Tax and fragile states: Challenges for Norwegian development assistance
States need revenue to function and an efficient tax system plays an important role. Can Norwegian development assistance contribute to this?
Top marks for NUPI’s EU project
Reviewers find NUPI-led research on the EU’s crisis response "exceptional"!
Women and the Katiba Macina in Central Mali
This policy brief examines the local rule of the Katiba Macina from a gender perspective and addresses the question of women’s participation in the insurgency. The key findings can be summarised as follows. First,controlling gender relations is an important element of the Katiba Macina’s rule, allowing the insurgency to demonstrate its authority over the community. Second, its rule has also had a gendered impact, which has restricted livelihoods in ways that threaten not only women’s socio-economic security, but also their way of life and identity. Third, women, like in most other jihadist insurgencies, are not recruited as combatants, but have multi-faceted supporting roles as wives of ‘men of the bush’ and as informants in informal surveillance mechanisms that pass on information and contribute to maintaining law and order. Moreover, women are more likely to actively participate when they are bonded to the insurgency through familial ties.
The evolving political dynamics in Ethiopia and its implications for the Horn of Africa
In this seminar, Dr. Abdeta Beyene of the Centre for Dialogue, Research and Cooperation in Ethiopia will talk about the evolving political dynamics in Ethiopia and its implications for the greater Horn of Africa.
Disengaging from violent extremism: The case of al-Shabaab in Somalia
Disengagement, rehabilitation and reintegration for members of violent extremist groups during ongoing conflict is a tricky matter. Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes are normally implemented after a peace agreement is in place. However, this does not apply to south central Somalia, as well as other conflict-ridden areas around the world today. Providing adequate security for those wanting to leave violent extremist groups is arguably a key element for success for programmes operating in such contexts. This article looks at some of the security challenges the Defector Rehabilitation Programme (DRP) for al-Shabaab members has encountered in south central Somalia. The lessons learnt presented in this article were mainly gathered through discussions and presentations made at a training held in Nairobi in November 2017 by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) for programme staff in the DRP. Interviews and conversations were also carried out with staff members and partners involved in different stages of the programme, and practitioners and stakeholders working to prevent or counter violent extremism in Somalia, during field trips to south central Somalia between 2013 and 2017
United Nations Stabilization Operations: Chapter Seven and a Half
The UN Security Council has in recent years included the term ‘stabilization’ in the name of the operations deployed to Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Central African Republic. But, are they stabilization operations? Although the concept has become increasingly popular in the UN context, it seems to denote everything from robust military action to early peacebuilding activities, and for this reason the UN high-level independent panel on peace operations in 2015 recommended to avoid the concept until it was further clarified. To contribute to this clarification, the article follows two main lines of inquiry—first it unpacks the different meanings of stabilization in UN peace operations by drawing upon the experiences of current UN stabilization missions such as MONUSCO in the DRC and MINUSMA in Mali. Based on this inquiry, it argues that what we are witnessing is cognitive slippage—where a broad range of unrelated activities are gathered under the same concept as a discursive tool to get financial and political support from Western partners. Second, the article ventures on to examine how the center of gravity of international interventions has moved on to a prevalence of ad-hoc coalitions undertaking counterterrorism operations, and what impact this has on UN peace operations, and in particular the understanding of stabilization in these. It argues that these missions could be termed Chapter seven and a half operations as they combine UN peace operations under Chapter VII mandates with the inclusion of regional ad hoc coalitions of the willing.
Breakfast seminar: The EU in the Sahel – from good intentions to Europe first?
Researchers from some of the world's leading institutes have in a three-year project looked into which local impacts the EU crisis response has had in the areas where they have taken place, and how the EU can improve its response mechanisms.
How do Islamist movements relate to the modern state?
The first research notes from the HYRES project are out, analyzing several very timely questions related to Islamist movements in Mali, Iraq, Libya and Lebanon.
Mali's Religious Leaders and the 2018 Presidential Elections
Mali is by constitution a secular state, but here as elsewhere in the Sahel the role of religious leaders is increasing both in the social and the political sphere. This HYRES research brief explains how, why, and in what ways religious leaders tried to gain influence in the 2018 presidential campaign. While the research brief shows that there has been a fusion of politics and religion that can increase the political influence of Malian religious leaders, such engagement can also be a double-edged sword as Malians tend to see ‘politics as dirty’ and not a field that pious men of faith should get too deeply involved in.
EPON at Stockholm Forum for Peace and Development 2019
On 14-16 May 2019, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs co-hosted the 2019 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development titled ‘From crisis response to peacebuilding: Achieving synergies’.