Combating Criminalized Power Structures


Book Description

Criminalized power structures (CPS) are illicit networks that profit from transactions in black markets and from criminalized state institutions while perpetuating a culture of impunity. These criminalized power structures are the predominant spoilers of peace settlements and stability operations. This volume focuses on the means available to practitioners to cope with the challenges posed by CPS along with recommendations for improving their efficacy and an enumeration of the conditions essential for their success. The means range from economic sanctions and border controls to the use of social media and criminal intelligence-led operations. Each step of this toolkit is detailed, explaining what each tool is, how it can be used, which type of CPS it is best suited to address, and what is necessary to ensure success of the peace operations. The effectiveness of the tool is also assessed and its use is illustrated through real life situations, such as international supply chain controls to prevent the looting of natural resources in Western Africa or the intervention of international judges and prosecutors in Kosovo. A companion volume, Criminalized Power Structures: The Overlooked Enemies of Peace, articulates a typology for assessing the threats of CPS illustrated by many case studies.




Criminalized Power Structures


Book Description

Criminalized power structures (CPS) are illicit networks that profit from transactions in black markets and from criminalized state institutions while perpetuating a culture of impunity. The book articulates a typology for assessing the threats of CPS and for implementing appropriate strategies to achieve sustainable peace effectively and efficiently. The international case studies address interventions undertaken either to support the implementation of a peace agreement (i.e., a peace operation) or to stabilize a country entangled in an internal conflict in the context of a power-sharing agreement among key protagonists (i.e., a stability operation). In each of these cases, at least one of the parties to the agreement was a criminalized power structure that was a leading spoiler. The final chapter identifies strategies that are most effective for each type of CPS, including the ways and means (or tools) required for effective conflict transformation. A companion volume, Combating Criminalized Power Structures: A Toolkit, provides practitioners with the means of coping with the challenges posed by CPS.




The Politics of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Latin America


Book Description

This book investigates the history, development, and current state of anti-corruption agencies in Latin America. In recent decades, specialized anti-corruption agencies have sprung up as countries seek to respond to corruption and to counter administrative and political challenges. However, the characteristics, resources, power, and performance of these agencies reflect the political and economic environment in which they operate. This book draws on a range of case studies from across Latin America, considering both national anti-corruption bodies and agencies created and administered by, or in close coordination with, international organizations. Together, these stories demonstrate the importance of the political will of reformers, the private interests of key actors, the organizational space of other agencies, the position of advocacy groups, and the level of support from the public at large. This book will be a key resource for researchers across political science, corruption studies, development, and Latin American Studies. It will also be a valuable guide for policy makers and professionals in NGOs and international organizations working on anti-corruption advocacy and policy advice.




International Intervention Instruments against Corruption in Central America


Book Description

This book analyzes the innovative international intervention instruments against corruption in Central America called Hybrid Anticorruption Agencies or HACAS. The author aims to disclose and explain the decision of the United Nations and the Organization of American States to promote, separately but with a similar rationale, a new strategic approach to fighting corruption through the creation of two HACAS. Specifically, the book examines the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH). The CICIG and the MACCIH represent unique cases of anti-corruption hybrid commissions because they combine resources, participants and/or national and international institutions which, in a coherent and integrated manner, strengthen the investigation, prosecution, and punishment of corrupt and criminal acts. The book also studies the HACAS as international instruments not free from risks and limitations.




Deconstructing Peace


Book Description

This book develops a novel approach to peace and conflict studies, through an original application of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to the post-conflict politics of Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on new readings of the peace agreements and the post-conflict political systems, the book goes beyond accounts that present a static picture of ‘fixed divisions’ in these cases. By exploring how formal electoral politics and the informal political spheres of artistic, cultural, judicial and protest movements already contest the politics of division, the book argues that the post-conflict political systems in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina are in a process of deconstruction. The text adds to the Derridean lexicon by developing the idea of a ‘deconstructive conclusion’, which challenges historical understandings of conflicts at the same time as challenging their consequences in the present. The study provides a critical contribution to peacebuilding and International Relations literature, by demonstrating how Derridean concepts can be utilised to provide fresh understandings of conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as allowing for political interventions to be made into these processes.




Shaping Peace in Kosovo


Book Description

This book explores the prospects and limits of international intervention in building peace and creating a new state in an ethnically divided society and fragmented international order. The book offers a critical account of the international missions in Kosovo and traces the effectiveness of fluid forms of interventionism. It also explores the co-optation of peace by ethno-nationalist groups and explores how their contradictory perception of peace produced an ungovernable peace, which has been manifested with intractable ethnic antagonisms, state capture, and ignorance of the root causes, drivers, and consequences of the conflict. Under these conditions, prospects for emancipatory peace have not come from external actors, ethno-nationalist elite, and critical resistance movements, but from local and everyday acts of peace formation and agnostic forms for reconciliation. The book proposes an emancipatory agenda for peace in Kosovo embedded on post-ethnic politics and joint commitments to peace, a comprehensive agenda for reconciliation, people-centred security, and peace-enabling external assistance.







Wicked Problems


Book Description

"This book argues that the field of peace and conflict needs a stronger and more practical sense of its ethical obligations. By focusing on the ethical dilemmas in peace work it aims to reckon with recent questions among those involved in mediating conflict, from international peacekeepers to social justice activists. For example, it argues against posing false binaries between domestic and international issues and against viewing violence and conflict as the same. It holds up strategic nonviolence to critical scrutiny and shows that "do no harm" approaches may in fact do harm. The chapters cover the role of violence in conflict; conflict and violence prevention and resolution; humanitarianism; human rights advocacy; transitional justice; political reconciliation; and peace education and pedagogy, among other topics"--




Understanding Peacekeeping


Book Description

Peace operations remain a principal tool for managing armed conflict and protecting civilians. The fully revised, expanded and updated third edition of Understanding Peacekeeping provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the theory, history, and politics of peace operations. Drawing on a dataset of nearly two hundred historical and contemporary missions, this book evaluates the changing characteristics of the contemporary international environment in which peace operations are deployed, the strategic purposes peace operations are intended to achieve, and the major challenges facing today’s peacekeepers. All the chapters have been revised and updated, and five new chapters have been added – on stabilization, organized crime, exit strategies, force generation, and the use of force. Part 1 summarizes the central concepts and issues related to peace operations. Part 2 charts the historical development of peacekeeping, from 1945 through to 2020. Part 3 analyses the strategic purposes that United Nations and other peace operations are intended to achieve – namely, prevention, observation, assistance, enforcement, stabilization, and administration. Part 4 looks forward and examines the central challenges facing today’s peacekeepers: force generation, the regionalization and privatization of peace operations, the use of force, civilian protection, gender issues, policing and organized crime, and exit strategies.




The Politics of Protection


Book Description

This new book shows how from the end of the Cold War, the security agenda has been transformed and redefined, academically and politically. It focuses on the theme of protection. It moves away from the dominant question of whom or what is threatening to the crucial questions of who is to be protected, and in the case of conflicting claims, who has the capacity to define whose needs prevail. It also poses the question of political agency in relation to some of the most significant questions raised in relation to the governance of insecurity and protection in the contemporary world. The authors identify and explore issues that challenge or raise a number of questions about the traditional notion that states are to protect their citizens through retaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.