Politics and Governance

Austrians, the Austrian journalist Alfred Polgar sardonically noted in the early 20th century, are a people who “look with foresight into the past.” He was referring to Austrians’ tendency to seek comfort in Die Welt von Gestern, the world of yesterday, as the writer Stefan Zweig titled his autobiography. When Austrians flocked in 1955 to the cinemas to see the film Sissi, a kitschy love story about the young Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I and the Empress Elisabeth, they didn’t merely enjoy the couple’s love story: They sought refuge, after the horrors of World War II, in the film’s old world composed of hierarchy, law, and order underpinned by a general respect for traditional values.

Today, another young conservative Austrian leader, Sebastian Kurz — the 31-year-old chancellor of Austria and chairman of a revamped version of Austria’s traditional center-right party — projects a similar profile as Sissi’s young emperor. In part, that’s due to his style of conservative populism, an original synthesis of heavy-handed social conservatism and law enforcement with traditional fidelity to established European institutions and economic policies. Since becoming leader of the Austrian People’s Party, he has steered it toward a coalition with the far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party, which had previously been ostracized by the bien-pensant Austrian establishment. Since taking office as chancellor, he has spoken of an urgent need to crack down on illegal immigration and maintain Austria’s traditional culture.

Read the full article here in Foreign Policy.

Image: "UNO Generalkonferenz 2017" (CC BY 2.0) by Österreichisches Außenministerium

Medical diplomacy – ‘the winning of hearts and minds of the people by exploiting medical care, expertise, and personnel to help those who need it most’ (Thompson 2005, 3) – both produces positive health outcomes in the recipient country and helps the donor country to build symbolic capital and prestige, while simultaneously improving relations between the two countries (Feinsilver 2010, 86). Governments are not the only actors to engage in medical diplomacy in global health settings. Since the end of World War II, a myriad of new actors with various agendas have stepped into this emerging field of diplomacy, including multinational corporations selling medical equipment, philanthropic organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Adams et al. 2008). During my tenure as director of the Division of Human Health at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, my team and I published a paper on global health diplomacy that reviewed the agency’s program activities in human health, which focus on radiation medicine and cancer, and on the peaceful applications of atomic energy within the context of global health diplomacy (Deatsch-Kratochvil et al. 2013). The idea of reflecting on the role of cobalt radiotherapy machines in medical diplomacy was born from that seminal paper, leading to the title chosen for this current essay.

Read the full article here in Medicine Anthropology Theory.

Image: "very klang" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by aarongilson

Several analysts have recently argued that unpredictable and blunt foreign-policy moves by the United States under President Donald Trump have prompted Japan — America’s most important East Asian ally — to move toward China. An article in the Wall Street Journal was headlined “Trump Trade Fight Brings Japan and China Together,” dubbing them “strange bedfellows.” Others have used the uncertainty caused by Trump as the background to a thaw between the two East Asian rivals.

Yet while there’s some truth to these arguments, Tokyo isn’t about to ditch Washington for Beijing anytime soon. Japan’s policy toward China is becoming more pragmatic in the face of growing Chinese power and a more uncertain U.S. role, but the last thing it wants is to see the United States disappear from East Asia.

Read the full article here at Foreign Policy.

Image: "China and Japan 1939" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Erik Daugaard Photography - Copenhagen

The discussion centered on the following topics: 

• Analyzing the results of the election;
• The state of emergency after the elections;
• U.S.-Turkey relations in Syria;
• The F-35 and S-400 missle crisis; and
• The future of the U.S.-Turkey relationship.

Click here for a full summary of the event. 

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325 (2000)) on Women, Peace and Security, formally acknowledging the changing nature of warfare and the disproportionate and differential impact of conflict on women. This resolution affirmed the importance of the participation of women and the inclusion of gender perspectives throughout all aspects of conflict prevention, mitigation and resolution, particularly in peace negotiations, humanitarian planning, peacekeeping operations, and post-conflict peacebuilding and governance. In the 18 years since this resolution was adopted, seven subsequent resolutions have been adopted by the Security Council on this agenda, further recognizing gender equality and women’s empowerment as critical to international peace and security.

Yet, the participation of women in peace processes is still lagging globally, despite qualitative and quantitative evidence demonstrating that security efforts will be more sustainable—and peace has a better chance of lasting longer—when women contribute to conflict prevention and early warning, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict resolution and rebuilding. This is not simply a matter of representation, where women have a seat at the table because they constitute fifty percent of the world’s population. Rather, it is a matter of operational effectiveness: when women play meaningful roles in these processes, societies are more stable, secure and less likely to relapse into conflict.

Laurel Stone’s quantitative analysis of 156 peace agreements from 1989 to 2011 has demonstrated that peace agreements have a 35 percent chance of lasting fifteen years or longer when women are included in the peace process, in stark contrast to half of all such initiatives that failed within five years during the 1990s. Further, the meaningful participation of women contributes to both the longevity of the peace, as well as to the achievement of the peace agreement itself. These findings follow from a qualitative analysis of forty peace and constitution-drafting negotiations since the 1990s, which found that parties were significantly more likely to agree to talks and subsequently reach an agreement when women’s groups exercised strong influence on the negotiations, as compared to when they had little or no influence.

Why does women’s participation matter at the peace table?

It is widely accepted that women experience conflict differently than men. This understanding of the disproportionate and differential impact of war on women was codified in UNSCR 1325 (2000). Research from the International Peace Institute draws on the work of Pluemper and Neumeyer, reminding us that “men make up the majority of combatants during conflict and are more likely than women to die from war’s direct effects. Women are more likely to die from war’s indirect effects after conflict ends—from causes relating to the breakdown in social order, human rights abuses, economic devastation, and the spread of infectious diseases.” As such, women who have had the chance to meaningfully participate in peace negotiations often broaden the range of topics being discussed at the table, from one of security, to wider issues of human rights and development.

Further, as peace processes evolve from outlining ceasefires, dividing territory, and power-sharing, and to further incorporating the elements that make up a society’s architecture—education, healthcare, infrastructure, access to justice—women’s participation is critical, as they bring to the table a unique set of perspectives based on their life experience.

In peace processes, women are perceived by both men and women as honest brokers; tend to reach across religious, ethnic, cultural and party lines; promote trust; raise issues critical to achieving a positive, durable peace; and prioritize issues of gender equality and women’s empowerment both in the peace agreement and its implementation.

Strategies and Modalities of Women’s Participation in the Peace Process

In this context, women can play a multitude of roles. Women can be mediators; delegates to negotiating parties or members of all-women negotiating parties representing a “women’s agenda;” signatories; witnesses; representatives of women’s civil society with an observer role; in a parallel forum, consultation or movement; as gender advisers to mediators, facilitators or delegates; members of technical committees; or part of informal and/or grassroots groups advocating for peace and mobilizing communities throughout the peace process.

It is in this latter category that women tend to be disproportionately represented, pushing for peace at the margins, as they are often excluded from the formal peace process. In some cases, informal participation has proven to be the most accessible way to exert influence. Research from the Inclusive Peace and Transition Initiative has found that the main factors enabling or constraining women’s participation and influence are elite support, public buy-in and the influence of regional and international actors in peace processes. Therefore, it is incumbent upon these parties to enable women’s meaningful participation.

A sustainable, durable peace

Peace processes can be defining moments in a country’s history, where new political structures, institutions and often constitutions are re-written and re-imagined. This is a critical juncture where the perspectives and needs of all members of the population must be addressed if the method and outcome is to be truly inclusive.

It remains critical for parties to reach a sustainable peace that not only addresses the short-term cessation of hostilities, but also the longer-term sustainability of the peace—a peace that is not solely considered the absence of violence, but one that aims to rebuild society. Women’s participation has proven to be critical to creating a lasting, durable peace.

The peace process also provides a unique inflection point where existing power structures can be challenged, and gender equality provisions can be written into and adopted by different structures. This is a vital step, as evidence has shown that societies with higher rates of gender equality are less likely to break out into and/or relapse into conflict. An inclusive peace process has the ability to truly transform a society. 

Hannah Beswick is the Women, Peace and Security Adviser and Gender Adviser at the Permanent Mission of the United Arab Emirates to the United Nations in New York.

Read the full publication here:

English: http://www.eda.ac.ae/images/pdf/EDA_Insight_Women_in_Peace_Processes_EN.pdf
Arabic: http://www.eda.ac.ae/images/pdf/EDA_Insight_Women_in_Peace_Processes_AR.pdf

The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy, an autonomous federal entity, of the UAE Government, or the EastWest Institute.

Image: "Workshop on UN resolution 1325" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by UNAMID Photo

On April 13, 2018, the United States carried out airstrikes in Syria in response to the country’s use of chemical weapons. The Office of Legal Council recently released its legal case for these strikes, determining that unilateral force is legal unless or until the “anticipated nature, scope, and duration” of the conflict reaches the level of “war in the constitutional sense.” Under Article II of the Constitution, the president is Commander in Chief and he can therefore direct military force in pursuit of a range of U.S. interests: “the promotion of regional stability, the prevention of a worsening of the region’s humanitarian catastrophe, and the deterrence of the use and proliferation of chemical weapons.” The opinion raised eyebrows, but how significant is it?

From a legal standpoint, it breaks little to no new legal ground. Rather, it is fully consistent with the Obama-era opinions that relied on Article II authority for military force, including for humanitarian disaster and in response to the use of chemical weapons. As the legal memo accurately stated, “When it comes to the war powers of the President [Article II], we do not write on a blank slate. The legal opinions of executive advisers and the still weightier precedents of history established” the constitutional prerogative to use force.

What makes it more notable is not the opinion itself, but what it signifies as part of a broader trend in American politics. At least since the Korean War, American leaders have studiously avoided being seen engaging in “war.” Several factors have conspired against leaders acknowledging the onset of war.

First, in large part because of the advent of nuclear weapons, American wars actually have moved from large-scale wars to smaller-scale conflicts.  The prospect of inordinate costs from a nuclear exchange deterred nuclear-armed countries from escalating, which has helped countries like the United States avoid repeating the bloodiest of its wars like the Civil War or either of the World Wars. On the other hand, modern conflicts no longer bring a sense of existential stakes that easily mobilize public support, so leaders simply try to skirt the discussion of war altogether.

For example, in 2008, the United States noticed that it was not losing in Afghanistan, but was not winning either. A review of the Afghanistan war noted that an impediment to progress was that it took 42 steps to obtain an Afghan driver’s license. Each step was an opportunity for bribery, which contributed to corruption and helped finance the Taliban insurgency. Not surprisingly, the Bush Administration was loath to release the review: “a public release will just make people scratch their heads.” How was the war taking so long? Why did the path to victory run through their equivalent Department of Motor Vehicles? The administration decided to scrap a public roll-out of the Afghan review. The question of how to sell a war with unsellable war aims presented itself in Vietnam as well. President Johnson hoped to avoid a debate on a “war” so he sidestepped all of the trappings of war, such as war taxes and massive escalation of troops. Rather, he engaged in deception and “escalated the war by stealth to avoid democratic debate.”

Second, as Tanisha Fazal shows in her new book, Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict, the codification of international law to govern the conduct of conflict, which has steadily evolved especially since World War II, has been a double-edged sword. To be sure, the laws of war have provided important guideposts for state behavior. States are required, at a minimum, to frame their actions in ways that are consistent with international law, which means they at least think about some form of legal behavior. But those same international legal provisions have had an unintended consequence. States have gone to great lengths to avoid being “in war” so they can sidestep legal constraints. For instance, Russia strips its soldiers of insignia so it can plausibly deny state involvement in Crimea, thereby de facto - but not de jure - annexing it. 

Third, technological advancements of war have further altered the appearance of war. Leaders have increasingly embraced “light footprint warfare,” including drones, special operations forces, and cyberattacks as less risky and less resource-intensive compared to conventional attacks that require boots on the ground.  Also referred to as “gray zone” conflict, or hybrid warfare, these tools have the additional virtue of providing “the thinnest veneer of deniability” and therefore help “fragment opposition to actions that otherwise invite a vocal, sometimes forceful, international response.”

All of these features of modern conflict guide leaders away from the threshold of “war.” Smaller-scale conflict is obviously preferable to the carnage that comes with large-scale war, but the move has the unintended consequence of eroding wartime accountability. Democracies are theoretically more accountable in the conduct of war because of institutions that help adjudicate decisions about war and lower the likelihood of foolhardy wars. For one, the marketplace of ideas, with a free press unrestricted by censorship, should help ferret out information about the basis for war. Opposition groups then have incentives to amplify the debate and use the levers of government to prevent the war or contain it once it has started. Taken together, the institutions should confer a “democratic advantage” in wartime, with wars shorter, less costly and more victorious than non-democracies.

The logic has intuitive appeal, but runs into headwinds in the current context. These institutions work far less fluidly when conflict is “not war,” when leaders can cast operations as below the threshold of war. As Jack Goldsmith and Matt Waxman observe, if drone strikes are out of sight, then “cyberattacks are even less visible.” These democratic institutions cannot function smoothly if wars are fought in the shadows, and the democratic advantages evaporate. Former President Obama, having presided over an expanded drone war, was  criticized for acting as “accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner,” in part because of the fecklessness of these institutions, including the legislature. It is also no coincidence that wars have become longer and costlier, with Afghanistan and Iraq two of the obvious examples.

The factors that have given rise to the current accountability crisis are unlikely to change. Since the populace itself is blissfully detached from the costs of war, it is unlikely to impose bottom-up pressures. Unfortunately, accountability then must fall on Congress, which has shown little appetite for imposing meaningful constraints. A start would be to renegotiate the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which has empowered three presidents to expand counterterrorism operations, virtually unfettered. Renegotiating an updated AUMF would at least require debate and a conscious decision about where and how force is permitted for counterterrorism, but would be less effective in constraining interventions such as those in Libya and Syria that appeared to rely on Article II authority. Here Congress needs to more actively insert itself in the debate or risk being relegated to bystander status.

Sarah Kreps is an associate professor of government and adjunct professor of law at Cornell University, and author of a recent book: Taxing Wars: The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018).

The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the EastWest Institute.

Image: "US Constitution" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by kjd

“Oh, no, no. Don’t. Don’t lift me.” Those were the last words of Robert Francis Kennedy, also simply known as “Bobby" or RFK, before the 42-year-old senator and presidential candidate slipped into a coma on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 6, 1968 from which he would not awake.

 Like his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, who was murdered in 1963, RFK was gunned down by the bullets of an assassin. He had just finished his victory speech in the ballroom of the hotel, where he thanked his supporters for their efforts in the 1968 Democratic primary in California, when the shots were fired.

For many Americans on this muggy summer night in Los Angeles fifty years ago it marked not only the death of Robert Kennedy but also a belief in American progress and the country’s political innocence. What followed the assassination was Watergate, Richard Nixon , the intensification of the Vietnam War and the escalation of racial violence in the United States.

Read the full article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (full text in German).

Image: "Group photo of four gentlemen including" (CC BY 2.0) by Kheel Center, Cornell University Library

In an increasingly globalised world, we are geographically very beneficially at the crossroads separating South Asia with Central Asia and the Middle East, this must be converted to our geo-political advantage. The new nation state of Pakistan felt quite vulnerable because of Indian hostility on its eastern borders and by Afghanistan's obstinate refusal on the western borders to recognize the newly formed state. The early compulsions formulating Pakistan's foreign policy were such that we had no choice but to find strong support in the world to help guard its very existence. There is no certainty as to what would have happened if Pakistan had opted for Soviet Union's support instead of choosing US as an ally. Given the social and mental setting of our early leaders, the evolving global cold war scenario found Pakistan aligned with the US as a natural choice, the Pakistan Army relying fully on American weaponry and equipment for its defensive needs. Our membership in SEATO and CENTO severely limited our foreign policy options.

US-Pakistan relations have been a roller-coaster ride from the outset. Not many remember American Gary Powers piloting US spy plane U-2 from Badaber air base near Peshawar before being shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Our precarious situation was highlighted by Khrushchev publicly putting us in the Soviet nuclear crosshairs. Though for decades Pakistan continued solidly siding and furthering US national security interests in the region and the world, the 1963 border agreement with China went against the grain. Similarly our interests were always not identical as the 80s Afghan War of the eighties and the one since 2001 has shown. Issues Pakistan considered dear to our national interest like the Kashmir and the crisis in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) never got more than verbal support. The Nixon-Kissinger "tilt" towards Pakistan involved only a symbolic show of force in the Indian Ocean by the US Sixth Fleet. The US has always come to our rescue with massive aid during national disasters like floods, cyclones, earthquakes etc, otherwise millions of lives would have been lost. For this we must remain ever grateful.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union, the bipolar world which came into existence after the World War II came to an end. The so-called 'non-aligned' bloc of which India was a driving force lost its importance even before the demise of the Soviet Union. This was capitalism's final victory over all alternative ways of life and development, the US war machine seen as vitally contributing to this victory. For a couple of decades, the world became unipolar, the US being the only superpower standing after almost five decades' of competition for global supremacy. Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' perceived Islam and the Muslim world that owned a large part of the oil and gas reserves of the planet as their new enemy. For a couple of years Russia, the defeated giant, was graciously given the role of a junior partner in the global game.

The happenings of 9/11 triggered a new wave of global polarization and warfare kept the world occupied while quite unnoticed the collapse of the Soviet Union saw a China-Russia rapprochement begin to take place. Declaring in 1992 that they were pursuing a "constructive partnership"; in 1996, they progressed toward a "strategic partnership"; and in 2001 signed a treaty of "friendship and cooperation" that led to the foundation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Eurasian in its design this new organisation reminds one of the European Union (EU) in its principles of association. Drawing new members it has developed into a new political, economic and security-related focal point that has quietly changed the relations in Asia. India and Pakistan together have becoming new members since 2017but that has not automatically solved our problems. As the sudden thaw in cross-border firing across the LOC has shown, could this be changing? This new SCO platform promises stability and options for negotiated resolution of crises. While the Arab Middle East is up in flames and destabilized for the time, the Asian mainland has generally avoided such turmoil. Without much fanfare the economic counterpart of Baghdad Pact and the CENTO, the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD),has been replaced by the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). Compared to three countries forming the RCD,ECO has more than a dozen countries of the region as members. Could this be the harbinger of a Baghdad Pact "in reverse", with Russia and China the new sponsors for Iran, Turkey and Pakistan instead of the US and UK?

Despite coming in for constant criticism, Pakistan's foreign policy has astutely availed the new opportunities. Diversifying our security-related cooperation towards China and Russia, we have taken a hands-on attitude in promoting the peace process in Afghanistan. The Army has succeeded in stabilizing the tribal areas by clearing the Haqqanis and other militant bases in Swat and FATA as well as fencing the vulnerable border to avoid illegal border crossing of militants. The legal foundation for a full-fledged integration of the tribal areas into Pakistan to bring them at par with the rest of the country has been laid. Despite the anti-Pakistani attitude and consequent rhetoric among certain circles of the Afghan civil and military, the US must take cognizance of our vital role in any initiative to achieve their goals in Afghanistan.

Pakistan is the crossroads bridge between the different regions of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Our foreign policy commitments have to mirror our special responsibility to keep the region stable. Pakistan needs to work hard to improve relations with our immediate neighbours, this forbids our joining any bloc or having relationships with one country to the exclusion of others. The decision not to join the war in Yemen but to join the Saudi-initiated military alliance against counter-terrorism is an example of how to keep a balance between our next-door neighbour Iran and an old friend Saudi Arabia. Similarly we must maintain the balance between an old ally US, our deep friendship with China and the newly developing relations with Russia. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a great economic force-multiplier for us, it is fortunately for us a Chinese economic strategic compulsion. We need to work hard to revive our relationship with the US to an even keel. Pakistan's national interest lies in being a member of no bloc but to be friends with all the blocs.

Read the piece on Business Recorder.