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On Thursday, September 21, 2017 IPI held its fifth Ministerial Dinner on Peace Operations in its Trygve Lie Center for Peace, Security, and Development. The dinner was attended by foreign and defense ministers, a United Nations senior official, and former members of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), who discussed the recent debates on the reform of peacekeeping operations and adoption of Security Council Resolution 2378, as well as the broader reforms proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres.

The event was chaired by Terje Rød-Larsen, President of IPI, and co-hosted by Finland, Uruguay, Indonesia and Rwanda, represented respectively by Timo Soini, Finland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs; Enrique Loedel, Uruguay’s Vice-Minister of Political Affairs; Dian Triansyah Djani, Indonesian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and Valentine Rugwabiza, Rwanda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Member of the Cabinet.

In a roundtable debate, conducted under the Chatham House rule of non-attribution, attendees had an open discussion on the most pressing issues confronting contemporary UN peace operations, while taking into account the recommendations contained in the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) and the reforms proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres.

The discussion began with Arthur Boutellis, Director of the Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations at IPI, briefly presenting the (forthcoming) IPI Peace Operations Reform Scorecard 2017, which analyzes the implementation of the recommendations from the HIPPO.

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, presented some of the progress made and challenges remaining on peace operations reform, and how the reforms proposed by Secretary-General António Guterres will help address some of the latter.

The ensuing discussion stressed the importance of political strategies guiding peace operations, the need to increase women’s participation in peacekeeping and in peace processes, the need to further institutionalize consultations with troop-contributing countries during the mandating process, and the importance of regional partnerships (especially the African Union). Many also emphasized the importance of training, performance and accountability, and for a change in mindset to accompany the reforms proposed by the Secretary-General. Member states represented included Korea, Italy, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Croatia, Namibia, Norway, Sweden, Ghana, Japan, Estonia, France, Mexico, Netherlands, Turkey, Nigeria, Argentina, Azerbaijan and the Slovak Republic.

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Joan M. Larrea, The Chief Executive Officer of Convergence, said that when she was first asked to participate in conversations about how business interacts with peace processes, she thought everyone knew that peace is good for business, “and I also thought it was obvious that business is good for peace.”

“But,” she said, “apparently it’s not that obvious to all parties, hence this report.”

Her reference was to the report “A New Way of Doing Business: Partnering for Peace and Sustainable Development,” a collaboration between IPI, the Sustainable Development Goals Fund and Concordia, and the focus of a September 21st IPI policy forum on “Changing the ‘Business as Usual’ Model: A New Way to Partner for Peace and the 2030 Agenda,” sponsored by the same three organizations.

“We’re long past everybody thinking of business as a rapacious race to the bottom,” Ms. Larrea told the forum. “Economic growth is a prerequisite for peace, and economic growth comes from business, it comes from companies, it comes from investment. So for me the link is obvious.” With emphasis, she concluded, “Peace is really good for business, but business is really, really good for peace.”

Terje Rød-Larsen, President of IPI, said the institute had decided to explore the linkages as part of its research into applying the Sustainable Development Goals “because without business, implementation of the SDGs is not possible. In the end the UN needs the business community, and vice-versa.”

Matthew Swift, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Concordia, said his organization felt there was a need for translating the public and private sectors to each other.

“Those sectors speak very different languages, but as an institute that focuses on what public-private sector cooperation can achieve, it’s important to get both on the same page,” he said. “And the SDGs do a very nice job communicating to CEOs around the world ways in which they can follow this framework of the seventeen goals towards both changing the way they do business but also thinking about the role the private sector has in various communities.”

Paloma Durán, Director of the SGD Fund, said putting into effect these synergies in the context of the UN presented a particular set of challenges.

“How to engage the private sector, keeping in mind that the private sector is not one homogenous actor and there are different sizes, different regions with different practices,’ she said. She also emphasized that businesses needed to be responsible partners and to incorporate the 2030 Agenda into their core business strategies and policies.

While it was important for the UN to engage big corporations with large resources, she said, “we need to work with small and medium-sized business; not because we want the private sector only as a donor, but because we want a real actor working with us.”

Peter van der Vliet, Director of Multilateral Organizations and Human Rights of the Netherlands, said he was encouraged by the opportunities for collaboration offered by the SDGs and by the growing interest of business in having an impact beyond simply making money. “Whether it’s big multinational corporations or small enterprises, the private sector is increasingly not only about making a profit,” he said. “And try to find one SDG where the private sector does not have an impact, just one. From goal one to goal seventeen, the role and conduct of business is crucial.”

Hedayetullah Al Mamoon, Senior Secretary in the Ministry of Finance of Bangladesh, said that “we should be careful about the difference between developed countries and developing countries because our private sector is not so strong.” He stressed that less developed countries need support to use and scale up innovative financial mechanisms to attract more private investments. The report highlights how new partnerships can be forged to finance the SDGs.

Mats Granryd, the Director-General of GSMA, the trade body that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide and is focused on leveraging broad-based technologies for sustainable development, said members of his group reached more than 5 billion people in their effort “to connect everyone and everything to a better future.”

“There’s no better way of describing that better future than the SDGs,” he said.

Tonye Cole, co-founder and Executive Director of the Sahara Group, said the SDGs had shaped a defining rationale for his business operations, particularly in Africa.

“The SDGs in themselves have created a tool,” he said, “a mechanism for business so we can look at ourselves and say we actually have a voice.”
“And now we can itemize them and say, ‘I do SDG five, I believe in SDG eight, I actually have for years been doing SDG one’,” he said. “Now businesses can actualize it and put words to it.”

To meet the scale and ambition of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the private sector will have to play a central role. The agenda provides a window of opportunity for the private sector, governments, the UN, and civil society to collaborate with each other through a new global partnership.

This report explores what is needed to make this new partnership a reality, including the steps that both the UN and the private sector need to take. It also seeks to understand how the private sector can contribute to achieving peace as both an enabler and an outcome of the 2030 Agenda. Finally, the report aims to address how to mitigate the risk companies face in investing in countries facing challenges in attracting private domestic and international investments.

The report offers a number of recommendations for the private sector, the UN, and governments to engage in new forms of collaboration:

• To make the 2030 Agenda’s call for a new global partnership a reality, businesses should embed the SDGs across their supply chains and in their core business strategies and improve reporting. The UN, governments, and businesses should all deepen their engagement with each other and in particular with small and medium enterprises. Engagement of the private sector should be based on the recognition that investing in the 2030 Agenda is not only good for people and the planet; it can also improve bottom lines.
• Businesses should take a sustaining peace approach to all operations and investments. They should assess not only how to avoid contributing to conflict but also how to support efforts to build and sustain peace, including by working closely with national governments, building trust with communities, engaging with local small and medium enterprises, and striving to be more inclusive in their own policies and practices.
• Lack of resources is not the main challenge to financing the 2030 Agenda. Achieving the agenda requires expanding the scale of projects related to its implementation and reducing the risks for greater private sector engagement. The UN, governments, and businesses should partner to scale up investments in countries that need it most through innovative, long-term, self-sustaining funding models and a wider diversity of investors.

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Speaking at the 10th annual Trygve Lie Symposium on Fundamental Freedoms at IPI, Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende said that religious minorities are the “most vulnerable people in the world” and that it was impossible to “separate freedom of religion from other civil rights like the rights to privacy and assembly and expression.”

The title of this year’s symposium, co-sponsored by IPI and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held on September 21, 2017, was “Promoting the Freedom of Religion or Belief,” and Mr. Brende noted that “collective religious hatred is not a natural phenomenon, it is man made.” Therefore, he argued, we have the power to end it, and “it is our moral obligation to work for a solution.”

Pointing out how widespread religious persecution is, IPI President Terje Rød-Larsen opened the meeting by noting that three quarters of the world’s population “still live in countries with high restrictions when it comes to freedom of religion or belief.”

Zeid bin Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that religious systems have been “among the roots of human rights law and International Humanitarian Law” and that he was convinced that “religious leaders with their considerable influence over the minds of millions can be consequential human rights actors in the world today.”

He added that religious minorities must be “free to fully participate in all areas of society, though it must be clear that they cannot impose their beliefs on others.”

Retno Marsudi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, noted that her country, the world’s largest Muslim nation, also was home to Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists and many other faiths. “Freedom of religion is in the DNA of Indonesia,” she said. “Tolerance is what holds us together as a nation.”

In a reference to the dangers of both Islamic fundamentalism and Islamophobia, she said, “Religious extremism has falsely used religion to justify their inhuman policies and they abuse the guarantee of freedom of expression promised by democracy.”

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the British Minister of State for the Commonwealth and the UN, said the key to tackling extremism was resisting intolerance. “You must be intolerant of intolerance,” he said. “If we nip it in the bud, that intolerance will not rear its ugly head as discrimination, and that will not turn into persecution, and persecution will not turn into human suffering.”

Mark Lattimer, Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International, warned against treating religious identity as something separate from a human right.

“When we speak about freedom of religion and belief, it is not just about freedom to worship,” he said. “Those are vital rights, but if you look at the face of religious rights, what you see is targeted persecution based on religious identity.”

He said that “the individual right to freedom of religion and belief, the collective persecution on account of identity, the mobilization of communities for political purposes all are different phenomena with different solutions, and we need to be careful about abandoning human rights solutions in favor of others.”

Ulrik Vestergaard Knudsen, Denmark’s Permanent Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, reported that his government raised the issue of religious freedom in international meetings “as much as possible” and at home was about to create the new post of ambassador for religious minorities.

Norwegian parliamentarian Abid Raja said that the three-year-old International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief, of which he is a member, now had representatives in more than 65 countries and was growing.

Several speakers referred to persisting instances of religious persecution, particularly the forced expulsion of the Rohingya Muslim minority from Myanmar. In his comment, Mr. Borge said, “The fact that we are using the words ‘genocide’ and “ethnic cleansing’ to describe events unfolding in 2017, 70 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a disgrace.”

IPI President Terje Rød-Larsen moderated the discussion.

DIIS bidrager til fællesnordisk forskningsprojekt

Die Länder des Westbalkans kämpfen mit politischer Instabilität, schwachen Institutionen und Korruption. Einzig Kroatien etablierte sich bisher als Mitgliedsland der EU und der NATO und könnte ein Vorbild für andere Balkanstaaten sein.

Pres fra Tyrkiet og Iran kan hæmme varig stabilitet

Joining the debate on the role of President of Russia Vladimir Putin in international politics and the relations between Russia and the West, the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy publishes (in Greek) a relevant working paper written by Mr Alexandros Mpoufessis. You can access it here.

President XI Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, seeks to expand and secure maritime routes, road networks, railway and bridge infrastructure projects for China from Asia across Africa to the Middle East and Europe. The Chinese blueprint includes a mosaic of infrastructure investments, trade agreements, energy cooperation and establishing a financial footprint through extensive lending arrangements. The Balkan Silk Road initiative connects Beijing with Athens and establishes further infrastructure links with Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, Budapest, Tirana, Podgorica, etc.

Seen from a southeast European perspective, the BRI has major repercussions in countries as diverse as Greece, Serbia, FYR Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Port infrastructure, highway projects, high-speed railway links and thermal power plant renovation form the constituent elements of the BRI in southeast Europe.

The report – written by the independent economic analyst Dr. Jens Bastian – was commissioned by the EBRD in London. It was presented and subsequently made available as a public document on Thursday, 14. September 2017. On the invitation of the South-East Europe” and the “Asian Studies” Programmes of ELIAMEP, Dr. Jens Bastian presented the report at the Office of the European Parliament in Athens.

Prof. Loukas Tsoukalis, President of ELIAMEP, chaired the event.

Dr. Peter Sanfey, Deputy Director for Country Economics and Policy at the EBRD made introductory remarks.

Dr. Plamen Tonchev, Head of Asia Unit at the Institute of International Economic Relations (IIER), Athens  served as a discussant to Dr. Bastian’s report

ARI 73/2017 - 20/9/2017
Luciano Zaccara

¿Cuáles son los desafíos internos –de la Guardia Revolucionaria y las restricciones económicas– y externos –la nueva escalada saudí-estadounidense y la crisis en el Consejo de Cooperación del Golfo– que el reelecto presidente Hassan Rohaní afrontará en los próximos cuatro años?

Die Gemeinsame Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik (GASP) der Europäischen Union lebt. Zum großen Erstaunen vieler Beobachter lässt sich seit einigen Monaten eine stark erhöhte konzeptionelle und praktische Aktivität der GASP feststellen, vergleichbar nur mit den Neuerungen nach der Kosovo-Krise. In einer Rede vom Juni 2017 beschwor Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel den europäischen Geist und bekräftigte, dass Europa sich künftig nicht mehr allein auf andere verlassen könne. Überall in der europäischen Politik, wo es um außen-, sicherheits- und verteidigungspolitische Fragen geht, entstehen Institutionen, gründen sich politische Initiativen, wird gemeinsame Sicherheitsforschung angestoßen und werden neue Rechtsakte vorbereitet.

Wie aber ist diese Renaissance eines schon tot geglaubten Politikfeldes zu erklären? Welche rechtlichen und politischen Dynamiken tragen zu dieser Wiederbelebung bei? Festzuhalten ist unter anderem, dass die ehemals rein politischen Bereiche der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik zunehmend rechtlich überformt und in die europäische Rechtsgemeinschaft inkorporiert werden. Zudem wirkt der EuGH immer stärker daran mit, die alten Unterscheidungen zwischen politischer und rechtlicher Integration sowie innerer und äußerer Dimension der EU zu überwinden.

Am 21. August 2017 hat Präsident Trump auf dem Militärstützpunkt Fort Myer seine lange erwartete Strategie für Afghanistan und Südasien präsentiert. Der Anti-Terror-Kampf soll mit mehr Truppen und erweiterten Einsatzbefugnissen fortgeführt werden. Die Strategie beinhaltet, mehr Druck auf Pakistan auszuüben und von Indien mehr Engagement für den Aufbau Afghanistans zu fordern. Eine politische Verhandlungslösung für den Konflikt mit den Taliban ist nach Trump zwar nicht ausgeschlossen, steht aber nicht im Fokus der US-Afghanistanpolitik. Obwohl weder die innerafghanischen noch die internationalen Rahmenbedingungen derzeit für eine politische Verständigung mit den Taliban sprechen, sollten Deutschland und die EU weiter auf eine Verhandlungslösung hinwirken und die Reformprozesse der Regierung unterstützen.

Nach seiner Wahl zum US-Präsidenten behauptete Donald Trump, Mitbewerberin Hillary Clinton habe die Mehrheit der abgegebenen Stimmen nur erlangt, weil nicht Wahlberechtigte massenhaft gewählt hätten. Der Vorwurf des Wahlbetrugs wird in den USA seit Jahren benutzt, um die bürokratischen Hürden für eine Stimmabgabe zu erhöhen und bestimmte Bevölkerungsgruppen am Wählen zu hindern. Darüber hinaus gibt es weitere legale Tricks, um Ergebnisse zu beeinflussen. Republikaner wie Demokraten versuchen, den Zuschnitt von Wahlkreisen zum eigenen Vorteil festzulegen. Die Konsequenz sind politisch homogenere Bezirke, Erfolge für extremere Kandidaten und immer größere Abweichungen von einer proportionalen Repräsentation des Wählerwillens. Am 3. Oktober 2017 prüft der Oberste Gerichtshof in Washington, ob der parteipolitische Zuschnitt von Wahlkreisen erstmals beschränkt werden soll. Langfristig könnte sich der Kampf um die Wahlmodalitäten auf die Mehrheitsverhältnisse im Kongress auswirken.

Die koreanische Halbinsel steht in diesen Wochen mehr denn je im Fokus der globalen Aufmerksamkeit. Seitdem Kim Jong Un die Macht von seinem Vater übernommen hat, reiht der nordkoreanische Diktator einen Raketen- und Nukleartest an den nächsten. Die Nervosität in Ostasien wächst – die Weltgemeinschaft sucht nach einer Strategie. Über die Reaktionen auf die jüngeren Eskalationen und die Folgen für die Sicherheitslage in Ostasien berichten die Auslandsmitarbeiter der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung aus der Region und aus anderen Teilen der Welt. Ihre wichtigsten Beiträge finden sie auf dieser Seite.

Lundi 18 septembre 2017, Dominique Reynié a modéré la discussion sur le référendum de l’indépendance de la Catalogne entre Teresa Freixes, Professeur de Droit constitutionnel de l’Université Autónoma de Barcelone, Professeur Jean Monnet ad personam et présidente de Concordia Civica et Marti Anglada, Délégué du Gouvernement de la Catalogne en France.

Cet article Référendum sur l’indépendance de la Catalogne, pour ou contre ? est apparu en premier sur Fondapol.

Diverging conceptions of time, space and discourse

Key points and video from the DIIS seminar in the run-up to COP 23

Auf Einladung des Landrates des Landkreises Kelheim, Martin Neumeyer, besuchte eine Delegation des Demokratischen Forums der Deutschen in Rumänien (DFDR) Mitte September 2017 Kelheim und München. Die kommunalpolitischen Amts- und Mandatsträger sowie Mitglieder der Leitungsebene des DFDR interessierten sich besonders für Fragen der kommunalpolitischen Mitgestaltung. Sie trafen Gesprächspartner der Gemeinde- und Landkreisebene, den Bayerischen Staatsminister für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Forsten, Helmut Brunner, und Landtagsvizepräsidenten Reinhold Bocklet.

ARI 72/2017 - 19/9/2017
Carlos Malamud

La figura del vicepresidente no está bien definida en los sistemas políticos latinoamericanos, fuertemente presidencialistas. Esto los coloca en una situación de debilidad frente a los presidentes, como muestran los recientes casos de Ecuador y Uruguay.