Currently viewing the tag: "intervention"

It’s rare in political science to be able to say, authoritatively, that an extensive sub-field of study has been operating under a false assumption, and that there’s an adjacent sub-field that has been almost entirely neglected. But this is the case with civil war and transnational/inter-state war in Africa. A Google Scholar search for the […]

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The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is the AU’s largest, most ambitious, most complex and most dangerous peace support operation. It has rivaled and often surpassed United Nations peace missions in size and challenges. Paul Williams has written a thorough, extremely detailed, comprehensive, balanced and thoughtful account of the mission. It is indispensible for any policymaker or scholar of Somalia, and a model for how academic analyses of peace operations should be written.

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Recognizing that in today’s geopolitics, no idea is bad enough to be put to rest, we draw on a 2013 interview with Trita Parsi, founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States (2007) and A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (2012). The interview took place during a period of mounting US pressure on Iran to cease their nuclear program, but before the Joint Comprehesnive Pan of Action that the Obama Administration signed with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the European Union, and Iran. Parsi’s warnings then about the perceived ‘military solution’ are as relevant today as they were then.

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The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia today announced the judgment in the case of the Bosnian Serb’s top military leader during the 1992 – 1995 conflict, Gen. Ratko Mladic. He was found guilty of all charges except one: the count of genocide for the overall conduct of the war, especially in municipalities […]

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In the battle of wills for Somalia’s future, the terrorist group al-Shabab struck a cruel and potentially lasting blow on Oct. 14. Not only did it kill more than 300 people in the largest terrorist attack in the country’s history; it shook the confidence of the Somali government and its domestic and international backers that they can stay the course in rebuilding the war-torn East African nation.

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This article considers the military doctrine currently available to the African Standby Force (ASF) for peace operations (PO) on the African continent. In the absence of an updated and relevant doctrine for PO, risks are posed to the harmonization and coordination of multinational missions, as well as to the successful achievement of mission objectives. Despite laudable efforts by both the United Nations (UN) and bilateral donor nations to support the preparatory and continuation training of ASF troops, differences in the national and multinational experiences of this work and the differences in the legal basis of this doctrine do not provide an optimal ‘stop gap’ measure. The pressing new requirement for African peace missions to deter terrorist and insurgent anti-peace factions exposes the limitations of UN doctrine, which preserves traditional peacekeeping principles of consent, impartiality and minimum use of force

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