The Center for International Security and Cooperation is a center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
The United Nations Secretariat--the main part of the UN bureaucracy directly under the Secretary-General--has arguably changed or been challenged more than any other part of the UN system in recent years, with more and more mandates and rising expectations. Though much attention has been given to the reform of the Security Council, and though Washington has made UN 'management reform' a core pillar of its UN policy since the Oil-for-Food scandal, the UN Secretariat has nevertheless proved singularly impervious to even the common sense suggestions for improvement. In many ways, there is a greater gap today than at any time in the past between what the Secretariat does, what it's meant to do, and the capacity it has. Why has improvement been so difficult and what have been the recurrent mistakes of UN reform efforts? With the election of a new Secretary-General due in late 2006, can we think about the UN bureaucracy in a different and more practical way?
Thant Myint-U is a visiting senior fellow at the International Peace Academy. He is also a senior advisor to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council and a Fellow of the Cambridge University Centre for History and Economics.
From 2000-2006 he worked in the United Nations Secretariat, first for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and then for the Department of Political Affairs (DPA). From 2004-5 he was Chief of DPA's Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political and in 2005-6 he was a Senior Political Officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In 2004 he was also a member of the Secretariat of the Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.
Thant Myint-U has also served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, with UNTAC in Cambodia in 1992-3 and with UNPROFOR and UNMIBH in the former Yugoslavia from 1994-6. In 1994 he was the UN's senior spokesman in Sarajavo.
From 1994-1999 Thant Myint-U was a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where he researched and taught Asian and British imperial history. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1988, his master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1992 and his PhD in history from Cambridge University in 1996.
He is the author of several published and broadcast works, including two books: The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps: Remembering Burma's Past (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006 forthcoming).
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non-Eurocentric security studies.
Lyman and Morrison will discuss the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force Report on the US and Africa. The Report argues that Africa is becoming steadily more central to the United States and to the rest of the world in ways that transcend humanitarian interests. Africa now plays an increasingly significant role in supplying energy, preventing the spread of terrorism, and halting the devastation of HIV/AIDS. Africa's growing importance is reflected in the intensifying competition with China and other countries for both access to African resources and influence in this region. A more comprehensive U.S. policy toward Africa is needed, the report states, and it lays out recommendations for policymakers to craft that policy. The report is available at www.cfr.org.
Princeton N. Lyman is the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow and Director for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. Ambassador Lyman served for over three decades at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), completing his government service as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. He was previously Ambassador to South Africa, Ambassador to Nigeria, Director of Refugee Programs and Director of the USAID Mission to Ethiopia.
From 1999 to 2000, he was Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Ambassador Lyman held the position of Executive Director of the Global Interdependence Initiative of the Aspen Institute (1999 to 2003) and has received the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Department of State Distinguished Honor Award. Ambassador Lyman has published on foreign policy, African affairs, economic development, HIV/AIDS, UN reform, and peacekeeping. He coauthored the Council on Foreign Relations Special Report entitled Giving Meaning to "Never Again": Seeking an Effective Response to the Crisis in Darfur and Beyond. His book, Partner to History: The U.S. Role in South Africa's Transition to Democracy, was published in 2002. He earned his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. He serves as the Co-Director of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force on Africa.
J. Stephen Morrison is Director of the Africa Program and the Task Force on HIV/AIDS at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He joined CSIS in January 2000 and in late 2001, launched the CSIS Task Force on HIV/AIDS. The task force is a multiyear project co-chaired by Senators Bill Frist (R-TN) and John Kerry (D-MA) and funded by the Gates Foundation and the Catherine Marron Foundation. Dr. Morrison co-chaired the reassessment of the U.S. approach to Sudan that laid the basis for the Bush administration push for a negotiated peace settlement, and in the summer of 2002 he organized an energy expert mission to the Sudan peace negotiations in Kenya.
From 1996 through early 2000, Dr. Morrison served on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, where he was responsible for African affairs and global foreign assistance issues. In that position, he led the State Department's initiative on illicit diamonds and chaired an interagency review of the U.S. government's crisis humanitarian programs. From 1993 to 1995, Dr. Morrison conceptualized and launched USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives; he served as the office's first Deputy Director and created post-conflict programs in Angola and Bosnia. From 1992 until mid-1993, Dr. Morrison was the Democracy and Governance Adviser to the U.S. embassies and USAID missions in Ethiopia and Eritrea. He serves as the Co-Director of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force on Africa.
CISAC Conference Room
Contemporary terrorism is rarely discussed through the lens of North-South relations. The favoured tropes revolve around the clash of cultures and the defence of civilization, rather than the struggle between rich and the poor, the strong and the weak. Casual reference to studies putatively demonstrating poverty does not lead to terrorism is seemingly sufficient to settle the issue. But past and present North-South relations are of profound significance for the current conflict. They in fact comprise in large measure its historical and social context. Grasping this context is essential for crafting strategies that do more than fuel the burning resentments of peoples who suffered historic defeats at the hands of imperial powers. It is also essential for avoiding the dire domestic consequences past "small wars" have had for Western powers, not least in France and the US.
A growing number of international relations scholars argue that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace. Existing approaches emphasize IGO membership as an important causal attribute of individual states, much like economic development and regime type. The authors use social network analysis to show that IGO memberships also create a disparate distribution of social power, significantly shaping conflicts between states. Membership partitions states into structurally equivalent clusters and establishes hierarchies of prestige in the international system. These relative positions promote common beliefs and alter the distribution of social power, making certain policy strategies more practical or rational. The authors introduce new IGO relational data and explore the empirical merits of their approach during the period from 1885 to 1992. They demonstrate that conflict is increased by the presence of many other states in structurally equivalent clusters, while large prestige disparities and in-group favoritism decrease it.
Martha Crenshaw is the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., where she has taught since 1974. She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. Her recent work includes the chapter on "Coercive Diplomacy and the Response to Terrorism," in The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (United States Institute of Peace Press), "Terrorism, Strategies, and Grand Strategies", in Attacking Terrorism (Georgetown University Press), and "Counterterrorism in Retrospect" in the July-August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs. She serves on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chairs the American Political Science Association Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism.
She has served on the Council of the APSA and is a former president and councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2004 ISPP awarded her its Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and in 2005 the Jeanne Knutson Award for service to the society. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Orbis, Political Psychology, Security Studies, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. For the next three years she will be a lead investigator with the new National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. She is also the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2005-2006. She serves on the Committee on Law and Justice and the Committee on Determining Basic Research Needs to Interrupt the Improvised Explosive Device Delivery Chain of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. Her current research focuses on why the U.S. is the target of terrorism and the distinction between "old" and "new" terrorism, as well as how campaigns of terrorism come to an end.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler at Oxford University have reported that countries with a higher percentage of national income from primary commodity exports have been more prone to civil war, an interesting finding that has received much attention from policy makers and the media. In this paper, James Fearon shows that this result is quite fragile, even using Collier and Hoeffler's data. Minor changes in the sample framing and the recovery of missing data undermine it. To the extent that there is an association, it is likely because oil is a major component of primary commodity exports and substantial oil production does associate with civil war risk. Fearon argues that oil predicts civil war risk not because it provides an easy source of rebel start-up finance but probably because oil producers have relatively low state capabilities given their level of per capita income and because oil makes state or regional control a tempting "prize." An analysis of data on government observance of contracts and investor-perceived expropriation risk is consistent with this hypothesis.
A new united nations report recommending the most sweeping reform in the institution's history offers a global vision of collective security for the 21st century that is as committed to development in poor nations as it is to prevention of nuclear terrorism in rich ones.
The point is, according to the report's research director, Stephen Stedman, a threat to one is a threat to all in today's world. "Globalization means that a major terrorist attack anywhere in the industrial world would have devastating consequences for the well-being of millions around the developing world," the document states. The report's value lies in putting forward a comparative framework of collective security that addresses all the compelling threats of the day, Stedman explained. "The recommendations really are the most important possible makeover of the institution in 60 years," he said. "I think something is going to come out of it." Stedman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS), was recruited a year ago by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to direct research for the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. Stedman is an expert on civil wars, mediation, conflict prevention, and peacekeeping.
Annan created the 16-member blue-ribbon panel, made up mostly of former government leaders and ministers, in the wake of widespread heated criticism of the United Nations following the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In Annan's annual report to the General Assembly in 2003, he said, "Rarely have such dire forecasts been made about the U.N. ... We have reached a fork in the road ... a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the U.N. was founded." The panel was charged with analyzing global security threats and proposing far-reaching reforms to the international system.
On December 2 the panel, chaired by former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun, issued its 95-page report: "A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility." The document identifies six major threats to global security:
-War between states;
-Violence within states, including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses, and genocide;
-Poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation;
-Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons;
-Terrorism; and
-Transnational organized crime.
Although states do not face these threats equally, a collective security system must take all member states' threats seriously and deal with them equitably, the report noted. It specifically mentioned the world's appallingly slow response to AIDS.
The report makes 101 recommendations for collective prevention and response to the threats, including ways to reform the United Nations. Annan described these in a December 3 editorial in the International Herald Tribune as "the most comprehensive and coherent set of proposals for forging a common response to common threats that I have seen."
The document also reaffirms the right of states to defend themselves-even preemptively-when an attack is imminent, and it offers guidelines to help the Security Council decide when to authorize the use of force. Stedman said other significant proposals involve improving biosecurity, strengthening nuclear nonproliferation, and defining terrorism. Panel members agreed that any politically motivated violence against civilians should be regarded as terrorism and condemned.
The panel was very critical of the Human Rights Commission, a body that has often harmed the United Nations' reputation by permitting the membership of some of the worst human-rights violators, including Cuba, Libya, and Sudan. The report also discussed the need for new institutions, such as a peace-building commission, that would support countries emerging from conflict.
Scott Sagan, co-director of CISAC, described the report as hard-hitting, although he said he would have tried to extend the withdrawal clause of the nonproliferation treaty from three months to a year. "I think it's the beginning of some major changes that will be helpful," he said. "We need to get states to work together to reform the U.N. rather than sniping at it."
CISAC was closely involved in the panel's work and was named in a cover letter accompanying the report from Panyarachun to Annan. Co-director Chris Chyba served on the panel's 30-member resource group, providing expertise on nuclear nonproliferation and bioterrorism. Bruce Jones, a former CISAC Hamburg Fellow, acted as Stedman's deputy, and Tarun Chhabra, a graduate of CISAC's undergraduate honors program and recent Marshall Scholarship recipient, worked as a research officer. Political science Professors David Laitin and James Fearon, and SIIS Senior Fellow David Victor, provided, respectively, expertise on terrorism, civil wars, and the environment, Stedman said. "There is an immense amount of Stanford influence in the report," he added.
CISAC also hosted a nuclear nonproliferation workshop for the panel on campus last March and helped organize a meeting during the summer in Bangkok. SIIS co-hosted a conference on governance and sovereignty on campus in April and a meeting at Oxford University in June. CISAC provided workspace to give the research team a quiet place to focus on writing the report's first draft in August.
The report has attracted intense international media interest in part because it calls for expanding the U.N. Security Council, its top decision-making group, from 15 to 24 members. The panel was unable to agree on one proposal and offers two options that would make the council more representative and democratic. "I believe either formula would strengthen the legitimacy in the eyes of the world, by bringing its membership closer to the realities of the 21st century-as opposed to those of 1945, when the U.N. Charter was drafted," Annan wrote in the International Herald Tribune.
According to Stedman, the media has highlighted the Security Council's proposed expansion because so many nations have a stake in it. "But in the absence of a new consensus on international peace and security, expansion of the council will not be effective," he explained.
In March, Annan will use the report to inform a series of proposals he will present to the 191 U.N. member states. These, in turn, will be submitted to a summit of world leaders before the General Assembly convenes next September in New York. Stedman said he has been asked to stay on for another year as a special advisor to the secretary general to keep the United Nations "on message" during negotiations.
Engagement by the United States, which has openly questioned the institution's relevance, will be critical to implementing the report's recommendations, said Stedman, who added that the superpower can benefit from a revamped United Nations. "Putting threats to the United States into a global framework makes it more secure," he said.
Stedman noted that one of the most disturbing aspects of the panel's consultations was listening to government representatives from civil-society organizations dismiss the seriousness of bio- and nuclear terror threats against the United States. "They were essentially denying this as a real threat to American security," he said. "I said it's as real a threat to the U.S. as other threats are to you."
When Stedman accepted the job, he thought he would spend 80 percent of his time on research and writing and 20 percent on consultations and negotiating. In fact, he said, it was the other way around. "It's unlike anything I've ever done," he said. "It's been a blast." In contrast to academia, where a researcher presents his or her best findings and defends them, Stedman was faced with 16 people who would push back, reject, or accept his work. "I had to work to change language to include their concerns," he said. "My biggest concern at the beginning was that the report would be based on the lowest common denominator. It's not."
Stedman said the panel members remained open-minded throughout the year. "They showed flexibility, listened to arguments, and changed their minds," he said. "Our job was to be as persuasive, rigorous, and comprehensive in our analysis as we were able to achieve."
In the end, Stedman said, the report belongs to the panel. "Parts of what the exercise shows is that access to those making policy is really important," he said. "If you do really good work and you have access, you have a chance of being heard. Kofi Annan gave me that opportunity."
How does the resource base of a rebel group impact its membership, structure, and behavior? While scholars, analysts, and policy makers increasingly link natural resources to the onset and duration of civil war, this article explores how resource endowments shape the character and conduct of rebel groups. This article identifies a rebel "resource curse" much like the one that undermines state institutions in resource-rich environments. While the presence of economic endowments makes it possible for leaders to recruit on the basis of short-term rewards, these groups are flooded with opportunistic joiners who exhibit little commitment to the long-term goals of the organization. In resource-poor environments, leaders attract new recruits by drawing on social ties to make credible promises about the private rewards that will come with victory. Opportunistic joiners stay away from these movements, leaving a pool of activist recruits willing to invest their time and energy in the hope of reaping large gains in the future.