'State failure' has become a part of the global post‐9/11 security calculus. Faltering states are presented as dangers to international stability, as terrorist safe havens and as 'black holes' of global politics. However, the political and academic debate about this phenomenon still leaves much to be desired. This working paper and its companion piece (INEF Report 88/2006) try to revisit the phenomenon from new perspectives. The focus of “State Failure Revisited I” is on the globalization of security and neighborhood effects.
Topic:
Security, International Political Economy, Sovereignty, and Terrorism
Mediation and its possible contribution to the resolution of intrastate conflicts has gained increasing attention in today's international arena. Especially the advantages of nongovernmental personnel to act as mediators (track-two mediation) even on the highest political level in contrast to official state representatives, or state-like authorities appear worth being identified. Successful past mediation initiatives by such actors have already presented their obvious potential in this regard.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, and Foreign Policy
This INEF report is the companion piece to “State Failure Revisited I: Globalization of Security and Neighborhood Effects” (INEF Report 87/2007). While the first working paper mainly took a structural perspective and dealt with the global and regional level, the contributions in our new study put those actors in the spotlight who shape national and local arenas.
Private actors increasingly influence global governance and generate transnational rules and regulations. By creating soft law, they adopt governance tasks that were traditionally in the responsibility of sovereign states. These modes of “private governance” are quite disputed. Some hope that by including private actors, democracy on a global level can be enhanced. Others fear that private governance circumvents democratically legitimated governments and that private regulation competes with national and international law. Thus, questions arise about the legitimisation of private actors and about the democratic legitimacy of private governance.
Topic:
International Relations, Democratization, Government, and Privatization
When the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published its 1994 report, nobody expected that the human security concept outlined within it would attract so much attention from politicians and academics alike. This is all the more astonishing as the concept has provoked a lot of criticism ever since its first appearance due to its excoriated analytical ambiguity and its disputed political appropriateness.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Human Rights, International Political Economy, and United Nations
With US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting rather ruthless counter- insurgency campaigns, the topic of in surgency and counterinsurgency is of pressing relevance. At the same time, questions of internal violence in developing countries have generally been high on the political and academic agenda in the context of “failed” and “failing states”.
Topic:
Defense Policy and War
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, Iraq, Middle East, and Asia
Water is an essential factor for human development and health, but also for agricultural production, the development of the tourism sector and industrial growth. The increasing scarcity of the resource contributes to high competition between these user groups. Growing tension and conflict over water allocation urge for new approaches in demand management.
Topic:
Development, Government, Health, and Privatization
The present report argues on the assumption that UN peace operations represent intermediate international public goods that yield a number of positive externalities – such as peace and security, enhanced international stability and respect for human rights. The potential benefits that can be derived from these operations critically depend on how the international community decides to provide and finance them. Despite the fact that the financing of UN peace operations is a crucial component of their production path, there have been surprisingly few attempts to examine whether and how the UN has adjusted the international public financing system underlying the provision of its operations to the complex tasks the organization is asked to undertake. The present study contributes to a better understanding of UN peace operations as international public goods and fills this gap by providing an up-to-date analysis of the several existing international financing me chanisms and tools created by the UN to help foster better allocation to its operations. It summarizes important UN internal reform processes related to their use and offers policy re commendations for a more integrated and innovative financing approach to UN peace operations as international public goods.
Both the significance and the profile of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have undergone a fundamental transformation in the past twenty years. In development cooperation new fields such as ecological sustainability and the promotion of democracy have emerged besides 'traditional' issues like poverty reduction. Furthermore, confronted with the realities of war and state decline, developmental NGOs pay increasing attention to crisis prevention and the resolution of conflicts; even a new type of nongovernmental organization has appeared, conflict-resolution NGOs. The change has been particularly dramatic in the area of humanitarian aid: even before the end of the Cold War some NGOs – Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) at the head of all of them – freed themselves from the “straitjacket” of only conducting humanitarian operations with the permission of the (often illegitimate) local government; meanwhile the concept of sovereignty has been substantially redefined. NGOs, however, also con- formed to the imperatives of globalization and commercialization, and formed oligopolies on the market for humanitarian aid. At the same time, they are also confronted with their own “powerlessness” in conflict zones: actors of violence and power-holders successfully attempt to instrumentalize humanitarian aid for their own purposes, and western military forces threaten the independence of humanitarian work by demanding subordination to political and strategic goals.
Topic:
Globalization, Government, Humanitarian Aid, Non-Governmental Organization, Privatization, and Sovereignty
For developing countries and economies in transition, accession to and membership in the global trade body is a delicate and cumbersome experience. The need to bring national legislation into conformity with WTO rules, negotiating and implementing concessions on market access for trade in goods and services, transparency requirements, emerging new trade issues (e. g. environmental standards), and the necessity to establish and maintain professional trade-related research competence places heavy burdens on applicants and developing members that not infrequently exceed their institutional capacity for formulating policy options or negotiation strategies.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Globalization, and International Trade and Finance