Archive 1986 – 2017

The outcome of the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which begins April 24, 2000 at the United Nations in New York, will play a significant role in determining the security of humanity in the 21st century. Your personal commitment to a successful outcome of this Review Conference is essential to strengthening nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament efforts, and thus to humanity’s future. The nuclear perils to humanity are not sufficiently widely recognized nor appreciated. In the words of writer Jonathan Schell, we have been given “the gift of time,” but that gift is running out. For this reason vision and bold action are called for. General George Lee Butler, a former Commander in Chief of all US strategic nuclear weapons, poses these questions: “By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently,...

The Cold War was generally interpreted as an encounter between nuclear superpowers that led opposed alliances and sustained their respective identities by reference to antagonistic ideologies. Such an image of the global setting lent support to the argument that international politics could be best understood from a perspective of bipolarity. Since the end of the Cold War a decade ago, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, it is more difficult to find an illuminating image to capture the essence of world order. The two main claimants have been “globalization” and “unipolarity.” Neither image helps us grasp the changing role of the sovereign state nor the preoccupation during the 1990s with intrastate violence and conflict, a class of instances that Mary Kaldor has helpfully dubbed “new wars.” Partly these concerns reflect a perceived threat to world order that derives from unexpected sources in recent years. The main...

“The Battle of Seattle” that occurred during the recent meeting of the WTO in Seattle needs to be understood as the first crisis of globalization that poses a political challenge. The Asian financial crisis more than two years earlier was mainly a regional crisis of an economic character despite its wider reverberations in Japan, Russia, Brazil. The control mechanisms proved reasonably effective, and an Asian recovery is underway without any pressure for deep substantive reforms. We hear less and less talk about “a new financial architecture” in the last several months. Perhaps, there is more awareness of the importance of sound banking systems and a less dogmatic attitude toward fiscal policy on the part of the World Bank and IMF to avoid the sort of social trauma that especially befell Indonesia after 1997. But Seattle was a different and shriller alarm bell. It occurred in the city of Microsoft, Starbucks,...

Anyone who pretends that India’s decision to cross the nuclear weapons threshold openly has made no difference to its international standing is either lying or living in fantasy. Of course, the official reaction in the West was one of anger, and disappointment. India with nuclear weapons inevitably meant that Pakistan would soon follow. It was a major setback for the American-led effort to sustain the non-proliferation regime, and it appeared to make the world more dangerous, especially in the setting of Indo-Pakistan relations. Perhaps, more troubling for the West than the strategic implications of an Indian bomb, was the public enthusiasm that greeted the news in India. Indeed, most commentators tried to reassure the world that Delhi’s decision to go nuclear was driven by domestic politics, especially by the BJP’s declining popularity. When the Indian Defense Minister, George Fernandes, contended that the bomb was intended mainly to improve India’s security...

In 1945, the UN was founded to prevent interstate wars like Hitler’s march into Poland 1939 that started World War II. Despite a lot of criticism of the UN, it has been amazingly successful in achieving this goal. There are still many wars, but almost all of them today are civil wars. Of 39 wars in 1995, all were civil wars. The Gulf War in 1990 was the last war of aggression, and it was decisively repelled by an international force in 1991. The UN was explicitly prevented from doing anything to stop civil wars by the provision in its current Charter that it should not interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign member states. In the second half century of its existence, the UN needs to be strengthened, so that it can also help prevent or end civil wars. When people talk about UN reform, they usually mean to...

It is perhaps a peculiar quality of human beings that we like to count things, and we seem to become particularly excited when our numbers end up with several zeros at the end. Such is the case with the year 2000, even though it is not exactly the turning of the millennium, which will take place as the year turns from 2000 to 2001. It is close enough, however, and it has its own set of problems, which have been characterized by the expression “Y2K.” I will return to that, but first I would like to offer a few observations to provide perspective on the past as a prologue to our current situation. First, life has existed on Earth for some 4 billion years. Second, humans have existed on Earth for only some 3 million years, less than 1/1000th of the existence of life on Earth. Third, civilization and recorded...

By Roswitha and Peter Jarman* An elderly Ingush showed Roswitha his portacabin in the makeshift settlement where he had lived since the local civil war of 1992. She admired the neat order he had created around his hand-made bed. ”My wife is ill in hospital, do you have some medicine?’, he asked. Roswitha, having none, tried to give him fifty dollars. “No”, he said, “I cannot take money”, so she slipped the notes into his pocket. Tears poured down his cheeks. ”What have I done to deserve this?’, he asked, ‘I fought against the Fascists and received war medals. We Ingush were all deported by Stalin in 1944 to Kazakhstan and had to start there with nothing. When we returned here in 1957 I built a house for my family and then came this war. Who is responsible for it? I have no space in this cabin for my five...

Some of the UK’s first analyses of the Kosovo conflictfrom a peace journalism perspective REPORT 1“TRANSCENDING ASSUMPTIONS“ Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia enjoyed almost universal editorial support among mainstream British newspapers. The passage of time made it possible to gauge more of the consequences and led to some reassessments, including a nagging suspicion summed up by BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson: “I think we were suckered.” What assumptions were built into news reporting before and during the bombing, how did these help to construct a framework of understanding which made it seem to make sense, and how could it have been different? An award-winning correspondent with a major US TV network put her finger on one widespread assumption at the London launch of The First Casualty, the new edition of Phillip Knightley‚s classic history of war reporting which contains an important chapter on Kosovo. She recalled a period in the Autumn...

Setting the Stage: Understanding Security Recent events have shown the failure of traditional approaches to security and security guarantees. Conventional conceptions of security, focussing upon the security of the ‘State’ and freedom from the threat or use of force, have proved inadequate to address the diverse range of challenges faced by the world community at the dawn of the 21st Century. From environmental devastation– resulting in wide-spread flooding, deforestation, and depletion of the ozone layer–to limitations upon the human rights and freedoms of individuals and communities and the rising number of intra-state wars, new security issues are constantly arising. Though what is actually considered a ‘security’ issue varies widely depending upon the approach and perspective taken, the fact that the concept of security used during the era of the Cold War is no longer suf ficient for the world of today cannot reasonably be denied. While many of the factors...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   Conflict and Peace ForumsTaplow Court, Taplow, Bucks, SL6 0ER, United KingdomPhone +44.1628.591 233 / 239 Fax +44.1628.773 055www.conflictandpeace.org email info@conflictandpeace.org Table of Contents 1. Introduction Conflict Coverage A new approach Perspective: the fact and the truth 2. Practical Examples Explaining conflict, framing violence Conflict or meta-conflict? Media responsibility Practical reporting decisions Britain and Ireland From “apportioning blame” to conflict analysis in South Africa Worthy / unworthy victimhood Consequences Beyond ‘victim journalism’ and ‘how do you feel’? 3. Reporting of the ‘Kosovo Crisis’ ‘The Serbs’ – aggregation and dis-aggregation Disaggregation Assumotions revisited The KLA and the media 4. Journalism and market forces The rise of ethical purchasing and investment Two tentative conclusions 5. Appendix: Middle East The view in international media References About the author & publisher 1. INTRODUCTION Journalists have become accustomed to vying with estate agents and...

The Peace Journalism Option 3 By Jake Lynch for Conflict and Peace Forums   PART 4 4. JOURNALISM AND MARKET FORCES The content of news is shaped by three main influences. One comes from the limits set down by the state, in the form of laws, censorship and access to information. The second is a ‘civic society’ element: journalists are exponents and guardians of values which belong both to everyone and to no-one. These have evolved in implicit dialogue with audiences and the public at large, and develop a little further whenever journalists meet to discuss the ethics and principles of their work – especially if they do so in consultation with professionals from other fields as in the conferences Conflict and Peace Forums have organised over the past few years. But the factor which has been the focus of most critical endeavour in Western societies is the influence of market...

“We are seeing it for the umpteenth time in international conflict-management: when intellectual analysis and politics fall apart, cover it up with military potency and give it all a human face! One would like to believe that the West’s moral, legal and political conflict ‘management’ disaster in the Balkans and in Kosovo 1989–1999 would be debated throughout the West — democracies with freedom of speech. The silence about that failure, however, is roaring. It’s just the locals who won’t understand how well-meaning we were and are! But something else is happening: the disaster is turning into a recipe. Read the statements from leading ministers, top generals, the EU and NATO during the last six months. They invariably state ‘that we have learnt in Kosovo’ that we need more military capacity, more force. NATO’s Secretary-General, Lord Robertson, tells the world that ‘the time for a peace dividend is over because there...