Kosovo, an impoverished region at the southern tip of Serbia, is drawing ineluctably closer to war with each passing day. By night, men smuggle guns and ammunition from Albania to an Albanian militia determined to wrest Kosovo away from Serbia. The militia's fighters, angered by years of Serbian police violence against Kosovo's 90-percent Albanian majority, have killed Serbian police officers and murdered Albanians deemed to be loyal to the Serbian state.
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
The world's response to the Kosovo crisis dramatizes the increased role of international military forces in humanitarian action. Some people view this development positively as the harnessing of the military for humanitarian tasks; others are alarmed at the perceived militarization of humanitarian action. A workshop convened by the Netherlands Foreign Ministry in The Hague on November 15-16, 1999, assessed these different perspectives on the Kosovo experience in the light of research it had commissioned.
The election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel threw into flux the Middle East peace process. What in early 1996 seemed to many observers the almost inevitable "working out" of a decades-long conflict that had gradually become unsustainable on all sides, was by late 1996 seen more clearly as part of a contingent unfolding set of events which could drive the region in more than one direction, including backwards toward explicit conflict and even war. This presents unique theoretical, analytic, and policy opportunities.
When political observers talk about European security, they invariably refer to the challenges Western Europe faces on its peripheries from a renationalized Russia, conflicts in the Balkans, and Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa. Rarely do they imagine that the greatest dangers to the new Europe may come from within, that the kind of stability Europe has enjoyed since World War II could be merely a passing chapter in history, not a transcendence of history. Without suggesting that there is necessarily a worst case ending, this study will argue that there is indeed a series of crises converging on post-Cold War Europe that threaten its stability and that need to be addressed by European policy makers and taken into account by Americans.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, International Law, and War
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
The war in Chechnya has presented unique obstacles to effective humanitarian action. The continued precariousness of the humanitarian effort points to the need to reflect upon the experiences of humanitarian actors in this perilous setting and to identify and clarify lessons to be learned from unfolding events. This report appraises the context and effectiveness of humanitarian action associated with the war in Chechnya and offers several recommendations.