Political and Military Fronts in Resolving Asymmetrical Conflicts

Abstract

The growing terror inflicted by the Lord’s Resistance Army has devastated communities in four countries in central Africa. Since the 1980s, mass human rights violations such as kidnapping, murder, rape, and child abduction have been part of a systematic attempt by the Lord’s Resistance Army to undermine state actors in the region. This article attempts to highlight the contributions of Intergovernmental Organizations as part of the United Nations work to eradicate the group using both political and military fronts of action. We will be employing Rourke and Bouyer’s concept of collective security and parameters to measure the success of collective action undertaken by state and non-state actors in conflict resolution. We illustrate the proposed utilization of collective security parameters, a method Intergovernmental Organizations use to exert both political and military-based influence towards resolving asymmetrical conflicts, to provide insight into the major research gap in the discourse of conflict resolution. Utilizing empirical data from 2008-2012, this article identifies the political front as the mobilization of mass resources and the reallocation of African Union peacekeepers; meanwhile, the military front is identified as the extension of existing United Nations mandates in the region to include the current issue of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa.