Africa's toy soldiers,non-state armed groups,and ‘voluntary’ recruitment

Armed conflict on the African continent has witnessed increasing recruitment of child soldiers, often at the hands of non-state armed groups. Unfortunately this practice continues unabated in the face of legal obligations prohibiting the recruitment of child soldiers under international humanitarian law, and international and regional human rights law. While international condemnation of the practice has led to attempts to increase the minimum age for recruitment to 18, a disjuncture persists between the legal obligations states sign up to, and the actual enforcement of these prohibitions at a domestic level.

International criminal law jurisprudence emanating from the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court is being monitored closely, as these courts seek to enforce the prohibition in all armed conflicts, and against both state actors and non-state armed groups. International humanitarian law only protects child soldiers who have been unlawfully recruited. In this piece, the authors take a closer look at what amounts to unlawful recruitment in light of customary international humanitarian law, since this body of law also binds non-state actors, even without further criminalising legislation at a domestic level. Moreover, the article briefly explores whether a child can ever void this protected status by volunteering to participate directly in hostilities.     

Force deployment and the production of security: Why is the united states in NATO?

Standard economic concepts of production and cost minimization subject to a production constraint are used to derive the conditions of optimal deployment of home and forward military forces for the production of home security. United States' participation in the NATO alliance is then analyzed in the context of a two‐ally (U.S. and Western Europe) optimal force deployment model of NATO. Next, U.S. force‐basing policy is adduced as an enforcement mechanism for the “transatlantic contract.” Lastly, statistical evidence on burden sharing within Western Europe, and the effectiveness of the U.S. contract enforcement policy, is presented.     

THE EXERCISE OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Skeptics of the Bush administration have castigated its strong aversion to formal international agreements in responding to the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), citing unilateral actions as the default alternative. Yet this critique misses the growing emergence of a conscious framework guiding the administration's actions: an emphasis on the exercise of national sovereignty and the corollary principle of sovereign responsibility. Rejecting the paradigm of arms control as the answer to WMD proliferation, the current administration instead advocates a toolkit of alternative mechanisms based on the full exercise by individual nation, states of their domestic authorities and rights under international law, acting in their capacities as responsible citizens of the global community. This paper will examine that philosophical approach and its concrete application through the following policies: (1) the Proliferation Security Initiative; (2) enforcement of national laws and regulations as exemplified by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 and the U.S. proposals for consideration by Biological Weapons Convention signatories; and (3) preemptive warfare to disarm the WMD programs of a threatening state.     

Reforming the notion of national sovereignty by external intervention

In principle, national sovereignty is the right of a nation to govern its internal affairs without foreign interference. In practice, it is defined by one's interpretation of international law, which may permit legal external intervention under some circumstances, ultimately removing a nation's sovereignty. This paper will examine the current system of international law outlined by the United Nations, analyse the ambiguities contained within its Charter and elaborate on how external intervention can be justified. The case-study of recent developments related to Libya will demonstrate that the manner in which international law is interpreted is changing the notion of principles of sovereignty.     

Identifying the spoilers in the security sector reform – disarmament demobilisation and reintegration process in the Congo

The Congolese security sector reform – disarmament demobilisation and reintegration (SSR-DDR) process has suffered from setbacks in its military sector during the last 10 years, such as insufficient funding, lack of coordination and domestic reluctance to major changes, with as a result, a very fragile and disjointed Army. These problems have deepened as officers have defected from the Army and caused new instability in the East of the Congo. This article aims to analyse the recent mutinies and the reaction by the Congolese government by applying a capabilities-based approach in combination with a typology of spoilers. The objective is to identify and classify the spoilers and answer the questions of why they emerge now and how they are dealt with on a national level. From the analysis, the author suggests that there are several spoilers involved in the current situation – the most powerful being the Congolese and the Rwandan governments, prompting the question of whether an international involvement is necessary to solve the problem.     

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.     

Assessing military reform in Indonesia

This article seeks to assess the magnitude of military reform in Indonesia and its impact in establishing greater levels of professionalism within the armed forces. To this end, the authors will offer some reflections on the studies of civil-military relations and military transformation for inculcating a higher degree of military professionalism; analyse to what extent the process of military reform in Indonesia has reshaped the institutional role of the armed forces; and discern three major strategic gaps in Indonesia's military reform, namely the “legal loopholes and regulation vacuum,” the “shortcomings of democratic civilian control,” and the “defence-economic gap.” This article asserts that military professionalism will grow more substantially depending on the ability of civilian elites to exercise effective control over the military and the capacity of the government to transform the military establishment keeping pace with strategic challenges and operational requirements.     

基于WSR方法论的军事环境安全策略研究

为了克服新形势下军事发展面临的一系列环境安全问题,不断加强军事环境管理工作,拓展并解析了军事环境安全的概念,建立了基于WSR方法论的军事环境安全三维分析模型.结合模型的“物理”、“事理”、“人理”分析,提出了一套相互关联的军事环境安全策略,为进一步深入研究并制定军事环境安全战略规划提供了重要参考.     

基于问题驱动的军事高科技培训

信息化建设培训作为专题培训重要形式已在军队人才队伍建设中产生很大影响,基于问题驱动的培训是新形势下创新发展的重要探索和有益尝试.     

The British army,information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies.