Diplomacy & Defense Think Tank News

For two decades, the women, peace, and security agenda has been the subject of policy development internationally, regionally, and nationally. But by many indicators, the global status of these commitments to gender equality is under threat. In the multilateral system, a growing number of states are questioning established standards of women’s rights, while international policy and programming struggle to adapt to the gendered implications of the changing nature of conflict.

This issue brief takes stock of the state of the women, peace, and security agenda in the current geopolitical context, with a view to supporting strategic advances at the upcoming twentieth anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000). It looks at characteristics of the current geopolitical context that are of concern to the defense of women’s rights, what these changes have meant for how the international community seeks to build peace and improve security, and how we can evaluate approaches to implementing WPS commitments in relation to these pressures on the multilateral system.

The paper concludes that in order for the women, peace, and security agenda to be an effective tool, it must move beyond rhetoric and be woven into actionable policy. It must become a driving force behind the development and implementation of peace and security policy and programming rather than being buffeted by political considerations that elide the status and rights of women. This depends on a sustainable increase in resources and improved accountability within the multilateral system.

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Wie unterscheiden sich Geflüchtete in Bezug auf ihre Gesundheit? Und in welchem Zusammenhang stehen die Ungleichheiten in der Gesundheit mit ihren Lebensbedingungen und dem Gesundheitssystem? Diesen Fragen geht ab diesem Herbst für zunächst drei Jahre die Forschungsgruppe „Fluchtmigration nach Deutschland: ein „Vergrößerungsglas“ für umfassendere Herausforderungen im Bereich Public Health“ (PH-LENS) nach, zu der auch Jürgen Schupp, Vize-Direktor des SOEP, sowie Hannes Kröger, Post-Doc im SOEP, gehören. Im Teilprojekt „Longitudinal aspects of the interaction between health and integration of refugees in Germany (LARGE)“ entwickeln sie auf Grundlage der IAB-BAMF-SOEP-Stichprobe Geflüchteter ein Indikatorenset zur physischen und mentalen Gesundheit. Darüber hinaus untersuchen sie, welche Rolle diese Indikatoren im Laufe der Zeit für die Integration der Geflüchteten in die deutsche Gesellschaft spielen. Die beiden Sozialwissenschaftler nutzen dafür neben längsschnittlichen auch quasi-experimentelle Analysemethoden.

Die Einrichtung der Forschungsgruppe hat der Hauptausschuss der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) auf Empfehlung des Senats im Juli 2019 bewilligt. Das Teilprojekt wird ab 1. Oktober mit insgesamt 425.436 Euro gefördert.

Pressemitteilung der DFG zu den neu bewilligten DFG-Forschungsgruppen

PH-LENS mit allen Teilprojekten in der Projektedatenbank der DFG

On September 23rd, IPI, together with the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, cohosted a policy forum entitled “Picking up the Pieces in a Fractured World: Rebuilding Trust in Multilateralism for Peace and Security.”

Multilateral legal instruments and institutions have long been the hallmark of the international community’s approach to global issues. This has been true for issues such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, climate change, and countless others. In the field of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty embodies the ideal of multilateral, science-based verification in the interest of global peace and security. Yet the treaty’s fate remains uncertain because it still needs to be ratified by a number of nuclear-capable countries. The nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament regime also continues to face significant challenges more broadly. How can the international community come together to rebuild trust and strengthen faith in multilateralism to confront these and other global challenges, thereby securing a more peaceful and prosperous world for the next generation?

Speakers:
H.E. Ms. María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, President of the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly
Dr. Lassina Zerbo, Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO)

Moderator:
The Honorable Kevin Rudd, 26th Prime Minister of Australia; President, Asia Society Policy Institute; and Chairman, IPI Board of Directors

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On Sunday, September 22, 2019, IPI held its fourteenth Ministerial Dinner on the Middle East in its Trygve Lie Center for Peace, Security, and Development. The working dinner drew the participation of foreign ministers, United Nations officials, special representatives of the Secretary-General to countries in the region, heads of humanitarian agencies, and other high-level representatives from the Middle East and North Africa, Europe, and beyond.

The event was chaired by Terje Rød-Larsen, President of IPI, and co-hosted by the United Arab Emirates and Luxembourg, represented respectively by Anwar Mohammed Gargash, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, and Olivier Maes, Political Director, Luxembourg’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

In a roundtable conversation, conducted under the Chatham House rule of non-attribution, participants exchanged views on recent developments and long term trends in the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular focus on Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Central to the discussion was concern about rising tensions in the Gulf region after the recent attack on Saudi oil fields and the possible paths to de-escalation through diplomacy.

Attendees included the foreign ministers of Algeria, Cyprus, Finland, Iraq, Ireland, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Slovak Republic, Sweden, Tunisia, and Yemen; as well as Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, and Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdul Latif bin Rashid Al Zayani.

Also present were Ferid Belhaj, Vice President of the World Bank; Børge Brende, President of the World Economic Forum; Rosemary A. DiCarlo, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs; Thomas Greminger, Secretary General of the OSCE; Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq and Head of UNAMI; Pierre Krähenbühl, Commissioner-General of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; Ján Kubiš, Special Coordinator for Lebanon; Robert Malley, President and CEO of the International Crisis Group;  Peter Maurer, President of the ICRC; Nickolay Mladenov, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Personal Representative of the Secretary-General to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority; Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy;  Amr Moussa, Former Secretary General of the League of Arab States; Ghassan Salamé, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of UNSMIL.

Evidence from northern Somalia

Briefing Paper examines port investments in Berbera, Somaliland

International conference at DIIS, December 13-14, 2018

Das von der Koalition beschlossene Klimapaket kommentiert Karsten Neuhoff, Leiter der Abteilung Klimapolitik am DIW Berlin, wie folgt:

Das nun von der Koalition beschlossene Klimapaket ist ein wichtiger erster Schritt. Das Paket beinhaltet Anreize für klimafreundliche Investitionen durch einen, wenn auch recht langsamen, Einstieg in die CO2-Bepreisung für Gebäudewärme und Verkehr. Die Anreize werden kombiniert mit einem notwendigen Maßnahmenpaket, zum Beispiel für energetische Gebäudesanierungen oder die Förderung des öffentlichen Personenverkehrs. Die konkrete Umsetzung wirft sicher noch Fragen auf. Werden einzelne Maßnahmen einer energetischen Gebäudesanierung auch aufeinander abgestimmt? Werden also zum Beispiel beim steuerlich geförderten Fenstertausch die Fenster so eingebaut, dass später die Wände auch gedämmt werden können? Ohne diese Kopplung, zum Beispiel durch einen verpflichtenden Sanierungsfahrplan, wird es schwer, die Klimaziele für 2050 zu erreichen. Ebenfalls erschwerend wäre es, wenn der Vorschlag umgesetzt wird, dass alle Windanlagen mindestens einen Kilometer von Wohngebieten entfernt sein müssen. Auch wenn es für die Bundesländer Möglichkeiten gibt, diese Regelung zu umgehen, erschwert solch eine Vorgabe das Erreichen des Ziels, den Anteil der Erneuerbaren Energien auf 65 Prozent auszubauen. Die sicherlich größte Verbesserung besteht in der klaren Definition von Emissionspfaden für jeden Sektor und der Schaffung eines unabhängigen Gremiums für die jährliche Überprüfung des Fortschrittes in den einzelnen Sektoren wie Verkehr und Gebäude. So kann jedes Ministerium seine Erfolge präsentieren und bei Bedarf nachsteuern. Das jetzt als permanente Institution etablierte Klimaschutzkabinett bietet dabei Flexibilität für den Austausch und die Koordination zwischen den Sektoren.

Everyday justice: religion, social harmony, and armed groups

Fører konflikten med Iran til fredsforhandlinger, åben krig eller bare mere af det samme?

Event Video: 
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There has been a 25% reduction in United Nations peacekeeping troops since 2014, and while that is “largely a story of success,” the future will be more complicated, said Jake Sherman, Director of the IPI Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations. Five years ago, the UN had 16 peacekeeping missions, 127,000 uniformed authorized personnel, more than 22,000 civilians, and budget of nearly eight billion dollars. Since then, he explained, peacekeeping has entered a period of consolidation.

Such peace operations transitions were the subject of a September 18th policy forum at IPI co-hosted with the Permanent Mission of Germany to the UN. Panelists discussed lessons learned from recent transitions in Liberia, Haiti, and Côte d’Ivoire. They also addressed political and operational considerations for strengthening upcoming transitions in Darfur, Guinea-Bissau, and other missions.

The next wave of peacekeeping transitions “will likely grapple with unfinished political settlements, continued protection challenges, huge geographic territories with limited state presence, and weak host-state consent to the UN’s presence,” said Mr. Sherman. He pointed to IPI’s ongoing transition project, which “aims to provide forward-looking lessons for the UN about how to better manage these complex processes” that will be applicable to the remaining 13 active missions.

IPI Policy Analyst Daniel Forti, opened the discussion by explaining how, “At their core, UN peace operations transitions are about reconfiguring how the UN engages national actors on the country’s peacebuilding, development, and security priorities.” He emphasized that “transitions don’t just begin when the UN Security Council sets a final withdrawal deadline, nor do they conclude when the last peacekeeper leaves the country. Instead, transitions are multi-year processes that require sustained political, security, and programmatic engagements. “In this light,” he noted, “transitions are one of the few processes that bring together the entire UN system, with its peace and security, development, and human rights arms all playing important roles.”

Mr. Forti shared key takeaways from the reports, which included the need for shared and long-term political strategies for transitions, as well as strategic communications between the UN and host communities. He stressed the need for early UN engagement to secure adequate financing, as well as the importance of strengthening peacekeeping partnerships and capacities for transition-related support. He also highlighted the value of field-level planning strategies to guide transition processes.

Rania Dagash, Chief of the Policy and Best Practices Service in the UN Department of Peace Operations, focused on the challenges that transitions generally face and what her department has learned through those mission departures. “Transitions are fundamentally political processes,” she said, “but we often deal with them as technical processes.” She mentioned, as well, that “human aspects of the transitions,” referring to peacekeeping staff, as well as interaction with the host countries, must not be overlooked. Another objective, she noted, was sustaining political engagement after the transition of a UN operation and the withdrawal of a large mission.

Ms. Dagash pointed to the importance of safeguarding the space for peacebuilding as UN leverage decreases during this period of waning support for multilateralism. She focused as well on the lack of resources and funding for peacebuilding activities, and how this has posed a challenge in host countries after a transition. “When the UN leaves,” she pointed out, “the money leaves with it.” This compounds the risk of relapse into conflict, which is a real threat in some of the countries. She argued, “We can design and plan our transitions better.”

Taija Kontinen-Sharp, Chief of Staff in the Office of the Assistant Secretary-General for Development Coordination, cited the “universality” of the Sustainable Development Goals as an “anchor to the broader conversation about peace and development” in the context of transitions. She asked, “How do we sustain peace in places such as Haiti where many of the issues at the heart of it are sustainability and development issues?” Confronting these issues, she said, required joint planning and a “vision of a broader trajectory for peace and development in a country.”

Ms. Kontinen-Sharp cautioned against thinking of mission drawdowns and closure as the end of the UN presence in a country. Instead, she said, “We’re not talking about a new face, but a different kind of configuration and UN support for the country.” But, she said, “we need to do joint analysis better, and that needs to be our entry point.” She mentioned Haiti as a good example of joint planning where the UN country team and peacekeeping mission “were working together from day one to see where do we want to land” and “how does the mission look in the context of the development agenda?”

She explained that the UN Development Coordination Office was now “thinking through programmatic responses in a transition context,” and discussing drawdown processes and logistics. She emphasized the need to “make sure that we have a very clear programmatic transition.” Resident Coordinators once were responsible for UN Development Program management, which occupied fifty to sixty percent of their time, said Ms. Kontinen-Sharp. So the delinking of the Resident Coordinator system from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) provided UNDP with more time to invest in development coordination and system leadership, she explained, which is a “commodity that the system didn’t have previously.”

“In my own view,” said Ms. Kontinen-Sharp, “We’ve gone a long way in terms of coming together at the UN community, across technical pillars in working on transitions.” She said she would be interested to see whether there could be more conversations around transitions in the UN Economic and Social Council to complement those taking place in the Security Council (ECOSOC).

Lesley Connolly, Global Peacebuilding Policy Advisor at the Life and Peace Institute, spoke on the case of Liberia and what could be learned from the closure, in March 2018, of the UN mission in Liberia (UNMIL), which then transitioned to a UN country team. UNMIL, she explained, was one of the most successful peace operation transitions and implementations of the secretary-general’s Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace Framework.

UNMIL’s transition encompassed a military drawdown process that ended in June 2016, and was then followed by a civil drawdown and reconfiguration that lasted through March 2018 and marked the end of the mission. “The challenge, however, is that disproportionate amounts of attention were given to security and military transition versus the civilian transition,” Ms. Connolly said. This, she noted, “placed significant planning burdens on the mission and the UN country team to address rapidly what should be long-term processes.”

Ms. Connolly emphasized that transitions need to be aligned with external changes in a country. She determined that Liberia underwent a “Triple Transition,” in that the country was not only shifting from a UN Peacekeeping Operation to a UN country team, but that the Liberian government itself was undergoing a transition. Meanwhile, the UN development system reform was taking place, and Liberia was the first country implementing this new model. Its first post-conflict democratic transition took place following elections at the end of 2017. She said that the full implications of all this would not be felt “for a long time.”

The final recommendation she addressed was that after a transition, it is necessary to give sustained attention to the country’s new needs, in the context of the mission’s departure, adding that the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) is one example of a valuable tool for this support.

She concluded, “Transitions are multi-year processes that require sustained political, security, and programmatic engagements from the whole UN. Focusing on long-term planning for the transition process from an early stage is vital. The transition needs to be driven by analysis on the ground, and rooted in the realities of capacities and political dynamics.”

Gunnar Berkemeier, First Secretary at the Permanent Mission of Germany to the UN, spoke on the role that Germany had played in peace operations transitions during the country’s time on the Security Council. The key lesson, he said, was that “transitions are inherently political.” He pointed out the juxtaposition that many topics and discussions in the Security Council have very long and systematic processes, but that the Council needs to be flexible, at times, to adapt to present realities. He gave the example that in the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), “the majority of the Council thought that we were in a clear drawdown situation and ready for transition, but election results were unexpected, and the UN needed to react and adapt.”

Mr. Berkemeier said that benchmarks for withdrawal, such as elections, will never give the answer of whether it is a good or bad time to withdraw. “In the end, it will be a political decision and a political discussion about whether and when” to transition. He concluded by explaining that the Peacebuilding Fund is an important tool in aiding peacekeeping transitions, but that it cannot be the only tool. Transition support requires, in addition, he said, action from the Fifth (budgetary) Committee of the UN, because, “transitions are never the time to be stingy.”

The event was moderated by Mr. Forti.

Zusammenfassung:

Daten des European Institute for Gender Equality ausgewertet – Frauenanteil in höchsten Kontroll- beziehungsweise Entscheidungsgremien ist in europäischen Ländern mit Geschlechterquoten und harten Sanktionen auf knapp 40 Prozent gestiegen – Entwicklung in Ländern mit moderaten Sanktionen wie Deutschland deutlich langsamer – Freiwillige Selbstverpflichtungen helfen fast gar nicht

Von freiwilligen Selbstverpflichtungen zur Erhöhung des Frauenanteils in Spitzengremien der Privatwirtschaft oder sanktionslosen Geschlechterquoten ist wenig zu erwarten. Das ist das zentrale Ergebnis einer aktuellen Analyse des Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW Berlin). Demnach ist der Erfolg einer Geschlechterquote eindeutig damit verbunden, wie genau diese ausgestaltet ist. Drohen den Unternehmen bei Nichteinhaltung der Quote harte Sanktionen, wie beispielsweise in Norwegen die Zwangsauflösung oder hohe Geldstrafen, steigt der Frauenanteil deutlich stärker als in Ländern mit moderaten Sanktionen wie Deutschland. Eine völlig sanktionslose Quote ist derweil immer noch wirkungsvoller als gar keine Quote oder eine bloße Empfehlung zur freiwilligen Erhöhung des Frauenanteils.

Zusammenfassung:

Analyse der Mietmarktregulierung der vergangenen 100 Jahre in 27 Ländern – Je strenger reguliert der Mietmarkt, desto mehr Haushalte legen sich ein eigenes Heim zu – Regulierung, die Mieterhaushalte schützen soll, führt dazu, dass das Angebot an Mietwohnungen schrumpft – Aktuell angedachte Regulierungsmaßnahmen dürfen Interessen von Investoren und VermieterInnen nicht außer Acht lassen

Dank eines neuen, historischen Datensatzes analysiert eine Studie des Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW Berlin) den Zusammenhang zwischen der Regulierung des Mietmarkts und der Eigenheimquote in 27 Ländern der OECD über einen Zeitraum von 100 Jahren. Zentrales Ergebnis: Je strenger der Mietmarkt reguliert wird, desto mehr steigt der Anteil der Haushalte, die im eigenen Heim leben. Dieser Befund gilt unabhängig von den Faktoren, die den Anstieg der Eigenheimquote in allen untersuchten Ländern in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten grundsätzlich begünstigt haben, zum Beispiel die Alterung der Gesellschaft und die Liberalisierung der Finanzmärkte.

Men en fællesnordisk Ruslandspolitik er urealistisk

Men en fællesnordisk Ruslandspolitik er urealistisk