International Crisis Group
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Global protests pose fresh challenge for international agencies, says thinktank | The Guardian
By Richard Norton-Taylor
The Syria crisis and Arab spring demonstrate that a new kind of armed conflict has emerged, raising uncomfortable questions about the role of international agencies, including the UN, one of the world’s leading research bodies warns in its annual survey.
Meanwhile, all five legally recognised nuclear states, including Britain, are either deploying new weapons systems or have announced plans to do so, and none of them has shown anything more than a “rhetorical willingness” to disarm, says the 2012 Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
“While the various uprisings [of the Arab spring] shared a number of traits‚ including large demonstrations, non-violent actions, the absence of single leaders and the use of central squares in major cities‚ they also differed in certain respects. The extent of the demands made by the protesters varied, ranging from improved economic situations to regime change, as did the level of violence,” says the report.
“The events of last year were not isolated in terms of contemporary conflict trends … Taken together, these changes suggest that there’s a new kind of conflict environment emerging, one in which international interventions become far more difficult to carry out”, stated Dr Neil Melvin, director of Sipri’s armed conflict programme.
“Unfortunately, the global community has yet to fully grapple with the ongoing structural changes that define today’s security landscape, changes that often outpace the ability of established institutions and mechanisms to cope with them”, said the Sipri director, Bates Gill. “What will be needed is an innovative integration of preventive diplomacy, pre-emptive and early warning technologies, and co-operative transitional partnerships.”
The report points to the tension between growing acceptance of the principle that state sovereignty is not a licence to kill – established in the UN’s 2005 General Assembly resolution on the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) – and the reluctance or failure of the five permanent security council members to act.
Photo: Khalil Hamra/ AP
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Atlantic: How the World Could—And Maybe Should—Intervene in Syria
Anne-Marie Slaughter on the case for R2P in Syria:
Last week the Carnegie Corporation, the Stanley Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation sponsored a terrific conference on the next decade of R2P. Panel members discussed the pros and cons of R2P interventions to date and what we might expect in the future. During the question period after the second morning panel, former International Criminal Court Prosecutor and current International Crisis Group President Louise Arbour said that she agreed with Gareth Evans’ (the former Australian foreign minister and a member of the original commission that gave rise to R2P) analysis that the preconditions for an R2P intervention in Syria were not met. Arbour said that, in terms of the magnitude of the crimes being committed in Syria (over 5,000 deaths, destruction of opposition towns) and the lack of effective alternatives other than force, the threshold for an R2P intervention was met. But she said an intervention in Syria failed the third criterion, whether intervention would do more good than harm.
I disagree with Arbour’s assessment, if in fact the conditions I spelled out above could be met. But that’s not the point. She made the further point that if the international community is NOT going to intervene, then R2P includes the responsibility to tell protesters on the ground that help will not be forthcoming, so that they can make their own plans accordingly. Arbour is right. But then the U.S., Turkish, and other governments saying that Assad’s fall is “just a matter of time” must be prepared to answer the question posed by protesters in the picture below honestly: “we won’t be coming.” But then we must also be prepared to face the consequences. In a recent Al Jazeera report, the source of the photo at the top of this page, reporter Zeina Khodr quoted one opposition figure as saying that Syria will descend into “endless chaos."Photo: Protesters in Syria / Al Jazeera English
