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Chapter 29 Successes and Challenges in Conflict Management

Chapter 29 Successes and Challenges in Conflict Management. Andrew Mack Analysis presented by : Muhammad Jawad Aziz. Sequence of the Presentation. Introduction Why the Worldwide Decline in Political Violence is so Little Known? Why Today’s Wars Kill Fewer People?

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Chapter 29 Successes and Challenges in Conflict Management

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  1. Chapter 29Successes and Challenges in Conflict Management Andrew Mack Analysis presented by : Muhammad Jawad Aziz

  2. Sequence of the Presentation • Introduction • Why the Worldwide Decline in Political Violence is so Little Known? • Why Today’s Wars Kill Fewer People? • What About Indirect Deaths? • No Grounds for Complacency (Conclusion) • Analysis

  3. Introduction • World do believe what it see through media, what it hear from the policymakers and what it observed from the presentation of a scholar. Political violence has been reduced since Cold War era. During the Cold War, though superpowers were enjoying a long term peace between them, but from 1946 to 1992, the number of armed conflicts were increasing through out the world.

  4. Introduction • The number of armed conflicts worldwide has declined by more than 40% since 1992. • The number of deadliest conflicts ( 1000 or more battle deaths) has declined by 80% since 1992. • The number of international crises fell by more than 70% between 1981 to 2001. • Wars between the states were less than 5% of all armed conflicts. • The number of military coups and attempted coups has declined by 60% since 1963. In 1963, there were 25 coups or attempted coups happened while in 2004, there were only 10, all failed.

  5. Introduction • The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval without wars between the major powers in hundreds of years. • Wars have become less deadly. The average number of people reported killed (combatants, civilians caught in crossfire) per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000; in 2002, it was 600. Decline of 98%.

  6. Introduction • International terrorist incidents lake comprehensive definitions and this deficiency makes it difficult to put data properly and accordingly. • Annual international terrorist attacks is ‘tiny fraction of the annual war death toll’ • Data on political violence are not very reliable because collecting data statistics in war zones is difficult.

  7. Why we have fewer wars? • The End of Colonialism: The demise of colonialism has removed a major source of conflict from the international system • Democratization: The number of democracies increased in the world • War, Poverty and State Capacity: War takes place in very poor countries. Risk of war in countries with $ 5000 per capita income is thirty time less than in those with an income of $250

  8. Why we have fewer wars? • Ethnic Discrimination and Conflict: “High levels of political discrimination are key cause of violent ethnic conflict”*. There has been a decline in ethnic and economic discrimination from the governments since 1950. • The End of the Cold War: The end of the Cold War removed a major cause of ideological hostility from the international system.It also stopped the support of two super powers to their allies which resulted in the decline of proxy wars. • The Upsurge in International Activism: United Nations peace building efforts increased sharply since the end of 1980s. World Bank, donor states, regional security organizations and thousands of NGOs complemented UN’s activities, which developed UN as a security actor. • *Victor Asal and Amy Pate, “The Decline of Ethnic Political Discrimination, 1950-2003,” in Peace and Conflict 2005: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements and Democracy, ed. Monty G. Marshal and Ted Robert Gurr

  9. Why we have fewer wars? • The UN has been involved internationally in peace keeping and peacemaking activities: • Preventive Diplomacy and Peacemaking efforts of the UN has increased between 1990 and 2002. • International support for Peacemaking and Peace building also increased, as in 1990, just four states enjoyed the international support while in 2003, the states became twenty eight.

  10. Why we have fewer wars? • Post-conflict Peace Operations increased from seven (1988) to seventeen (2005) • Attacking the Culture of Impunity with the establishment of International Criminal Court and various UN and ad-hoc tribunals, the number of governments prosecuting agents of former regimes for grave human rights abuses increased from 1 to 11 between 1990 and 2004.

  11. Why we have fewer wars? • A Greater Emphasis on Reconciliation is also one of the major reasons. The reconciliation commission’s operations has been raised from one (in 1989) to seven (in 2003). • Addressing the Root Causes of Conflict: aid and development policies are very much focused to address what are the perceived root causes of the political violence.

  12. Why Today’s Wars Kill Fewer People? • There was an average of 37,000 battle related deaths for each conflict waged in 1950, while in 2002, there were just 600. Key explanatory factors relating to Cold War era for less war casualties are: • The major wars in Cold War era involved huge armies, heavy conventional weapons, air bombardment and massive external interventions, which killed hundreds of thousands, even sometime millions of people.

  13. Why Today’s Wars Kill Fewer People? • Low intensity conflicts (today’s wars) are primarily with small arms and light weapons. Usually, the government forces are against ‘small bands of ill-trained rebels’ in these conflicts. • The number of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) has been raised which secure the massive killings of local population in any armed conflict. (10 million in 1970s and over 40 million in 1992)

  14. What about Indirect Deaths? • Death toll from a combat is not exact measure of total human lost in the war. In-fact, indirect deaths of a war are a lot more than combat killings. War related disease and shortage of food are far greater killers than combat. • The poorer the country and the more destructive the war, the greater the number of excess deaths caused by disease and malnutrition. International Rescue Committee (IRC) has estimated that 3.9 million people have died as a consequence of the fighting since 1998.

  15. No Grounds for Complacency(Conclusion) • Although wars and war deaths are down in recent years but some sixty armed conflicts are still being waged around the world. There are still gross abuses of human rights, widespread war crimes and ever-deadlier acts of terrorism. • UN’s Peace-building Commission (PBC) is a great initiative for future peace building efforts. It was developed in 2005. • PBC is a intergovernmental body with a membership of thirty-one states, which are supposed to guide over all peace-building policy, plan missions for post-conflict environments, set standards, provide adequate funding and bring a degree of coherence to field operations.

  16. Analysis • Author has tried to answer all the questions which he presented in the introduction of the chapter. • Under first title, the author has expressed that ‘violent conflict deaths’ are usually only a minority of total war deaths. Author also claimed that ‘indirect deaths in war’ are in huge numbers in every conflict. The whole chapter is based on the data collected from the minority of total war deaths which are combat deaths. Author claimed that indirect deaths are though huge in numbers but can not be calculated as no such data is available for these casualties.

  17. Analysis • Author argued “ since war numbers, combat deaths per conflict, and the numbers of people displaced have all declined in the past fifteen years, while funding for humanitarian assistance has more than doubled over the same period, we have every reason to expect that ‘indirect deaths’ should have declined as well”, without any available data this argument is baseless. Maybe, the case is other way around.

  18. Analysis • Though author partially discussed the issue of terrorism but he surely missed the whole episode of 9/11 and war against terror. • Indirect deaths in the result of U.S. invasion in Iraq and then in Afghanistan were also not addressed properly where one can not just reject the death toll by arguing that it is coming from media or generated by international NGOs. • The role of PBC is not highlighted comprehensively by the author. In-fact in Afghanistan, Central African Republic and Syria, we see no involvement of PBC, at all. • The chapter in a whole is not comprehensive while explaining its title.

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