Earlier this month, The Guardian reported that the Obama administration blocked a Pentagon supported plan to provide arms to Syrian opposition forces. For civilians in Syria hoping for meaningful intervention to stop the conflict, this must have been difficult news...
The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) recently determined that the situation in the entire country of Syria can be classified as a non-international armed conflict. While this may...
The Institute for Economics and Peace is making a big splash today with the release of the 2012 edition of its annual Global Peace Index (GPI)---"the world's leading measure of global...
Timothy Peterson and Leah Graham recently published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that, after you control for the democratic peace, similarities in human rights performance...
Blue moon, you targeted me standing alone...Yesterday Charli wrote a post on whether or not those opposed to the use of drones should use the concept of “atrocity law” instead of “war crimes” or human rights violations.I wonder if others who generally oppose "targeted killings" think the concept of "atrocity law" might be a more useful way of framing this problem publicly than talking about "war crimes" or "human rights" specifically - concepts that by their nature draw the listener's attention to a legal regime that only partially bears on the activity in question and invites contrasting...
Yesterday the ICRC released a report on the very scary and depressing trend of attacks on medical workers in situations of armed conflict and civil disturbances:According to Dr Robin Coupland, who led the research carried out in 16 countries across the globe, millions could be spared if the delivery of health care were more widely respected. "The most shocking finding is that people die in large numbers not because they are direct victims of a roadside bomb or a shooting," he said. "They die because the ambulance does not get there in time, because health-care personnel are prevented from...
Joshua Goldstein has a must-read book in press entitled Winning the War on War. I've seen the advance version and like many things about it, not least of which is the easy-reading style pitched at an informed lay audience, the way he begins with a thought experiment rather than with a bunch of statistics, then draws the reader through available scholarly research in an entertaining way to develop his argument. The thought experiment: imagine you're in a time machine moving backward from 2011 to prehistoric times, comparing a) the past ten years with the past twenty; b) the past twenty years...
Last week, Ban Ki-Moon made his standard plea for an Olympic Truce during the XXI Olympic Winter Games from Feb. 12 to Feb. 28 February and the X Winter Paralympic Games from March 12th to 21st.Thing is, the concept of the Olympic Truce is based on two fallacies: 1) that nation-states (which are the units of contestation in the Olympics) are also the containers of political community and 2) that they are the wagers of war against one another whose actions must be tamed.But actually, the fault-lines of global violence fall not between states but rather within them, evident in the fact that...
A recent paper from Brookings, Georgetown and Hoover discusses the international legal aspects of targeted killing. As you would expect, American policy isn't in sync with the emerging global norm. An idealist might argue that the US is in the wrong (and they have a very strong case under the International Convention on Human Rights); a Realist might argue that the US needs the latitude to kill because it (or somebody--and nobody else is available) has the responsibility to combat enemies of the legal regime that everyone else assumes. The point that I hadn't thought of before is the...
The now independent states that once made up the Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are often referred to in Russia as the "near-abroad". The meaning of near-abroad, depending on how broadly you want to interpret it, can range from "those areas that used to be part of Russia in our imperial past" to "those areas that really ought to be within our sphere of influence" to "those areas where we have the right to meddle at will". Relations between Russia and the near-abroad range from "let us celebrate our Slavic brotherhood" (Belarus, the gas price kerfuffle of late 2006...