Humanitarian dilemmas in peace and war

Humanitarian assistance is becoming more complex and the environment in which it operates more competitive. Nevertheless, humanitarianism is shielded from such pressures by a set of principles that are reflected in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) which all governments ostensibly accept. The issue for the wider international community as well as for donor and recipi ent governments and humanitarian organizations is whether such principles can endure in light of the dilemmas posed in times of conflict and post-conflict. Humanitarian Dilemmas in War and Peace explores the dilemmas that humanitarianism not only confronts but also creates in seeking to protect and preserve life of the disaster and emergency-affected. In so doing, it views humanitarianism from three perspectives: (i) humanitarian principles in times of conflict; (ii) humanitarian principles from the perspective of many within the Group of 77; and (iii) humanitarianism from the perspective of institutional survival. The opinion piece concludes that, despite the dilemmas suggested by these perspectives, humanitarian principles can be upheld even amidst the complex and com petitive aid environment. It would require inter alia a more focused definition of humanitarian action, mechanisms that hold humanitarian organizations to higher standards of accountability, a commitment to more consistent and coherent advocacy and greater strategic perspectives to anticipate and respond to factors creating large-scale human vulnerability.     

War's dark glamour: ethics of research in war and conflict zones

The article addresses three questions concerning violent conflicts in Sri Lanka, Burma and southern Thailand: How is it possible to investigate questions of war and conflict in the field, especially concerning access and exit options? Access was gained in different ways in all three areas depending on the respective situations; special conditions and restrictions influenced the type and quality of data to be collected. The second question concerns the ethics and permissibility of research and data collection in conflict zones. What are the dangers or risks for both researcher and the local informants? What will be the quality of data so gathered? Third is a related question of ethics, that of impartiality: this is less a question of whether it is possible than of whether it is permissible for the researcher to stay ‘neutral’ in violent conflicts. This also has to be determined individually and in a different manner for each conflict zone. It is obvious that all researchers violate the ideal of ‘objectivity’ implicitly or explicitly from the start, yet this need not invalidate their findings. The paper concludes that research in conflict zones is mandatory, despite all doubts and qualifications. Only making such zones public can shape perceptions, give voice to the voiceless and so prevent these conflicts becoming invisible—‘war without witness’.     

Rejecting the gift horse: international politics of disaster aid refusal

This is a study of the increasingly common phenomenon of developing states refusing some or all international aid following serious natural disaster. Aid refusal by the Myanmar junta following a 2008 cyclone is only the most recent prominent example of this practice, and I present here an original dataset of all cases of disaster aid refusal occurring between 1982 and 2006. Through quantitative analysis, I show that although poorer states are indeed less likely to refuse aid than wealthier states, recipient need does not alone drive the decision-making process. Nor are autocratic regimes any more or less likely to refuse aid than democratic regimes. Rather, just as recently transitioned states have been shown by other scholars to be particularly likely to engage in military conflict, I find that they are also particularly likely to publicly and explicitly refuse aid and insist on their own ability to handle disaster relief and recovery. Aid refusal, much like aid provision, is at its core a political act.     

A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered

This article presents a new theory of war that is grounded in the insights of Clausewitz on the social nature of conflict. Clausewitz had argued that war is a political process; he therefore distinguished between ‘war’—understood in political terms—and warfare—understood as fighting. He then created a typology covering a spectrum of war ranging from total to limited, the political stakes of a conflict determining where it would fall on the spectrum. I develop and modify this basic framework by arguing that the social organization of the actors has a determining role in predicting the stakes of war. I then show how this framework helps us understand some key problems in the political science literature on war and conflict. I attempt to show two main things: (1) that there are different types of wars (and that these differences are not necessarily related to the standing of the actors, i.e. the presence or absence of sovereignty); and (2) that how war and warfare are related is more complicated than previously understood and that this has implications for the political science literature on order, conflict and violence.     

A Pragmatic Response to an Unexpected Constraint: Problem Representation in a Complex Humanitarian Emergency

This paper elaborates a model of problem representation first presented by Billings and Hermann (1998) . The foreign policy process begins when decision-makers specify policy goals and identify relevant constraints in response to a perceived problem. Although this initial problem representation often sets the course for subsequent policy, unanticipated constraints can arise that catch decision makers off-guard. Finding themselves in a context they did not anticipate to be in, decision makers may choose to alter their representation of the problem and/or change the course of policy. Billings and Hermann offer one piece of this puzzle by examining how decision makers re-represent problems; this paper provides the second piece by assessing how policies, not representations, change in response to new constraints. A case study of the U.S. response to the Ethiopian famine in the mid 1980s demonstrates that policy does not always follow problem representation.     

Identity and morality in the Italian red brigades

The article provides a brief background to the activities of the Italian Red Brigades, then examines the group's development in terms of three phases ‐ social, existential and survivalist. A perceived social and political identity in the early 1970s gave the organization an illusory security and the self‐confidence to step up the attack on the state. As the level of violence increased the BR became separated from their social base and created an auto‐identity based on self‐delusion and political alienation. Armed struggle was simplified to existential abstractions of myth and symbol. By the early 1980s the effects of legal and police repression, popular rejection and internal conflict reduced the remaining militants to a strategy of simple survival. The irreversible degeneration of the group's morality accompanied the process of social estrangement.     

Humanitarian Organizations in Tajikistan and the Coordination of Aid to Displaced Afghans in No Man's Land

This article examines the coordination of humanitarian aid todisplaced Afghans on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistanfrom 2000 to 2002, in order to draw lessons that may be usefulin connection with the return of the remaining displaced Afghansand other groups of refugees and IDPs. It examines the rolesof the various organizations involved in the humanitarian operation,focusing on UNHCR and its position as lead agency. The caseof the displaced Afghans on the border between Afghanistan andTajikistan highlights some problematic consequences of locatingcoordinating functions in sectoral lead agencies, and some advantagesof neutral coordination bodies such as OCHA. It also demonstratesthe importance of a balance between information gathering, processingand sharing, as well as the interconnections between coordinationby command and coordination by consensus.     

Using yoshikono and war to save rakugo in Osaka

Abstract

In April 1936, the magazine Kamigata hanashi (Kamigata Story) was launched in Osaka. This was a rakugo (traditional comic storytelling) magazine published monthly out of a local storyteller's home. One mission of the magazine as laid out by the editor in the inaugural issue was to preserve a local narrative tradition that was losing a popularity battle with manzai (two-person stand-up comedy) and other modern performing arts and media. Interestingly, in the second year of the magazine's run, the editor issued a call for yoshikono, which, like dodoitsu, are songs conventionally written in lines of 7-7-7-5. This too was a tradition that, it was written, needed a champion. Yoshikono submissions increased with each issue until they filled multiple pages, reaching into the hundreds. Prizes were given for the best entries, and public yoshikono gatherings were advertised – singers and shamisen players were even enlisted in what appears to be an attempt to revive a community performance tradition with historic links to storytelling in Osaka. This article shines light on the largely forgotten art of yoshikono, discusses its role in an Osaka rakugo magazine from 1937 to 1940, offers forty verses in translation, and considers why yoshikono was unable to make a comeback after the Second World War.     

Children of war in the Philippines

Political armed conflict has important ramifications in the lives of children as individuals and on social development more generally. However, the emotional problems faced by children during and after war or political violence are rarely considered in development literature and practice. This article recounts the experience of working with severely traumatised children in the Philippines, using the methods of Creative Process Therapy. The report shows how a Western therapeutic model was successfully modified for application in a Filipino children's rehabilitation centre, and suggests that this experience offers possibilities for appropriate replication in other settings.     

Duelling and the abolition of war

Political scientists have long compared war to duelling in the hope that war could be abolished like duelling, that is, at the hands of a normative campaign. However, there has been limited investigation of duelling's past. What can the history of duelling teach us about the future of war? This paper advances two arguments. First, by refining the conventional wisdom, it argues that duelling's demise was caused less by normative campaigning than by the timing of industrialization. Second, it argues that although duelling is not an analogous institution to modern war, its ancestor, feuding, is. Writings on feuds contribute a complementary literature to the limited data on war, which is helpful for thought experiments and hypothesis testing. Further, feuding's fall was caused more by the growth of state capacity than by normative campaigning. In sum, neither the history of duelling nor that of feuding confirms the view that ideational factors played the principal role in suppressing these practices; therefore, we should reconsider how the abolition of war might occur.     

A rural economic development plan to help the USA win its war on cocaine

Since the 1980s, the USA has fought cocaine in the Andes with carrots and sticks: interdiction and crop eradication wield the sticks, while Alternative Development (AD), which offers economic assistance to farmers who voluntarily abandon illicit cultivation, provides the carrots. Yet cocaine continues to permeate US streets, and rural Andean communities remain isolated from the legitimate economy. Many critics blame US belligerence for compounding the Andean drug war. The underlying problem with the existing strategy, however, might not be the aggressiveness of its military sticks, but the flimsiness of its development carrots. The inability of AD to persuade farmers to abandon coca cultivation may be causing US policy makers to over-apply military solutions – often inflaming rural communities and exacerbating regional instability in so doing. Few legal crops can match the earning power of coca. The article therefore suggests that the US carrot could be made more attractive by adopting a Venture Development model which helps rural farmers to process their legal produce into high-quality finished goods that command premium prices. Such a strategy could conceivably choke the cocaine engine by applying market-based forces to address market-based realities.     

Ignoring public opinion: the Australian and Polish decisions to go to war in Iraq

This article investigates why the governments of Australia and Poland decided to contribute military forces to the United States led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 when a majority of Australian and Polish citizens were opposed to national involvement in the invasion. The objective of the article is to increase understanding of the conditions under which governments ignore the public in their foreign policymaking. The article examines the explanatory power of four intervening variables: issue salience, elite debate, timing of the next election and the importance assigned to international gains by the government. On the basis of the Direct Method of Agreement, the article concludes that government perceptions of international gains and the timing of the next election were potentially necessary factors for the outcomes of the cases, while issue salience and elite debate were not necessary conditions. A distant election may, thus, provide sufficient electoral protection for a government that conducts a foreign policy to which the public is opposed.