Publikasjoner
Why Consider New Approaches to Peacebuilding and Evaluation, and Why Turn to Complexity for Answers?
Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation
This book addresses the core dilemma that practitioners have to confront: how to function in situations that are fast changing and complex, when equipped with tools designed for neither? How do we reconcile the tension between the use of linear causal logic and the dynamic political transitions that interventions are meant to assist? Insights from Complexity Thinking for Peacebuilding Practice and Evaluation covers the design, evaluation, and learning for international interventions aiming to promote peace. More specifically, it reconceptualises this space by critically analysing mainstream approaches – presenting both conceptual and empirical content. This volume offers a variety of original and insightful contributions to the debates grappling with the adoption of complexity thinking. Readers will be given a rare opportunity to superimpose the latest conceptual innovations with the latest case study applications and from a diverse spectrum of organisational vantage points. This provides the myriad practitioners and consultants in this space with invaluable insights as to how to improve their trade craft, while ensuring policy makers and the accompanying research/academic industry have clearer guidance and innovative thinking. This edited volume provides critically innovative offerings for the audiences that make up this broad area’s practitioners, researchers/academics/educators, and consultants, as well as policy makers.
Lebanon on the brink
Gravely affected by the Syrian crisis, Lebanon has managed to remain relatively stable against all odds – despite the influx of some 1.5 million Syrian refugees and internal political crisis involving actors who support opposing Syrian factions. Lebanon’s resilience can be explained by the high opportunity cost of state breakdown for domestic, regional and international political actors. Moreover, international economic assistance, diaspora remittances and informal networks established by refugees help to prevent outright economic breakdown. Yet, stability remains extremely precarious. Important tipping points include (1) the IS strategy of spreading the conflict to Lebanon, and the consequent disintegration of the army along sectarian lines, (2) democratic decline and popular dissatisfaction, (3) Hizbullah’s domestic ambitions and Israeli fears over the group’s growing military power and (4) the potential for frustration between refugees and host communities turning into recurrent violence. However, (5) the slow economic decline and the worsening sanitary conditions stand out as the greatest challenges.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the New Eurasian Order
As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has redirected the structures and the objectives of both foreign and domestic policy in the PRC. BRI’s goal is primarily economic: to increase trade and investment along China’s periphery by funding and building infrastructure projects. But it is more. Through an analysis of official and semiofficial sources, this policy brief will show that BRI aims to weave neighboring countries into a network of economic, political, cultural, and security relations centered around China. BRI is a new project that is still taking shape. Yet, its objectives are ambitious: Beijing’s grand strategy is to re-constitute the Eurasian regional order with new governance ideas, norms, and rules. The policy brief concludes that European countries should address China’s challenge by stressing their commitment to the normative goals of multilateralism, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law in an open, rule-based global order.
Gender-Based Violence and Access to Justice: Grand Bassa County, Liberia
Liberia has a dual justice system: there is a formal court hierarchy under the judiciary (i.e. a statutory justice system), as well asa system of customary courts. In this project, this report examines the issue of gender-based violence (GBV) in relation o these two systems. This report is based on fieldwork in Grand Bassa County, and builds on qualitative data (interviews and focus groups) and quantitative data (survey). The survey showed that the majority of respondents (96%) have access to forms of local justice, i.e. a justice system that is affordable and nearby. This also corresponds well with our qualitative data. We have identified various challenges as well as potentials with both the customary and the statutory justice systems as regards GBV. First, the statutory system remains largely unavailable to the majority of the Liberian population, for reasons that include costs, travel distance, language and cultural barriers. That being said, the statutory system offers a more standardized procedure, with the potential of ensuring a more gender-equal form of justice compared to many of the customary systems. On the other hand, the customary systems are far more readily available, and are also efficient in handling various kinds of cases. However, there are also limitations, includingthe perceived low legitimacy of traditional authorities among youth as well as among influential organizations and institutions that support international human rights approaches, as women are often subordinate to men in the traditional institutions. Both system have many potentials. The authorities in charge of customary law acknowledge their limitations in handling GBV cases, and many are also motivated to include perspectives from youth and women in today’s Liberia. As the customary systems are available and affordable to most of the populace, there is much to be said for empowering and strengthening their roles and also improving communication with the statutory system. The statutory system is overburdened and could benefit from stronger working relations with the customary system.
Caught in the Act but not Punished: on Elite Rule of Law and Deterrence
Most literature on criminal deterrence in law, economics, and criminology assumes that people who are caught for a crime will be punished. The literature focuses on how the size of sanctions and probability of being caught affect criminal behavior. However, in many countries entire groups of people are “above the law” in the sense that they are able to evade punishment even if caught violating the law. In this paper we argue that both the perceived probability of being punished if caught and the cultural acceptance of elites evading punishment are important parts of theorizing about deterrence, particularly about corruption among political elites. Looking at data on parking violations among diplomats in New York City 1997–2002, we explore how diplomats from different rule-of-law cultures respond to sudden legal immunity. The empirical observations provide clear evidence of both the stickiness and the gradual weakening of cultural constraints.
Report: GoodGov: Work Together, Govern Better: Polish and Norwegian Cooperation towards More Efficient Security, Energy and Migration Policies
This report presents the main findings of the research project conducted between 2013 and 2016 by the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), with support from the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (ISP PAN). It also maps the project’s achievements, examines its policy relevance and identifies various knowledge gaps revealed during the study that should be addressed by new research. The GoodGov project has revealed important governance-related differences between Poland and Norway. These result from the interaction of various internal and external factors, including historical experience and path dependence, geographical location and the challenges it poses, various types of resources and access to them, institutional solutions and membership in various international organisations and frameworks. The latter, such as the EU and the EEA, are of special note as they set their own governance-related priorities, rules and solutions that have both a direct and indirect bearing on national governance in Poland and Norway. Based on the analysis of available data, this research project found that the governance system in Norway is perceived as more efficient than in Poland. In addition to the factors mentioned above, this may also be linked to the application of domestic learning mechanisms in Norway, where review of governance and learning play an important role and the apparent lack of such mechanisms in Poland. Since Norway ranks systematically higher than Poland in all six key categories assessed within the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, one could expect the transfer of governance-related knowledge between Norway and Poland to be a possible means of improving governance in Poland, including in the three fields in focus in this study—security, energy and migration. However, the potential for governance learning seems to be hampered by structural differences between Norway and Poland, by the fact that Poland and Norway are in different categories in at least two of the examined fields (energy and migration), and because Norway has decided to remain outside of the EU while Poland is a fully-fledged member. What complicates the picture even more is that the experimentalist approach to governance learning works better in some fields, such as energy and migration, and is much less present and efficient in other governance fields, such as security. Another factor limiting governance transfer is a visible preference for the application of hierarchical, international means of learning instead of nonhierarchical transnational learning practices among professional equals, which is considered to be far more efficient. All the governance-related challenges and differences notwithstanding, Poland and Norway should seek to closely work together for the sake of governance-related improvements.