Search

Begin New Search Publishing Institution Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Author Alyson J. K. Bailes

1. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Author:
Pan Guang, Mikhail Troitskiy, Pál Dunay, and Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
05-2007
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
Established in 2001 with China, the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as members, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has remained one of the world's least-known and least-analysed multilateral groups. It makes little effort itself for transparency and is only patchily institutionalized in any case. Such useful research materials as are available on it are often in Chinese or Russian. Outside its participant countries, the SCO has attracted mainly sceptical and negative comment: some questioning whether it has anything more than symbolic substance, others criticizing the lack of democratic credentials of its members and questioning the legitimacy of their various policies. These points have been made especially strongly by commentators in the United States following the inclusion of Iran—along with India, Pakistan and Mongolia—as an SCO observer state and hints that it may attain full membership.
Topic:
International Cooperation and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Shanghai, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan

2. Regionalism in South Asian Diplomacy

Author:
John Gooneratne, Mavara Inayat, Jamshed Ayaz Khan, Swaran Singh, and Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
02-2007
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
In any survey of present-day regional cooperation, South Asia is liable to be cited as one of the problem cases. The dominant strategic feature of the region is the tension and rivalry between India and Pakistan, two powers that have more than once gone to war or to the verge of war and that now have nuclear weapons. Unlike the East–West confrontation of cold war times, this confrontation has not (yet) led to more than a few fragmentary elements of a larger structure of confidence building and conflict avoidance. Even this major challenge is only one of the difficulties in the way of a non-zero-sum multilateral security order for the region. The discrepancy of size and power between India, a nation of over 1 billion people, and all its neighbours leads to natural concerns among the latter about India's dominance in the region and potential interference in their affairs. At different times this has been a significant strand in the policy thinking of states such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka and has led them to seek security assistance first and foremost from outside South Asia when they need it.
Topic:
International Relations, International Cooperation, and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Asia, India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal

3. The European Security Strategy: An Evolutionary History

Author:
Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
The adoption by the European Union (EU) of its first official and comprehensive security strategy—'A Secure Europe in a Better World'—in 20031 may be seen (aside from any practical results it leads to) as a conceptual and procedural turning point in the development of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Set against its specific political background, it was also an important stage in the developing self-awareness and ambition of the EU as a player in the global arena.
Topic:
Security and Defense Policy
Political Geography:
Europe

4. The European Security Strategy: An Evolutionary History

Author:
Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
The adoption by the European Union (EU) of its first official and comprehensive security strategy—'A Secure Europe in a Better World'—in 2003 may be seen (aside from any practical results it leads to) as a conceptual and procedural turning point in the development of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Set against its specific political background, it was also an important stage in the developing self-awareness and ambition of the EU as a player in the global arena. The European Security Strategy (ESS) has already attracted perhaps more than its fair share of exegesis, comment and debate. Too often, however, it has been treated almost in the style of literary criticism, divorced from its historical, institutional and short-term political context. This Policy Paper illuminates the latter dimensions of the document's significance and lays out a framework for considering and monitoring its future impact.
Topic:
Security and Defense Policy
Political Geography:
Europe

5. Armament and Disarmament in the Caucasus and Central Asia

Author:
Zdzislaw Lachowski, Björn Hagelin, Sam Perlo-Freeman, Petter Stålenheim, Dmitri Trofimov, and Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
07-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
The international attention paid to the nations of the South Caucasus region and Central Asia—a group of post-Soviet states beyond Europe's conventional frontiers but included in the Conference on/Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE/OSCE)—has been fitful at best over the past decade. During the last years of the 20th and at the start of the 21st century, after the conflicts in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh became (at least partly) 'frozen', security concerns about the regions tended to decline and to become overshadowed both by 'oil diplomacy' and by concern about developments within Russia itself, in Chechnya and Dagestan. In 2002–2003 a constellation of changes in the outside world has started to reverse this pattern. Chechnya is no longer a regular topic of high-level political debate between Russia and the West, and President Vladimir Putin has played the anti-terrorist card with some success to secure his freedom to deal with it as an internal security matter. The factors prompting greater international attention to Russia's south-western and southern neighbours, by contrast, have the potential to undermine—perhaps for good—any Russian pretension to decisive influence or an exclusive droit de regard in these regions. At the time of writing, however, this latest shift could again be called in question by a new diversion of focus to the 'greater Middle East' following hostilities in Iraq.
Topic:
Defense Policy and Arms Control and Proliferation
Political Geography:
Russia, Iraq, Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, Middle East, Chechnya, and Georgia

6. Relics of Cold War: Europe's Challenge, Ukraine's Experience

Author:
Oleksiy Melnyk, Ian Anthony, and Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
11-2003
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
In 1989, the year when the death knell sounded for the Communist bloc in Europe and for the 'cold war' which it had pursued with the West, a total of 6–7.6 million personnel depending on the method of counting (2.5–3.7 million from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, and 3.5–3.9 million from the Warsaw Treaty Organization, WTO) stood in arms within the European theatre. This included some 915 000 forces stationed outside their national borders inter alia from Canada, the Soviet Union and the United States. In the same area there were 80 400 main battle tanks, 76 300 armoured combat vehicles (ACVs), 67 700 heavy artillery pieces, 11 160 combat aircraft and 2615 attack helicopters—as well as many millions of smaller and lighter weapons. Aimed at each other as part of the East–West strategic confrontation, the USA and the USSR in 1990 deployed 10 563 and 10 271 strategic nuclear warheads respectively, while the United Kingdom possessed 300 and France 621. In addition, significant proportions of European territory (especially in the 'front-line' states such as the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, GDR) were taken up by military bases, exercise areas and other facilities such as airfields and pipelines. Large sectors of industry and of scientific, technological, and research and development (R) work were devoted to the needs of military defence. The resources involved were shut out from peaceful, civilian use more emphatically than would normally be the case today, because the bitterness of the strategic confrontation—and the associated risks of espionage and subversion—imposed a degree of secrecy often creating a situation where the citizens of a given state did not know what was happening on their own territory.
Topic:
NATO, Politics, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

7. Armament and Disarmament in the Caucasus and Central Asia

Author:
Zdzislaw Lachowski, Björn Hagelin, Sam Perlo-Freeman, Petter Stålenheim, Dmitri Trofimov, and Alyson J. K. Bailes
Publication Date:
07-2003
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
The international attention paid to the nations of the South Caucasus region and Central Asia—a group of post-Soviet states beyond Europe's conventional frontiers but included in the Conference on/Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE/OSCE)—has been fitful at best over the past decade. During the last years of the 20th and at the start of the 21st century, after the conflicts in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh became (at least partly) 'frozen', security concerns about the regions tended to decline and to become overshadowed both by 'oil diplomacy' and by concern about developments within Russia itself, in Chechnya and Dagestan. In 2002–2003 a constellation of changes in the outside world has started to reverse this pattern. Chechnya is no longer a regular topic of high-level political debate between Russia and the West, and President Vladimir Putin has played the anti-terrorist card with some success to secure his freedom to deal with it as an internal security matter. The factors prompting greater international attention to Russia's south-western and southern neighbours, by contrast, have the potential to undermine—perhaps for good—any Russian pretension to decisive influence or an exclusive droit de regard in these regions. At the time of writing, however, this latest shift could again be called in question by a new diversion of focus to the 'greater Middle East' following hostilities in Iraq.
Topic:
Defense Policy and Arms Control and Proliferation
Political Geography:
Russia, Iraq, Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, Middle East, Asia, and Soviet Union