When the Going Gets Tough… Monitoring Missions and a Changing Conflict Environment in Sri Lanka, 2002–2008

This article analyzes how the conflict environment in which a civilian monitoring mission is deployed influences the monitors' assessment of the operation. It draws on unique empirical material from the experience of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), deployed to oversee a ceasefire agreement in Sri Lanka 2002–2008. With material from a survey and in-depth interviews, experiences of the monitors are analyzed and changes over time are traced in relation to the monitors' assessment of the mandate and organizational set-up of the mission. The study points to the difficulty of monitoring missions to address escalation during an ongoing peace process. Its function is dependent on the goodwill of the parties. In essence, monitoring missions have the potential to strengthen peace when there is momentum in favor of progress, but when relations between the parties turn sour and the conflict escalates a civilian monitoring mission basically loses its potential. During the final stages of the war, which saw a very large number of civilian casualties, the war-torn areas were closed to international observers. Moreover, international pressure for a short-term ceasefire to alleviate the humanitarian situation was dismissed by the Sri Lankan government, which also saw the backing of several important actors, not the least China.     

An approach to the allocation of common costs of multi-mission systems

Many Naval systems, as well as other military and civilian systems, generate multiple missions. An outstanding problem in cost analysis is how to allocate the costs of such missions so that their true costs can be determined and resource allocation optimized. This paper presents a simple approach to handling this problem for single systems. The approach is based on the theory of peak-load pricing as developed by Marcel Boiteux. The basic principle is that the long-run marginal cost of a mission must be equal to its “price.” The implication of this is that if missions can cover their own marginal costs, they should also be allocated some of the marginal common costs. The proportion of costs to be allocated is shown to a function of not only the mission-specific marginal costs and the common marginal costs, but also of the “mission price.” Thus, it is shown that measures of effectiveness must be developed for rational cost allocation. The measurement of effectiveness has long been an intractable problem, however. Therefore, several possible means of getting around this problem are presented in the development of the concept of relative mission prices.     

Local contestation against the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo

ABSTRACT

This article examines local contestation against the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), manifesting itself in local actors publicly demanding a change in the mission’s mandate and/or its operations. The article investigates how EULEX’s actions and its effectiveness are perceived and reacted upon by the local actors. It shows that local contestation is mainly fueled by (1) conflicting sovereignty claims by the majority Albanians and the minority Serbs; (2) the understanding of sovereignty by parts of society as entailing exclusive authority; and (3) dissatisfaction with the mission’s effectiveness. By addressing EULEX from a bottom-up perspective—that of the local actors—the article underlines the limitations of EU policies in post-conflict Kosovo.     

舰艇编队信息作战视图描述

舰艇编队信息作战视图是该系统体系结构设计的重要组成部分。通过对舰艇编队信息作战任务的需求分析,提出了该作战系统的整体构想,采用基于UML的设计方法,完成舰艇编队作战使命所需完成的任务和行动、作战节点描述,并给出了作战视图的模型产品,为进一步描述整个舰艇编队信息作战系统的体系结构奠定基础。     

Effective? Locally owned? Beyond the technocratic perspective on the European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories

ABSTRACT

The European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS) was established in 2006 to contribute to the establishment of effective policing in support of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. EUPOL COPPS is often commended for its contribution to the professionalization of the Palestinian security sector under local ownership. Drawing on 40 interviews, we argue that the mission can be considered effective and locally owned only from a narrow technocratic perspective, which denies the political reality of continued occupation and absence of democracy. A broader analysis, which includes the voices of ordinary Palestinians, reveals that EUPOL COPPS contributed to the professionalization of authoritarian policing under continued Israeli occupation. Our findings show the limits of technocratic approaches to peacebuilding interventions and call for a stronger engagement with the ultimate beneficiaries of peacebuilding missions.     

维和警察警务风险管理刍议

由于联合国维和任务区条件艰苦,环境危险,维和警察在安全方面存在着很多风险和隐患。如何发现并排除隐患,最大限度地保证维和警察的安全,是维和警察管理部门亟待解决的问题。从维和警察警务风险管理概念入手,探讨维和警察警务风险管理计划、风险识别和评估、风险处理和效果评价等,以期对维和警察管理部门的警务风险管理实践起到辅助作用。     

Power and influence in post-secession South Sudan: A leadership perspective on nation-building

ABSTRACT

Following South Sudan's secession in 2011, the country faced significant political, social and economic challenges. The country emerged from a long andarduous nation-building journey, including almost 50 years of violent conflict, that would continue after declaring independence. This nation-building process would suffer a significant set-back in December 2013 when the most recent civil war broke out. This article provides a new perspective on South Sudan's nation-building trajectory that tends towards violence and complicates peace-building. It does so by utilising the leadership process approach from the Leadership Studies literature. While popular literature and commentary tends to fault the South Sudanese elite for the current crisis, there has not been a systematic effort to understand the leadership challenge and its role in conflict, peace and nation-building in South Sudan. In this article, South Sudan's nation-building process and its three primary components of (a) identity construction, (b) statehood and (c) collective will and responsibility, are analysed from a leadership perspective, focusing on issues of power and influence. The conclusion is reached that South Sudan's nation-building has been and will likely continue to trend towards a violent process due to a leadership process that lacks mutuality and is founded on insufficient sources of power.     

Does military spending stimulate growth? An empirical investigation in Italy

This paper investigates the effect of military burden on economic growth and extends previous works on the optimal size of government expenditure by exploring how external threat affects the preferences of the households and, in turn, economic growth. Post World War II Italian data are used to estimate nonlinear growth models using time-series semi-parametric methods. The estimates show that total government and civilian burdens are productive, whereas, military burden has significant effects on economic growth through the expenditure for peacekeeping missions, which reduces the insecurity in the home country. This may justify economically the current not negligible budget devoted to peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.     

Security sector reform,ethnic representation and perceptions of safety: evidence from Kosovo

This article explores the relationship between ethnic representation in security sector institutions and perceptions of safety. While most studies on post-conflict institutional reform focus on national institutions and outcomes, this article argues that a more nuanced view on ethnic representation is fruitful in order to account for the everyday perceptions of local people. Drawing on post-conflict Kosovo, the article analyzes how the representation of ethnic minorities in security institutions affects perceptions of safety among individuals across Kosovo’s municipalities. It also analyzes original interview data collected in the Pristina and Mitrovica municipalities that are typical cases of our sample. Both approaches validate that those municipalities that have ethnically representative security institutions also have higher levels of perceived safety.     

A plan for military intervention in Darfur

This article contains a plan on how the African Union/United Nations hybrid force authorised by the UN Security Council in July 2007 could realistically and effectively use military power to save civilian lives in Darfur. It is envisaged that the international force, given its limited size, would mainly focus on protecting and policing refugee and internally displaced persons camps, rather than trying to stop all violence in the region. This intervention is unlikely to provoke a violent military reaction from the Sudanese government. In fact, a careful analysis of the conflict suggests that Khartoum has been engaged in a scorched-earth counterinsurgency rather than in an attempt to exterminate Darfur's ‘black’ population as an end in itself, and thus would stand to benefit from interveners' efforts to keep the camps demilitarised.     

The long and winding road … to success? Unit peace operation effectiveness and its effect on mission success

Why does peacekeeping sometimes fail? How can effective peacekeepers increase the likelihood of success of a mission? The two main flaws in the current evaluations of peace operations are that they mainly rely on already concluded missions and that they make use of indicators that do not reveal micro-level dynamics. This article introduces an analytical framework relating the effectiveness of soldiers to their actual impact in their area of operation in a peace operation. The framework is called “unit peace operation effectiveness” (UPOE). Focusing on soldiers in peace operations, this article shows that: different units behave differently; emphasize different aspects of the mandate; and are effective in different ways. Ultimately, this has an actual impact on the end-state of the mission. It relies on and adapts classic security studies works to theoretically enrich the peacekeeping literature. The model is tested in an illustrative case study based on ethnographic work on French and Italian units in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2010.     

时变结构多阶段任务系统的可靠度研究

大型复杂系统完成规定任务往往涉及多个阶段,并且在不同的任务阶段,系统通常由其各级子系统、单元以不同的功能组合形式构成,因而,其可靠性逻辑结构(框图)也随时间的改变而改变。当连续多阶段系统不能分阶段单独处理时,将引出所谓的时段延续相关性问题。本文重点研究了时变结构多阶段任务系统的时段延续相关性问题,对典型时变结构的可靠度进行了分析,提出了有效的解决方法并建立了相应的数学模型。研究成果已应用于某大型测控系统的可靠性分析任务中     

The New Constabularies: Planning US Military Stabilization Missions

Modern peace enforcement missions are much more akin to historical constabulary missions than they are to traditional peace operations. As such, the underlying strategic and operational bases for these missions are both more complex and have more elements that can go wrong than does classic peacekeeping. At the operational level, such issues as relations with civilian organizations, coordination with other nations' forces, and command and control of highly disparate elements become critical. The area in which the most significant problems have occurred, however, has been in translating political goals into a realistic military strategy.     

Are non‐lethal weapons a viable military option to strengthen the hearts and minds approach in Afghanistan?

Commanders of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have repeatedly stressed the hearts and minds approach in Afghanistan, in saying that the human terrain is decisive for a successful outcome of the mission. Avoidance of civilian casualties is considered of strategic importance, and by nature highly dependent on the management of tactical level Escalation of Force (EoF) situations. Non‐lethal weapons (NLWs) are expected to enable tactical commanders to avoid innocent civilian casualties in such situations. This article considers a selected NLW on its potential to accomplish this requirement. It uses a defence technology assessment approach to analyse EoF situations experienced by Dutch ISAF forces in which the NLW is inserted. The analysis demonstrates that a range of contextual factors in the Afghanistan high‐risk environment tend to narrow down the window of opportunity for the NLW to help defuse the risk of unintended civil casualties.     

Varieties of defection strategies from multinational military coalitions: Insights from operation Iraqi freedom

How do states defect from multinational military coalitions? The question deserves considerable academic scrutiny, as states increasingly rely on coalitions to prosecute military missions. Yet to the extent that coalition defection has been explored, the extant literature tends to see defection as a binary undertaking – states are either in or out. In practice, however, defection is an act of risk minimization in a manner that forces other coalition partners to fill resulting operational gaps. A coalition can therefore appear stable due to a constant number of flags associated with the mission, but in practice be much less coherent and capable. After defining defection as a non-routine abrogation of operational responsibility at other coalition partners’ expense, significantly prior to mission conclusion, this article explores several states’ participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the various manners by which they defected from that coalition. It concludes with implications for future scholarship.     

军人坚毅品质训练内容及方法探析

坚毅品质是近十年来国外心理学领域的研究热点,它与个体成就显著正相关,能较好地预测军人在部队中的表现。影响坚毅品质形成的主要因素有体验、兴趣、认知与行为以及努力外化的习惯等。本文认为,积极探索"军(军事训练)心(心理训练)"相结合的军事训练模式,将坚毅品质心理训练有机融合于军事训练并贯穿于体能训练全程,同时注重坚毅品质心理训练与技、战术训练及完成重大军事任务相结合,并尝试在军事训练中增设坚毅品质心理训练专项,能够培养官兵勇敢、坚定、顽强等优良心理品质,在全面加强练兵备战的过程中锻造高素质专业化新型军事人才,从而更有效地提升军队战斗力,完成新时代党和人民赋予军队的使命任务。     

Approximations to the reliability of phased missions

A system whose configuration (block diagram or fault tree) changes during consecutive time periods (phases) performs a “phased mission.” Recently, Esary and Ziehms have shown that any multiphase mission can be transformed into an equivalent, synthetic, single-phase system, and thus that the phased mission problem can in principle be solved by standard reliability methods. We employ these ideas here to study approximations to mission reliability and to develop an algorithm which may be of practical interest. In addition, we extend the reliability calculus of Rubinstein, and Esary and Hayne, based on an approximate hazard transform, to phased missions, and we show how this extended calculus can be used in situations where phases are not of known fixed duration.     

反海盗任务中大中口径舰炮火力应用

在反海盗任务中,大中口径舰炮武器系统可担负对海盗船进行警示或警告性射击,或者直接打击的任务。在对海盗船编队目标特性分析的基础上,以单管大口径舰炮对集群海盗船射击作为研究对象,将射击类型分为警示、警告和阻拦射击,重点分析了对集群海盗船只警告性射击方式,提出了警告性射击修正量的计算方式,最后通过实例仿真证明了该方法的适用性。     

Building the Rule of Law: A Model of Police-Military Relations in Latin America

United States policy makers and academic researchers have neglected the deep institutional rivalries between police agencies and military services in Latin America. The problems of police/military coordination have complicated US national goals of democratization, strengthening the rule of law and combating the production and trafficking of illicit drugs in the region. Police agencies stand at the epicenter of dysfunctional criminal justice systems. Although the US policy of engagement with Latin American military services is intended to reorient their roles and missions towards supporting democratically elected civilian governments, US counternarcotics assistance programs have encouraged a wider Latin American military role in drug interdiction. This article develops an analytical model to identify the dimensions of police-military conflict in the context of the fundamental reform of criminal justice systems in Latin America.     

PARLIAMENT AND DEFENCE OVERSIGHT

Abstract

A tremendous amount of important work has been done recently on operationalising the protection of civilians as a military task. The bulk of the discussion has focused on how militaries should respond to direct attacks on civilians. This is an important issue, but thinking about civilian protection should also include a serious examination of the ways in which the approach of military organisations to the problem of ‘spoiler’ groups can affect the level and dynamics of attacks on civilians – importantly, where armed groups are interested in violent control of civilian populations, attempts to ‘dislodge’ them from areas of control may substantially increase the level of violence against civilians (beyond the dangers to be expected from being near areas where active fighting is taking place). In 2009, the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) supported the Congolese military in operations to dismantle the Hutu-dominated FDLR (Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) militia group, at massive human cost. Critics have primarily focused on MONUC's failure to protect civilians from direct attack, consonant with the general discourse on tactics for civilian protection. These criticisms are valid, but in this paper I argue that two crucial additional considerations should be kept in mind: the way that military operations can affect violence against civilians, and the way that moralising the approach to armed groups, even those which have committed serious abuses, can limit military and political options – potentially in ways that increase civilian risk in the name of protecting them.