Peace Support Research Articles

Regime Similarity and Rivalry

Explanations for the democratic peace have developed along two broad lines: those that focus on democratic-specific mechanisms and those that focus on institutional similarity mechanisms. We test these competing mechanisms against each other by examining a range of regime types and a variety of institutional mechanisms, and for the first time, test them in logistic multiple regression models of rivalry onset using three rivalry datasets. Our comparative test of the two approaches largely justifies democratic-specific explanations for the democratic peace. That is, more than any other regime pairing, two democracies are less likely to engage in a rivalry. We also find some evidence that socialist single-party dyads are less likely to experience rivalry than other dyads, but overall the support for a broader institutional similarity peace is quite limited.

Editorial: The Peace Support Operations Model

Editorial: The Peace Support Operations Model

Iraq, Afghanistan and the future of British military doctrine: from counterinsurgency to Stabilization

The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have had profound effects on both the British and US militaries. Among the most important is the way in which they have challenged traditional assumptions about the character of unconventional conflict and the role of the military within comprehensive strategies for encouraging sustainable peace. In the UK, the most important doctrinal response has been JDP 3–40 Security and Stabilisation: the military contribution. Security and Stabilisation is an ambitious attempt to synthesize elements of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, peace support and state-building within a single doctrine that reflects the lessons learned from recent British operational experience. This article examines the purpose, impact and potential value of this important innovation in British doctrine. To do so, the article explores the genesis of Stabilization; analyses its impact upon extant British doctrine for counterinsurgency and peace support; discusses its relationship with the most important related US doctrines, FM 3–24: the counterinsurgency field manual and FM 3–07: the stability operations field manual; and debates the function of doctrine more broadly. It concludes by summarizing the primary challenges Security and Stabilisation must overcome if it is to make a serious contribution to the theory and practice of such complex interventions.

What Motivates Slovenian ‘Peacekeepers’?

This article is based on the results of longitudinal research on the motivations and expectations of members of the Slovenian Armed Forces participating in peace operations from 2003 to 2009. The analysis is based on three main approaches. The first is to distinguish between two groups of soldiers: those deployed to missions abroad on a voluntary basis, and those deployed to missions by order. The second approach is to distinguish between those deployed for the first time, and those who have already participated in peace support operations (PSOs) before. The third approach aims at distinguishing between three types of soldiers’ motivation for PSOs according to Battistelli's typology. The importance of the different groups of motivation would to a certain degree also vary depending on the national culture, organizational culture and the individual soldier, as well as the time at which the survey was conducted: prior to deployment, during deployment or after returning home.

The Hybrid War Model: a complex adaptive model of complex urban conflict

This paper firstly discusses the modelling of Peace Support Operations (PSO) within the defence simulation modelling context. It then provides a summary background of the current relevant approaches in such modelling, taking account of the increasing complexity of the strategic environment, and the relevance of ideas from Complex Adaptive Systems theory. It goes on to describe the details of two agent-based models spanning the problem domain, which capture the key ideas of complexity, within a PSO context, taking account of the complex interactions between peacekeepers, civilians, insurgents and non-governmental organisations involved.

The Peace Support Operations Model: Strategic Interaction Process

Modeling complex social interaction creates a number of challenges for the strategic analyst. Firstly, the fundamental basis of an operational model has to be based on rational and verifiable metrics, but recognize that human interaction in the real world is often irrational and is rarely verifiable. Secondly, the evolving discourse between factions almost always influences the ongoing process of interaction — often creating entirely new modes of interaction as the scenario unfolds. Our solution was to continue to base the Peace Support Operations Model (PSOM) Operational Game on verifiable metrics and create an interaction process designed to include those modes of interaction that are ill-suited to structured analysis and better addressed by processes that can adapt to shifts in strategic emphasis. The PSOM Strategic Interaction Process thus follows the same turn-based design as the Operational Game, but creates a framework for political interaction and the recording of faction intent as the game proceeds.

Emotional barriers to peace: Emotions and public opinion of Jewish Israelis about the peace process in the Middle East.

It is well-established today that the psychological barrier is one of the most prominent factors operating against efforts to promote peace. However, most studies along these lines have concentrated on the cognitive barriers and neglected the emotional ones. Hence, the main goal of this study is to create a deeper understanding of how emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and hatred) directed toward an adversary serve as a barrier to potential public support for peaceful resolution of a conflict. To that end, an experimental survey was conducted among a representative nationwide sample of Jewish Israelis (N = 501) in the week prior to the Annapolis Peace Summit. Negative emotions were stimulated, and different variables reflecting support for peace or violence were measured. Results obtained via paths analysis using structural equation modeling have drawn a comprehensive map of the distinct impact of each emotion on specific aspects of public opinion toward the peace process.

The Legal Implications Arising from Economic and Social Reconstruction as an Aspect of Peace Support Operations

This article asserts that the link between peace and security and stabilization and development, as exemplified by the UN-mandated international presences in Afghanistan, is to be welcomed but that, from the perspective of the laws governing both the use of force and the conduct of warfare, such an evolution is problematic for a number of reasons. One, the broader functions of the military in peace support raises questions for jus ad bellum such as determining whether the basis for the peace enforcement has been achieved, as States and their armed forces engage in stabilization and state-building initiatives as a means to counter breaches of and threats to the peace. Two, the broader functions are problematic for jus in bello as the practical application of such initiatives is not easily incorporated into a body of law that was drafted primarily to deal with inter-state conflict and only provides limited guidance on internal conflict such as that in Afghanistan. Consequently, international law must evolve to clarify the rights and obligations stemming from peace support operations for both States and their military personnel.

Seeking peace and security in the Horn of Africa: the contribution of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development

This article assesses the contribution that IGAD has made to regional security in the Horn of Africa since the adoption of its peace and security mandate in 1996. It describes the evolution of IGAD and its mandate in the context of regional conflict and wider African peace and security processes. It explores the local dynamics of the two major IGAD-led peace processes, in Sudan (1993–2005) and in Somalia (2002–2004), and discusses the effectiveness of IGAD's institutional role. A consideration of the wider impact of the peace agreements highlights the way IGAD has enhanced its role by setting the agenda on peace support operations in Somalia. The article concludes that IGAD's successes are more the result of regional power politics than of its institutional strength per se. Despite the obvious need for a better regional security framework, the scope for the IGAD Secretariat to develop an autonomous conflict-resolution capability will remain limited. However, IGAD brings a new diplomatic dimension to conflict management that locks in regional states and locks out interested parties beyond the region. With regard to Somalia, the organization has played a pivotal role in directing African and wider international responses to conflict in the region.

Swedish participation in international military peace support operations

Swedish participation in international military peace support operations

Vigilant Eagle: Kazakhstan’s Assistance to ISAF in Afghanistan

Kazakhstan‘s role in assisting international stabilization efforts in Afghanistan is often underestimated in Western commentaries. The precise nature of that assistance, cooperation with key actors, and level of partnership with NATO can be prone to underestimation, not least due to the tendency to prioritize the role of Russia in the international cooperative matrix. Yet, if properly understood, these issues convey subtle changes in foreign and defense policy in Astana that may have deeper implications for future peace support or counter-insurgency operations. This paper explores these themes, and argues that Astana actively seeks—on its own terms—ways and mechanisms through which the country might cooperate at a practical level with its Western partners on issues of mutual though not identical interests, as part of a process allowing it to develop a greater international role for itself. Twenty years after gaining its independence, Kazakhstan—like other states in Central Asia—is becoming a more clearly identifiable independent actor both in the region and globally.

<em>Adapting Traditional Peacemaking Principles to Contemporary Conflicts:</em> The ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) spearheaded a silent revolution in proving that a third-world regional organization is capable of driving a peace-enforcement process and achieving relative peace, in spite of neglect by the big powers. This has been shown through the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in Liberia (1989–1996–1999–2003), Sierra Leone (1997– 2001), and Guinea Bissau (1998). It has since been involved in preventive diplomacy in Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and other flashpoints while striving to institutionalize its Peace Support Operations (PSO) architecture in line with the UN standard. Against this backdrop, it became imperative to develop a preventive diplomacy strategy in order to prevent a relapse into destructive conflicts. While the result of the preventive diplomacy in previous interventions by ECOWAS has been modest, its effectiveness has been hampered by technical inadequacies and insufficient institutional support from the ECOWAS Commission. This has resulted in a resurgence of crises in some member states, relapse of postconflict states into instability and conflict, and disrespect for regional statutes and the protocol. It has also weakened the level of trust in ECOWAS to facilitate conflict prevention. However, the advent of the ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework (ECPF) in 2008 provided an opportunity to implement a coordinated peacemaking strategy and systematically implement provisions of the ECOWAS Revised Treaty, decisions, and protocols in order to enhance conflict prevention. More important, the ECPF represents an attempt to adapt the principles of traditional conflict management to contemporary challenges. This paper takes a critical look at the ECPF as a framework capable of effective conflict transformation in the emerging regional peace and security architecture, outlines its traditional conflict management principles, and points out the opportunities of fashioning a mediatory framework that will systematically and consistently engage in good offices, negotiation, mediation, conciliation, and arbitration for regional peace, security, and development.

The Peace Support Operations Model: Origins, Development, Philosophy and Use

This article is intended to give the reader of this special Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation edition an introduction to the UK Ministry of Defence’s Peace Support Operations Model (PSOM). It provides first a general description of the rationale and structure of the model, explaining something of the design philosophy and how this was translated into a viable game/model approach. The origins and need for a simple Irregular Warfare (IW) tool are explained and the expanding stakeholder interest catalogued. Issues of doctrine and terminology provided a constant challenge to the Study, and the PSOM’s efforts to navigate around these, and the friction from residual kinetic modelling legacy, is addressed. The progression from prototype to the current working model is described, along with the PSOM’s current development plans and approach. The intention to enhance the model’s representation of a number of ‘soft’ effects is stressed; some of these are introduced here and expanded in other papers included in this edition. Finally, a description of the extensive international collaboration and configuration control, particularly with the US, leaves the reader understanding that the PSOM provides a potentially unifying IW modelling approach to nations engaged in complex operations.

Representing Strategic Communication and Influence in Stabilization Modeling

Effectively contesting the battle for perceptions to gain the consent of indigenous populations is central to success in stabilization operations. This article examines the current approach to modeling Strategic Communication and Influence in stabilization wargaming employed within the UK Ministry of Defence, found at present in the Peace Support Operations Model suite. It describes the options for enhancing the representation of Strategic Communication and Influence at the strategic, operational and tactical levels, blending human—in-the-loop and computer-based approaches, concluding with an assessment of the future challenges and opportunities in this field.

Contemporary Peace Support Operations

In this article the authors examine two set of issues that constrain contemporary peace support operations (PSOs): one centered on the kinds of knowledge prevalent in PSOs and the second involving the organizational structures that characterize them. The authors' aim is to show the deep discursive and structural limitations and contradictions that continue to characterize the actions of armed forces and the dominance of militaristic thinking within PSOs. This article centers on multidimensional peacekeeping marked by emphasizing two main points in regard to the complex nature of such peacekeeping. First, Western military thinking is still dominant in the professional discourse of peacekeeping despite the fact that in many cases it is less relevant to the arenas where it is applied (in weakened or failed states). Second, forces in second-generation peacekeeping missions are by definition a form of hybrid organizations, and therefore conceptual changes in regard to PSOs not only involve the realm of knowledge but also entail practical consequences for the very organizational means used to achieve their aims. The authors' analysis demonstrates the blending, hybridization, and linkages that are an essential part of PSOs as processes that carry both advantages and disadvantages for organizational action.

The Peace Support Operations Model: Modeling Techniques Present and Future

The Peace Support Operations Model is a population centric, human-in-the-loop wargame that represents the cross-government, multi-actor stabilization environment. This paper outlines the mechanisms upon which the model is based and discusses the challenges faced and the approaches drawn upon in the fields of social science, economics and psychology in its development. It concludes with an assessment of the limitations of the current modeling approach and the potential future developments possible to enhance the representation of population dynamics in complex stabilization environments.

Social Behavior and Religious Consciousness among Shin Buddhist Practitioners

The doctrinal intricacies related to the teaching of and the absence of precepts in Shin Buddhism have not traditionally prevented the development of a distinctive ethic and forms of social interaction. The data from a survey conducted by the author among a sample of Shin Buddhist practitioners show that high expectations of good social behavior are still present within the religious community, and that there is a meaningful correspondence between morals and religious consciousness. Practitioners seem to be oriented toward core Shin Buddhist values such as compassion, responding in gratitude to the Buddha's benevolence, and peace of mind; traditional Japanese values which are generally related to human relationships, and, in the case of lay followers, also ancestor veneration; and other core Shin Buddhist values such as equality and nonviolence, which may be also characterized as modern values. There are indications that the inclination toward a rich interior religious life does not preclude interesting levels of social engagement, an anti-discriminatory attitude, and support for peace and nonviolence, which also appear to be positively correlated to high standards of religious consciousness. However, the latter is also shown to affect the inclination to religious exclusivism, and to be intertwined with patriotism and ethno-cultural defense. KEYWORDS: Shin Buddhism-social ethics-religious consciousness-Shin Buddhist values-traditional Japanese values-modern values (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) One of the major characteristics of Shin Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu ..., literally True Pure Land school), the tradition of Japanese Buddhism which traces back to the work and activities of Shinran ... (1173?1262), lies in its guarded attitude toward normative ethics. This is a direct consequence of the emphasis placed on the other-power of Amida Nyorai as the source of religious liberation, that is, birth in the Pure Land. This does not mean, however, that in Shin Buddhism no room is left for moral action guided by religious principles. This approach to an internalized version of Mahayana ethics, namely, morality without precepts, may be already seen at work in Shinran's thought, and continues to characterize much of the doctrinal debate on social ethics, as well as forms of social activism within Shin Buddhism. At the individual level there are signs that the moral expectations of the practitioners might be quite high, but so far there has been scant attention in the field of religious studies to the character of Shin Buddhist ethics and its interplay with the level of religious consciousness. The analysis of these two issues will be pursued in this article through the data of a survey carried out by the author in Japan among a sample of Shin Buddhist practitioners. Shin Buddhist Social Ethics The core of the Shin Buddhist approach to ethics lies in Shinran's claim that all sorts of calculations (hakarai ...), including the good acts aimed at accumulating merit, are nothing but an obstacle to the fundamental religious experience of shinjin ... and the achievement of Buddhist liberation.1 Following the path opened by his master Honen ... (1133-1212), Shinran believed that the meritorious acts of self-power (jiriki ...) should be superceded by the exclusive practice of the nenbutsu (senju nenbutsu ...), which, on the basis of the universality of Amida's Vow, can also direct the less fortunate and capable to birth in the Pure Land (ojo ...). In this connection, Shinran was also eager to clarify that the nenbutsu in itself was not a means but rather an act of gratitude to Amida's compassion and other-power (tariki ..). This attitude also provided the pattern to the main traditional Shin Buddhist approach to morality, characterized as a response in gratitude to the Buddha's benevolence (button ...) (cws i, 564; and ssz ii, 702). In this way, the newly established tradition was at the same time drawing from, and contributing to, the traditional idea of ho-on . …

Sudanese Images of the Other: Education and Conflict in Sudan

Education can contribute to peace and reconciliation as well as to conflict and strife (Bush and Saltarelli 2000; Smith and Vaux 2003; Davies 2004a). On the one hand, (re)building schools, recruiting teachers, and returning children to classrooms may help reduce the causes of fragility, legitimate the state, and create a peace dividend in postconflicts situations. The World Bank also argues that a return of children to school after armed conflict can produce an early peace dividend, cementing support for peace (World Bank 2005; Collier 2006; McEvoy-Levy 2006). On the other hand, Lennart Vriens (2004, 71) argues that education is one of “the most successful instruments for the . . . dissemination of militarism,” and Marc Sommers (2002, 8) claims that “many who conduct modern wars are expert at using educational settings to indoctrinate and control children.” The complex, often contradictory role of education in conflict is explored in this article in relation to Sudan. The focus of the article is the NorthSouth conflict, bearing in mind that other, “minor” wars and military clashes in both the North and South have “each fed into and intensified the fighting of the overall ‘North-South’ war” ( Johnson 2007, 127). I examine the preand postconflict political discourses and the educational discourses employed in relation to the ideological, religious, and military struggle between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in the South and the Khartoum government in the North. In addition, I will discuss how the political and educational discourses contributed to the reconstruction of the country and to the simultaneous sustaining and undermining of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

Civilian police use of English in international peace support operations

International peace operations are drawing increasingly on civilian police from many countries. To qualify, police need to be proficient in the mission official language (MOL), which is most often English. Language testing currently used to measure candidates’ MOL expertise may not however reflect the actual skills required of these peacekeepers. The experience of UN civilian police is used to compare pre‐mission peacekeeping training and testing with on‐the‐job linguistic needs, based on surveys. Findings include MOL proficiency requirements for various peacekeeping positions. A program which combines language and peacekeeping content would address the gap between training and practice for civilian peacekeeping police.

Europe and the Israel–Palestinian peace process: the urgency of now

The resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has long occupied a prominent place on the foreign agenda of the European Union (EU). Over the past 40 years, the member states of the EU have defined with increasingly coherence their approach to the resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: a commitment to Israel's right to live in peace and security and support of the Palestinians to national self-determination. At the same time, European discourse on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has shifted as its own internal needs and strategic concerns have changed. This changing narrative has impacted critically on the policy instruments and approach adopted by the EU to the conflict. Through an analysis of European statements and speeches, this article argues that European discourse in the 1980s and 1990s was underscored by a normative, justice-based framing. The collapse of peace process in 2000 has led to a noticeable securitization of European discourse on the conflict, one now marked by a growing sense of ‘risk, danger, and urgency’ and a fear that the conflict has begun to impact negatively on its domestic stability.