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1. Protection through Policing: The Protective Role of UN Police in Peace Operations

Author:
Charles T. Hunt
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
International Peace Institute
Abstract:
Since first deployed in 1960, United Nations police (UNPOL) have consistently been present in UN missions and have become increasingly important to achieving mission objectives. Since 1999, these objectives have often included the protection of civilians (POC), especially in places like the Central African Republic, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, and South Sudan. But despite its rise in prominence, the protective role of UNPOL is generally undervalued and regularly overlooked, and missions have tended to overly rely on militarized approaches to POC. This report examines the roles and responsibilities of UNPOL regarding POC. It outlines UNPOL’s contributions to POC and perceived comparative advantages, using examples of their role as compeller, deterrent, partner, and enabler. It also identifies and draws lessons from challenges to police protection efforts, including ambiguous mandates, policies, and guidance; poor coordination; problematic partnerships; and deficits in capabilities, capacities, and tools. Drawing on these lessons from past and current deployments, the report proposes recommendations for how member states, the Security Council, the UN Secretariat, and field missions can improve UNPOL’s efforts to protect civilians going forward. These recommendations include: Clarifying the role of UN police in POC through mandates, policies, guidance, and training to align the expectations of UN peace operations, the Secretariat, and member states for what UNPOL are expected to do; Involving all UN police in POC and giving them a voice in decision making and planning to infuse whole-of-mission POC efforts with policing perspectives and empower UNPOL to act more readily; Enhancing partnerships between UN police, host states, and other mission components to enable more responsive, better coordinated, and more comprehensive approaches to POC; and Providing more appropriate and more flexible capabilities, capacities, and tools to address critical capabilities gaps and adapt existing resources to better meet UNPOL’s latent potential for POC.
Topic:
Security, United Nations, Peacekeeping, Reform, Rule of Law, Civilians, and Police
Political Geography:
Africa, Darfur, Mali, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Congo

2. What Has Changed in Policing since the Arab Uprisings of 2011? Surveying Policing Concepts and Modes of Contestation

Author:
Alex Walsh
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
Abstract:
The 2011 Egyptian protests started in earnest nine years ago on National Police Day on 25 January, a holiday that Hosni Mubarak had introduced to commemorate Egyptian police officers killed and wounded by British colonial forces in 1952. Protesters upended the original meaning of the holiday to turn it into a symbol of police brutality and corruption under Mubarak. In the drama of the 18 days that followed, Egypt’s internal security apparatus fought the protesters in the streets, delivering one shocking provocation after another, galvanizing the protest movement and ultimately contributing to the removal of Mubarak. Since 2011, the police and internal security forces of many countries in the Arab world have been at the centre of the conflicts and struggles that shape the region for better and for worse. Recent and ongoing encounters between protestors and police in the streets of Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria and Sudan are a stark reminder that the police are more than just a proxy target for a protestation of the state. They are also the object of much anger both as a grouping, and in terms of the concept of policing and social control they embody. The impact of this sustained contestation of police behaviour and doctrine in the region deserves reflection. Has the police and policing changed in the Arab world? And if so, in what ways? This paper maps out some of the main modes in which the police and policing have been contested since 2011, and provides a preliminary assessment of its impact. It argues that mass mobilised contestation has only been successful in the instance where institutional reform followed. It notes that hybridisation of policing – where informal security actors cooperate and challenge formal security actors – has spread in many countries but that the concept of state security – with its emphasis on the state over citizens – continues to prevail across the region. Indeed, almost a decade after that fateful 25 January 2011, many of the aspirations of citizens protesting the police are far from realised, even while there are some promising developments.
Topic:
Protests, Repression, Police, and Police State
Political Geography:
Africa, North Africa, Egypt, and Cairo

3. Protection of Civilians from the Perspective of the Soldiers who Protect: Ghana and India in United Nations peacekeeping

Author:
Peter Albrecht and Podder Sukanya
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
UN peacekeeping missions are deployed in increasingly violent contexts, such as Mali and South Sudan. It leaves such missions suspended somewhere between traditional peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Concurrently with this transformation, protection of civilians has become increasingly important. How do countries like Ghana and India, two of the main contributors of troops to UN missions, define, approach, and experience the task of protecting civilians? What do they consider its key components to be? And what do they think is required to protect well? This new DIIS report concludes that the individual combat experience of troop-contributing countries is a defining feature of how protection of civilians is approached in peacekeeping missions. The report suggests that it is important to understand how difference plays out across missions, and how countries that contribute troops to missions understand and respond to their roles in these missions. This understanding is required in discussions about how effective and coherent we might expect peacekeeping to be as a form of intervention. This report is based on fieldwork in India and Ghana. Data on the Ghana case has been partially collected through the project Domestic Security Implications of Peacekeeping in Ghana (D-SIP), funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Democratization, Non State Actors, Fragile States, Conflict, Violence, Peace, Police, and Justice
Political Geography:
Africa, South Asia, India, and Ghana

4. Surveillance, Control and Disinformation Technology

Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
World Politics Review
Abstract:
For years, activists, academics and watchdogs have characterized the spyware industry as out of control, with technology outpacing the laws designed to constrain the industry’s activities. In January 2020, the nefarious potential of such technology was vividly demonstrated when the heir to the Saudi kingdom apparently used Israeli-made spyware to breach the personal phone of the world’s richest man, who owns a leading American newspaper and runs one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies. Meanwhile, the growing prevalence of facial recognition technology in authoritarian countries like Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which use it to monitor activists and suppress dissent, has raised increasing alarm among human rights advocates. Perhaps the most egregious example is in China, where the government has used facial recognition technology to racially profile Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority that is concentrated in Xinjiang province, and forcibly lock them up in internment camps. But authoritarian countries are not alone: This technology is now being harnessed for law enforcement and surveillance purposes in many democracies.
Topic:
Intelligence, Science and Technology, Digital Economy, Surveillance, Police, Artificial Intelligence, Police State, Digital Revolution, Digitization, Digital Policy, and Emerging Technology
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Is the United States at Risk of Large-Scale Civil Conflict?

Author:
Sarah Cliffe
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
The protests that have roiled the United States over the past weeks are rooted in an issue at the heart of the divisions in American society: racism, and in particular racism within the security forces. But their extent and impact are unprecedented in recent decades. What makes this moment different from previous waves of protests? This briefing by Sarah Cliffe draws on comparative global analysis to ask whether the US now risks large-scale civil conflict. It examines how the combination of a public health crisis, systemic generalized inequality and racial disparities, growing socioeconomic hardship, the political manipulation of racial and religious identities and the potential trigger of the forthcoming presidential election have exacerbated long-standing tensions in American society.
Topic:
Race, Protests, Crisis Management, Police, COVID-19, and Civil Unrest
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

6. The Power to Engage: Giving Punch to a new EU Global Strategy 2020

Author:
Sven Biscop
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
EGMONT - The Royal Institute for International Relations
Abstract:
I like being a policy-oriented academic: you meet lots of interesting people and you are invited to interesting meetings, so you can really contribute to the debate. Some actors may from time to time think you have an appealing idea, and they may even seek some academic legitimacy for their decisions. But you are of course not present when the actual decisions are being taken. It’s my job and I love it – but this is not the role that the EU itself should play. Europe does not aspire to be the world’s policeman, but it cannot just be the world’s professor either. As the new EU leadership is coming in, we must give punch to our strategy, and make sure we have the power to make our ideas work in the real world. Power, not to confront, but to engage the world.
Topic:
Globalization, Regional Cooperation, European Union, Leadership, and Police
Political Geography:
Europe

7. American Absurdities

Author:
M. Taratuta
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
I am prepared to assert that there is no idea so wonderful that it can- not be brought to the point of absurdity, or even turned into its exact opposite. Worse yet, lots of wonderful ideas often just end up reaching an ignominious end.
Topic:
Race, Social Movement, Elections, Discrimination, Protests, Police, and Black Lives Matter (BLM)
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America