Publications
The Mosul campaign: Winning the war, losing the peace?
After three years and a costly war, which recently destroyed the great al-Nouri mosque in Mosul, the military defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq is imminent. The Mosul offensive is a test case for both Iraq and for the international coalition; if it succeeds, it could be used as a model to be applied elsewhere in the region, such as in Raqqa. If it fails to create stability in Nineveh and Iraq, a new radical group may emerge, with far-reaching consequences. There are at least four essential reasons for concern. The first is the lack of a real Iraqi and regional coalition against ISIS. The reluctance of regional actors to work together against ISIS makes the ideological battle against it difficult. Governments in the Middle East do not consider ISIS their prime enemy; for instance, for Turks, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and not ISIS, is the main terrorist group. The Saudi-Iran rivalry takes priority over the regional battle against ISIS and fuels sectarianisation and extremism in both camps.
Liban : les paradoxes du salafisme jihadisme levantin
Le Liban est un contre-exemple des recherches sur la guerre civile, qui souvent surévaluent le potentiel de contagion transfrontalière des conflits. En dépit de nombreux facteurs qui aurait pu entraîner l’expansion au Liban de la crise en Syrie, les débordements restent limités, comparés à la violence de l’autre côté de la frontière. Malgré les liens historiques étroits entre les champs islamistes syrien et libanais, le nombre de Libanais sunnites ayant rejoint les djihadistes en Syrie est réduit (environ 1 000 personnes). C’est avant tout la surenchère confessionnelle et la rancune vis-à-vis du Hezbollah qui pourraient entraîner un nombre plus important de jeunes sunnites vers la prise d’armes. Si Daech ou Al-Qaïda misent sur cette option, et si les frustrations politiques et économiques d’une partie des sunnites ne s’atténuent pas sous le nouveau gouvernement, les risques de violence et de discorde civile, à long terme, demeurent plus que réels.
Limiting violent spill-over in civil wars. The paradoxes of Lebanese Sunni jihadism. 2011-2017
Research on violent spillovers in civil war has often exaggerated the potential for conflict contagion. The case of Lebanon is a counter-example. Despite the massive pressure of the horrific war in next-door Syria, it has, against all odds, remained remarkably stable – despite the influx of more than 1 million Syrian refugees and almost complete institutional blockage. This paper, based on ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews from Lebanon, studies the determination to avoid a violent spillover into Lebanon from the perspective of the country’s Sunni Islamists. Recent trends in the scholarly literature have shown that Islamists are not inherently revolutionary, nor always dogmatists, and often serve many social purposes at home. The main argument is that the Syrian war has not been imported into Lebanon; instead, the Lebanese conflict is externalized to Syria. Lebanon’s conflicting factions, including the Islamists, have found the costs of resorting to violence inside Lebanon to be too high. Even those Lebanese Sunnis who have crossed the borders to fight in Syria do so because of domestic reasons, that is, to fight against Hezbollah on Syria soil, where they can do so without risking an explosion of the Lebanese security situation. Sectarianism, in the sense of opposition to Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia, is the main driver of radicalization for Lebanese Sunnis.
Civil-Military Relations in Lebanon. Conflict, Cohesion and Confessionalism in a Divided Society
This volume examines Lebanon’s post-2011 security dilemmas and the tenuous civil-military relations. The Syrian civil war has strained the Lebanese Armed Forces’ (LAF) cohesion and threatens its neutrality – its most valued assets in a divided society. The spill-over from the Syrian civil war and Hezbollah’s military engagement has magnified the security challenges facing the Army, making it a target. Massive foreign grants have sought to strengthen its military capability, stabilize the country and contain the Syria crisis. However, as this volume demonstrates, the real weakness of the LAF is not its lack of sophisticated armoury, but the fragile civil–military relations that compromise its fighting power, cripple its neutrality and expose it to accusations of partisanship and political bias. This testifies to both the importance of and the challenges facing multi-confessional armies in deeply divided countries.
Conclusion: Are Rising Powers Breaking the Peacebuilding Mold?
In this concluding chapter we analyze the peacebuilding concepts, policies and practices of the group of rising powers - Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey – that we have chosen to focus on in this book. We find that these countries share a number of approaches, but note that they also diverge in several areas. The rising powers have a broader concept of peacebuilding than most Western donor countries, but the extent to which they equate peacebuilding with development varies. They have a more holistic operational approach, they have a longer time horizon and a strong emphasis on national ownership, but the latter is often narrowed down to governmental consent. They share a heightened sensitivity to sovereignty, but negotiate this in a variety of different ways. It is also possible that rising powers will adopt more results-based and shorter-term approaches. We find that the rising powers have influenced the discourse and practices of peacebuilding, especially at the United Nations, but have not transformed them. Several recent setbacks raise doubts about whether rising powers will sustain their new influential role in peacebuilding. Our research show that rising powers have set forth a broadly coherent set of principles and rationales as the basis for their new approach to peacebuilding. These principles and practices, and especially their results, are likely to influence how Western donors, the UN, regional organizations and non-governmental organizations approach peacebuilding in important ways in the coming years.
Introduction: Why Examine Rising Powers and Peacebuilding?
Over the last decade several setbacks in places like Burundi, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen, to name a few, have significantly eroded the prominence that peacebuilding enjoyed in the international system. The failure of peacebuilding to deliver sustained peace has combined with a push from rising powers against Western dominance, to produce a turn to the Global South as a source for more legitimate and effective responses to mass organized violence in the world. Onto this stage new actors like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and several other prominent regional powers in the Global South, like Indonesia and Turkey, have emerged as new ‘donors’ that advance their own political and technical approaches to peacebuilding. The entry of the rising powers into the peacebuilding field are likely to have significant implications for how the UN and other international and regional organisations, as well as both the traditional donors and the recipient countries view peacebuilding in the future. Their entry may fundamentally alter how we understand and undertake peacebuilding a decade or more from now. With this book, we seek to answer the following central question: What exactly is new and innovative about the peacebuilding approach of the rising powers from the Global South, and what are the implications of these new approaches for peacebuilding? In this introductory chapter, we explain why this question is important, and how we have gone about answering it in the book. The introduction thus give the reader an overview of the context, key research questions and the structure of the book.
Rising Powers and Peacebuilding: Breaking the Mold
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines the policies and practices of rising powers on peacebuilding. It analyzes how and why their approaches differ from those of traditional donors and multilateral institutions. The policies of the rising powers towards peacebuilding may significantly influence how the UN and others undertake peacebuilding in the future. This book is an invaluable resource for practitioners, policy makers, researchers and students who want to understand how peacebuilding is likely to evolve over the next decades.
Adapting NATO’s Conventional Force Posture in the Nordic-Baltic Region
The security of NATO members in the Nordic-Baltic region is interconnected by such factors as the possibility of geographical escalation, the importance of securing the North Atlantic for U.S. reinforcement of Europe, and the key role of cooperation with NATO partners Sweden and Finland. NATO must consider these interconnections as it continues to adapt to the challenge posed by Russia. NATO’s further adaptation should fill in the gaps in Allied force posture and be guided by an overarching principle of ensuring coherence between its existing elements and new ones. Given Poland and Norway’s close views on NATO and transatlantic relations, as well as their credibility rooted in their various contributions to the Alliance, the countries should jointly advocate a coherent process in the Nordic-Baltic region.
UN-Friedenssicherung und Terrorismusbekämpfung: seltsame Bettgenossen?
English summary: UN Peacekeeping and Counterterrorism: Uncomfortable Bedfellows? Based on the case of the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the article argues that UN peacekeeping neither is, nor will be ready operationally, doctrinally or politically to take on counterterrorism tasks. Such a development will jeopardize the legal protection of UN staff, and the ability of the UN to be an impartial arbiter of conflict, and for other parts of the UN family to carry out humanitarian work. The article thus argues that MINUSMA is an anomaly in the history of UN peacekeeping, and should be avoided as an example for future operations.
Public opinion in Putin’s Russia. The public sphere, opinion climate and ‘authoritarian bias’
Russian public opinion polls regularly report approval ratings of 84% to 86% for President Vladimir Putin – but can we trust those figures? This question has come to the fore after the events of 2014. Although Putin’s decision to annex Crimea, with the subsequent broad confrontation with the West, was seen by many as extremely damaging for the country’s long-term development, Putin’s approval ratings have shown almost unquestioning support for his policies. Does this support reveal deep-rooted anti-Westernism in Russian society, or an imperialistic mood? Or is it the result of intense propaganda campaigns and polling fabrications?