should, above all, support developing countries in making drug supply chains safer.

Mardi 21 mai, un échange a été organisé autour de Guillaume Pepy (Président du directoire de la SNCF) et Benjamin Smith (Directeur général d'Air France-KLM). Ces derniers ont pu partager leurs regards sur l'évolution de leurs entreprises respectives dans un contexte de révolution de la mobilité et des transports. La discussion a également porté sur les questions liées notamment aux challenges environnementaux auxquels font face leurs industries.

La Fondation pour l’innovation politique publie ses projections des résultats des élections européennes de mai 2019. Les projections ont été réalisées par la fondation (le 15 mai 2019) à partir des enquêtes cumulées des intentions de vote, réalisées et publiées dans chacun des 28 pays de l’Union européenne.

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Tandis qu’au sein des vingt-huit Etats membres la campagne pour les élections européennes bat son plein, les principaux candidats pour le poste de Président de la Commission européenne se sont opposés à trois reprises, à l’occasion de débats télévisés. Ceux que l’on appelle désormais les Spitzenkandidaten ont ainsi pu défendre les programmes politiques des groupes parlementaires qu’ils représentent. Morgan Guérin, spécialiste des questions européennes…

Saskia Gamradt 2019-05-21T08:51:00Z