Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) at
The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War & Peace Studies (SIWPS)

May 2013 Newsletter

CICR NEWSLETTER, SUMMER 2013

“Mali: Perspectives on the Current Crisis and the Future”

While Mali was hailed by many as a model of African democracy, recent     political events have revealed the fragility of the state. Facing a variety of challenges including unequal development, the drug trade, international extremist networks, secessionist movements, and corruption, Mali presents vital questions of relevance to the entire region and beyond. Fabienne Hara (International Crisis Group) and Gregory Mann (Department of History, Columbia University) discussed these issues in a panel discussion moderated by Youssef Mahmoud (International Peace Institute) on March 12th, 2013.

The panel examined many aspects of the war in Mali, revealing the complexity of a conflict involving many actors and many divergent interests, including those of the Malian government, the Tuaregs, Islamists, the French and other Western powers. Panelists also discussed the impact of U.S. counter-terrorism policy and the “war on terror,” as well the role of the United Nations and other international actors. The panel concluded with a reflection on the need for continued conflict assessment, including an analysis of the necessary conditions for peace, the relationship of citizens to the state, and attention to governance issues and instability that may persist after elections are held.

“Building Peace in Côte d’Ivoire: Challenges and Opportunities”

On April 4th United Nations Special Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG) for Côte d’Ivoire, Albert Gerard Koenders, was joined by CICR Director Jean-Marie Guéhenno to present a lecture entitled “Building Peace in Côte d’Ivoire: Challenges and Opportunities.” A Dutch diplomat with more than 25 years of experience in international affairs, development, and international policymaking, Koenders was appointed to the role of SRSG in August 2011. Joining in a volatile period, Koenders accepted the posting as head of the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) in the wake of the 2010-2011 crisis during which incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo’s refused to concede defeat in the second round of elections to his opponent, Alassane Ouattara.

Koenders outlined the priorities of the UNOCI peacekeeping operation which he defined as fostering a constructive political dialogue; undertaking a demobilization, disarmament, and integration campaign; carrying out security sector reform; and laying the foundations for a strong economic recovery. His address also touched on a number of contemporary issues facing the present situation in Côte d’Ivoire. Koenders commented on the role of youth movements and the media in the highly politicized country, the impact of the International Criminal Court on reconciliation efforts, and the death of 7 UNOCI peacekeepers in 2012.

“Turkey: An Evolving Role in Syria, Europe and the Middle East”

Sabine Freizer, Istanbul-based director of the International Crisis Group’s Europe Program, discussed the evolution of Turkey’s international role, with introductory remarks by CICR Director Jean-Marie Guéhenno. Freizer discussed Turkey’s “Zero Problems” foreign policy and various challenges that have arisen in the region in recent years. In particular, she addressed Turkey’s position on the Syrian conflict, the influx of approximately 300,000 Syrian refugees into Turkey, and the need for international cooperation on the issue as the number of refugees escalates. Other topics included Turkey’s efforts to build its capacity as an international mediator, the potential for the development of an economic zone in the region, Turkey’s increasingly porous borders with Syria and northern Iraq, and its relationship to sectarian divisions in the region.

Congratulations to the Class of 2013!

The Center for International Conflict Resolution would like to express a heartfelt congratulations to  International Conflict Resolution students in the SIPA Class of 2013! Thank you for your contributions to CICR, to SIPA, and all the best to you in your future endeavors!

Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) at
The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War & Peace Studies (SIWPS)

Newsletter Spring 2013

At a glance:

• “Mali, Syria, and the future of French defense” – An Interview with CICR Director Jean-Marie Guéhenno
• History and Peacebuilding in Lebanon: A look at ICR Applied Peacebuilding Research
• Event recap: “Building Peace in Colombia”
• Upcoming CICR events

CICR NEWSLETTER, SPRING 2013

“Mali, Syria, and the future of French defense” -An Interview with CICR Director

Jean-Marie Guéhenno

Recent global events have raised questions about how the international community will respond to current crises around the world. We sat down with CICR Director Jean-Marie Guéhenno to discuss Mali, the Sahel, Syria, the future of French defense and more.

What is your assessment of the recent French intervention in Mali been? Has it been a success? And how has the Hollande government explained the intervention?

Well, when the French President decided to intervene, there was a direct threat on the capital of Mali, Bamako, and a fear that the whole country might become a haven for some terrorist groups. And so there was not much time to dither so to speak. The French policy had been to avoid a direct engagement of French forces, but I think they were confronted with an emergency which left no choice. Now it’s much too early to tell how successful the operation will be. It has been successful in stopping the advance of those groups that wanted to take control of the whole country and it has created major disruptions in their operations. Now, like all engagements in fragile or failed states, success means consolidation of a country and of its institutions: that is a much more ambitious goal than just stopping forces from moving into the capital. And that stabilization is not going to be achieved through military force, it’s a political process. Mali is a fractured country, fractured not only between north and south, but also within the north where you have the Tuareg, but also Arabs, Songhai, Fulanis; it is the divisions of Mali, divisions between north and south, and division within the north that opened the way to the exploitation of those local conflicts by groups that have a more global agenda, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Long term stabilization will require reconciliation between all those groups, whose fractiousness provided an opportunity to AQIM, and the problems are not just in the north: in the south there was a military coup, and a major effort is also needed in the south to bring the situation back to normal. The French and the US are keen to bring the UN in, because for such a process of state building and reconciliation to take hold you really need an impartial broker, and it certainly cannot be the former colonial power. So I think we are entering a phase where the priority is going to be politics, which doesn’t mean that there is no more need for some security presence. I think the French have drawn some lessons from what you have seen in other international engagements: if you have a heavy footprint of foreign western troops, eventually it backfires, which is why France is eager to diminish its footprint and have African troops take a greater role.

What might an endgame in Mali look like? Do you feel confident that a peace keeping mission will be authorized? How is the African Union being considered? Would a hybrid UN-AU mission be authorized? What role should France play? Should they be heavily involved, should they leave a number of troops on the ground?

The discussions are ongoing: what exactly will be the structure of the mission is not yet known. My sense is that in the end there will be a UN mission with a strong African component. What exactly will be the institutional arrangements? I think it’s too early to tell. Will the French keep some presence in Mali? Possibly. I could see how some kind of “quick reaction force” would be helpful to a UN mission. The French government will have to balance the need not to have a heavy footprint with the need to keep enough of a credible, strong international military presence to deter actions by the insurgents groups.

In your work with the French President on French defense, have you taken into account this type of military involvement? Do you foresee similar Mali or Cote D’Ivoire type interventions in the future? How does that come into the long term planning process?

When you’re trying to think through what defense should look like, you have to have a long-term horizon, because the defense cycle, procurement, weapons systems, require a long time to be developed. The difficulty today is that the world is much more fluid, much more prone to sudden changes– “black swans” as the phrase goes — than it was during the Cold War, when there was one well-identified and massive threat, but a fairly predictable one. So in some ways the planning was easier. Today, the good news is that there is no threat comparable to the threat that existed during the Cold War, but there’s a much broader range of smaller threats and as you get into the planning process of French national security you really need to try to think through what could be the most plausible conflicts France will be involved in. One should not go too far and say that Mali is the way of the future, but it is certainly the type of conflict that a country like France might be confronted with. I think that in the present strategic situation what is interesting and challenging is that we used to only think of the threats of force, but now we also have to confront the threats of weakness, of fragile states, and when they are next to Europe it is a threat not only for France but for all Europeans. And so an important dimension for any sort of forward looking planning is to see how one can integrate the European and NATO dimension in the planning. I think the Mali conflict has a lot of the characteristics of future conflict, an adversary that is elusive, a state that is fragile. But there are also scenarios that include inter-state conflict involving countries with strong forces. However, future inter-state conflicts will be different from the past, because of changes in technology and politics.

It sounds as if you have seriously engaged external governments and regional bodies on your French defense Commission.

Yes, in fact our Commission included two non-French citizens for the first time ever. We had German and British members on the Commission. We held a number of hearings with a range of countries, including the US, members of the EU and some key emerging powers. There is a need for a deeper dialog with our European partners: we must ensure that we have a shared understanding of situations if we are to develop a joint response. We also must consider what issues the EU is more likely to lead on, what issues the US is more likely to lead on. The situation in Libya, with the US taking a strategy of “leading from behind,” demonstrated the US was willing to interact in this type of way. We must consider what kind of implications this has for the future of our national defense as well as EU defense. A strong EU depends on the strength and dynamism of its members.

Finally, a question on Syria: you have a significant history on this file and attended the Munich Security Conference where many major actors of the Syrian crisis were present including the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, US Vice President Joe Biden, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and President of the National Coalition for the Opposition Forces, Moaz Al-Khatib. What is your take on the Syrian situation as of today; is there more or less hope for international intervention than six months back?

It was positive that Al-Khatib and Lavrov met in Munich. However, there will not be progress in Syria until there is a serious conversation between the opposition and the government. Mr. Brahimi is trying to anchor negotiations in the Geneva declaration of 30 June 2012. However, the warring parties still have starting points that are incompatible with one another. To me preconditions are not helping the current situation and should not be included in the current negotiations. In time the parties will have to acknowledge a cessation of violence. What is needed in this situation is strong engagement from a third party. A third party mediator is particularly important when there is a major imbalance in power (like the situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories), where the international community has been very inconsistent.

However, I will not discount the fact that there could be some surprise; there are little signals that could lead to engagement. But the longer the conflict continues, the more radicalized it becomes. There has been a slight evolution in the politics of the situation, but it has been too slow. Unfortunately my initial impression that this will be a long, protracted conflict seems to have been proven right. There needs to be an understanding that there must be negotiations without pre-conditions.

Pushkar Sharma is a second-year Master of Public Administration student at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a Departmental Research Fellow at the Center for International Conflict Resolution.

History and Peacebuilding in Lebanon: A look at the ICR Applied Peacebuilding Course

The Applied Peacebuilding Practicum is an innovative International Conflict Resolution course focused on teaching students the skills for conceptualizing, designing and implementing international conflict resolution and peacebuilding projects. The class introduces fifteen first-year students to the practical skills of peacebuilding design and fieldwork. Students design projects in collaboration with a project supervisor in a field-based partner institution (INGOs, UN agencies, etc). Students then implement projects during the summer in the field, and return to SIPA to report on their experiences in the fall. Cathlin Goulding writes about her 2012 Applied Peacebuilding Research Project below.

As a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, I study curriculum and educative spaces that are developed and evolve out of periods of violence. The Applied Peacebuilding course at SIPA seemed like a rare opportunity to garner a rich theoretical understanding of peacebuilding, engage with students outside of my discipline, and apply my learning directly in the field.

For my fieldwork, I was lucky to be placed as a research assistant to Dr. Bassel Akar, a professor at Notre Dame University in Lebanon. One of Dr. Akar’s research projects is the study of history education in Lebanon and developing new frameworks for the teaching of Lebanon’s Civil War (1979-1989) in schools. Development of a “unified” textbook about this Civil War period was, in fact, a mandate of the Ta’if Accord, the peace treaty formulated in Ta’if, Saudi Arabia in 1989.

Some twenty years later, there is still gridlock within Lebanese governance to develop and approve a history education curriculum on the Civil War. Conversations about this history curriculum tend(ed) to circle around the consensus of historical events (e.g., “facts” and events that should be included and excluded), which, as might be expected, differed along sectarian lines. Recent efforts to release outlines of the curriculum were met vehemently by student-led protests, demonstrating the need for an examination of the teaching of history in Lebanon and, more broadly, the role of education in ameliorating violent tensions.

This summer, Dr. Akar and I began to map present and past history education efforts in Lebanon and other conflict-afflicted regions and, ultimately, were trying to make a convincing case for re-conceiving history education from a consensus and dissemination of an “official” history (e.g., a textbook) of the Lebanese Civil War to a new vision of history education that centers on “historical thinking.” By historical thinking, we mean using an “inquiry” approach to the teaching and learning of history, such as a critical examination of different perspectives, understanding causation, student-centered dialogue, and other pedagogical strategies.

So, over the course of three months in Lebanon, I conducted research, writing, and fieldwork on history pedagogies in (post)-conflict settings. I also took field notes at various meetings and conferences pertaining to history education in Lebanon, including a one-day workshop at the UNESCO Palace with Lebanese teachers, scholars, and members of civil society.

One of my biggest takeaways from my work this summer was the very urgency and necessity for the scholarly mapping of previous efforts to teach history in the aftermath of violence. Without this kind of research—one that makes visible what work has been already done and its utility and effect—it seems likely that the conversations, practices, and policies around history education in places like Lebanon will remain stagnant. Ideally, we hope the research will contribute to the loosening the current gridlock around history education, boost scholarly inquiry, and provide new pedagogical trajectories for practitioners.

And, of course, the “learning” of the summer has not been merely within the scope of research. There has been learning and thinking in my conversations with new friends, in observing and sitting on buses to and from Jbeil and Sour, or simply walking around in the Beirut neighborhood in which I lived. These encounters of difference—cultural, linguistic, gender, geographic, and psychic—were also critical moments of learning.

I am thankful to Dr. Akar and my professor, Zachary Metz, for providing with this opportunity.

Cathlin Goulding

Building Peace in Colombia: The Government’s Efforts in the Demobilization and Reintegration of Illegal Armed Groups

On Monday January 28, 2013, over forty members of the Columbia community came together to listen to a presentation by the Director of the Colombian Agency for Reintegration, Alejandro Eder (SIPA, 2006). Mr. Eder’s presentation was preceded with remarks by Professor Jose Antonio Ocampo, Professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Economic and Political Development Concentration at SIPA. The Center for International Conflict Resolution and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies sponsored the event which was organized by Columbia University’s Association of Colombian Students.

The talk, titled “Building Peace in Colombia: The Government’s Efforts in the Demobilization and Reintegration of Illegal Armed Groups,” focused on the comprehensive demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration program being undertaken by the Colombian government in order to transition combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) into productive members of society. Mr. Eder outlined the major components of the program, which include: psycho-social training, education, vocational training, and community service projects. He further discussed the challenges the government’s efforts face, which include ongoing violence and drug trade and the stigma faced by demobilized combatants.

UPCOMING CICR EVENTS:

Mali: Academic and Practitioner Perspectives on the Current Crisis and the Future

6:00-8:00pm, March 12, 2013

Room 1510, International Affairs Building, Columbia University

While Mali was hailed by many as a model of African democracy, recent political events have revealed the fragility of the state. Facing a variety of challenges including unequal development, the drug trade, international extremist networks, secessionist movements, and corruption, Mali presents vital questions that must be addressed for the benefit of the entire region and the world. A discussion featuring a panel of experts including Fabienne Hara (International Crisis Group), Youssef Mahmoud (IPI), Gregory Mann (History, Columbia University), and moderated by Elisabeth Lindenmayer (United Nations Studies Program, SIPA) will discuss Mali’s contemporary and future challenges and the international implications of these challenges.

Co-Sponsored by the United Nations Studies Program at SIPA

Due to limited seating, registration for this event on sundial is required.

For further information regarding this event, please contact Jessica Baen at jrb2178@columbia.edu.

More upcoming events:

-CICR Faculty Panel, date and time TBA

-CICR End of Year Happy Hour, date and time TBA

Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) at
The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War & Peace Studies (SIWPS)

Newsletter Fall 2012

At a glance:

• Introduction 
• CICR Director Jean-Marie Guéhenno Returns from Syria 
• Summer Researchers Present Research Findings on November 12 
• CICR Welcomes the SIPA Class of 2014! 
• Recent Events 
• Upcoming events

CICR NEWSLETTER FALL 2012

Introduction

We’ve had an excellent fall semester! The CICR is delighted to welcome back its Director, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, after his leave of absence during his appointment as Deputy Joint Special Envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League on Syria. Highlights from an interview with Professor Guéhenno on Syria can be found in this issue, and a video of his presentation on November 13th will be available soon.

The CICR is also happy to welcome 60 new MIA/MPA students who have enrolled in the International Conflict Resolution (ICR) Specialization – a significant increase in enrollment from last year. Many of these students joined us in the Catskills Mountains recently for the ICR Specialization retreat. The retreat provided opportunities for both serious conversation with conflict resolution practitioners, as well as some time to socialize and explore the beautiful grounds of the Greenkill Retreat Center.

Returning ICR students had many fascinating experiences in the field over the summer. ICR Practicum students conducted in-depth research on the interplay of natural resources, FDI, peacebuilding and state legitimacy in Liberia, Zambia, Haiti and Colombia. Students from the Applied Peacebuilding course did internship work in Burundi, Colombia, Cyprus, East Timor, Lebanon, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the US. Several ICR students participated in a trip to North Korea with Professor Elisabeth Lindenmayer (Director, United Nations Studies Program) and presented to a packed hall on the evening of October 2nd.

CICR’s events calendar has been quite active so far with a variety of presentations and brownbag discussions on topics ranging from the environment and conflict resolution, civil society in Afghanistan, to transitional justice in Libya.

We look forward to seeing many of you at future events and thank you for helping to make the semester a great success!

Jessica Baen

ICR Specialization and International Security Policy (ISP) Concentration Coordinator