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destroyed, diverted, or programs have to be scaled down to minimise risk to personnel. However, whether in complex emergencies or in response to natural disasters, militaries often play an important role in humanitarian relief efforts, sometimes by providing search and rescue and airlift capabilities or by restoring damaged infrastructure. Indeed, in most of today’s crises, humanitarian organisations operate in the same environment as a range of military and non-state armed actors. Coordination is often easier in natural disaster settings than in conflict, as there is a
an analysis of Article 2 and Chapters VII and VII of the UN Charter, and the constituent treaties of security and defence organisations. The different military responses undertaken by IGOs, ranging from observation and peacekeeping to enforcement and war-fighting, are discussed in terms of legality and practice. The chapter considers the duties of IGOs as well as their powers; in particular whether there is an emerging duty upon the UN (and possibly other IGOs) to take action in response to the commission of core international crimes (genocide, crimes against
One of the most frequently cited ‘lessons’ of the Kosovo crisis has been the alleged extent to which it spurred West European leaders to address a perceived need for Europe to do more for its own military security. Member states of the European Union decided to establish a ‘European Security and Defence Policy’ (ESDP) in the months following Operation Allied Force . Daalder and O’Hanlon have written
(This article was originally published on ‘Normblog’, 27 August 2013) The signs are now clear that Washington * and other Western powers, † including Britain, are considering military action against Syria on account of the regime’s apparent use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. ‡ Would such action be justified? In the debate about this at least three types of issue are centrally involved: (1) whether there is a basis in international law for military intervention; (2) whether it is likely to do any good; and (3) whether it might be merited in
, such technologies are tools that can either serve an ethical obligation that the military institution has towards its members or potentially increase the morality of warfare. However, as it is often said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and these considerations are not sufficient to assess the rightness of the use of these technologies, as it is also essential to understand their potential flaws from an
10 Sweden, military intervention and the loss of memory Annika Bergman Rosamond and Christine Agius Introduction Since the 1990s, Sweden has gradually changed from a neutral country to one that is ‘militarily non-aligned.’ It has taken active part in international peace operations under the command of NATO and the EU, and contributed forces to operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya. In 2015 Sweden also set aside resources to train Kurdish troops in Northern Iraq in the fight against ISIS (Dagens Nyheter 2015). At the 2014 NATO Summit in Warsaw, Sweden
Part II A military role for Germany in international crisis management? The process of redefining the role of military means in Germany’s foreign and security policy can be divided into three phases. A first phase ran from German unification through 1994 when the German Constitutional Court ruled out-ofarea deployments constitutional. The second phase began with the massacre on Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1995 and ended with the Kosovo War in 1999. A third phase lasted from 1999 to the outbreak of war in Iraq in
) and its allies. Recent research conducted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo and The Lancet –American University of Beirut (AUB) Commission on Syria suggests targeting of healthcare can now be considered an emerging tactic in conflict ( Druce et al. , 2019 ), and that Syria is a prime example of what has been called the ‘weaponisation of health care’ ( Fouad et al. , 2017 ). While the GoS and Russia have maintained that all military efforts in the Syrian context were against combating parties ( Hill and Triebert, 2019 ), there is a suggestion that the
, and how? Remotely or on site? At the very least, we had to decipher the diverging political and military agendas, and then adapt, persist or sometimes just give up. In this article, I will present the full range of methods used to acquire knowledge and obtain information as well as the various networks used to carry out this venture. I will also show how Médecins Sans Frontières’ operations became a balancing act, punctuated by episodes of adapting to the various
and that only presents mixed results in the so-called civil–military coordination in humanitarian responses. The challenge for humanitarian agencies to work effectively and according to their missions and principles while cohabitating the same spaces (geographical and others) as military and non-state armed actors has been a headache for decades. Contexts of violent conflict are usually examples of all that can go wrong when civil–military coordination is not prioritised. But those are not the only contexts where humanitarian agencies struggle to find and protect