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ISN Insights: Look Back, Week Ahead

The new ISN Insights week starts today, photo: Nicole North Rodriguez/flickr

Last week, ISN Insights examined the following issues:

This week we will be looking at: Vietnam’s geopolitical rise, the growing importance of E-diplomacy, the future of private military security companies, Colombia’s shifting foreign policy and human rights in Haiti.

Make sure to tune in each day for the newest ISN Insights package. And if you’re an active Twitter or Facebook user, look us up and become a follower/fan!

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New ISN Partner: SAGE International

The latest ISN Partner

We are happy to announce that SAGE International has joined the ISN’s worldwide partner network.

Lead by Dr John Bruni, SAGE is an independent, non-profit virtual think tank, consultancy and education service provider based in South Australia. It combines the talents of an interdisciplinary network of Australian and international scholars and researchers analyzing contemporary statecraft and strategy, especially the interface of political, psychological and philosophical motivations and the application of force.

The ISN Digital Library now includes SAGE’s publication series “Ideas and Concepts” with a recent paper on the difficulties of Iran’s foreign policy in Lebanon and another one on Julian Assange entitled “Neither Saint nor Sinner”.

Welcome on board, SAGE International!

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Keyword in Focus

Keyword in Focus: Tunisia

Too few jobs or too many graduates? Image: courtesy of Stefano Benetti

“A socio-economic oasis in a political desert”: this is how Diogo Noivo describes Tunisia in a 2009 briefing paper for the Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security (IPRIS). It got about by now that the notorious tourist destination is not a paradise for critical spirits and democratically-minded people. But now it seems that even the socio-economic oasis Tunisia was supposed to be is drying out.

A desperate, unemployed university graduate, who was denied the right to have a vegetable stall on the local market in a provincial town and slapped and insulted by the police, burnt himself in protest. Demonstrations organized by otherwise loyal trade unions were not crushed by the government’s security forces for a change and the autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali reacted to the protests by firing his youth minister and allocating more money for the country’s youth programs. However, the angry crowd didn’t let itself calm down by this and Ben Ali returned to his old methods: guns and batons.

In this excellent report, the German-language Swiss public radio reveals the socio-economic causes of this unrest: Tunisia’s good education system brings out tens of thousands of university graduates every  year, which the country’s low-tech industries such as textiles and cheap tourism can’t absorb.

Extortion, Exploitation and Annihilation in the Sinai Desert

Danger lurks everywhere, photo: Ernesto Graf/flickr

On Sunday, 5 December 2010, Pope Benedict XVI called on the world to pray for “the victims of traffickers and criminals, such as the drama of the hostages, Eritreans and of other nationalities, in the Sinai desert”. By doing so, he lifted the lid on years of international indifference to the plight of the refugees fleeing from the East African chaos northwards towards safety. Shortly thereafter, the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) bolstered the papal call with a well-researched report showing that African refugees in Sinai are habitually tortured, assaulted, raped and held for ransom by smugglers hired to bring them through Egypt’s desert.

As a consequence of a number of ongoing human-rights crises in the Horn of Africa, the Sinai has turned into a major center for people trafficking. On their search for safety, the refugees become easy prey to agents of Bedouin traffickers who promise access to Israel via Egypt. Since 2007, the Sinai Bedouins have thus developed a well-established, sizable, and highly organized trafficking network. However, in addition to smuggling people across borders for money, the Bedouins in the Sinai habitually abuse the migrants under their control and hold them for ransom.

The traffickers hold the asylum seekers hostage in various locations across the Egyptian peninsula for weeks or months until their relatives pay thousands of dollars to secure their release. In order to exact those payments the traffickers hold the refugees in steel containers, depriving them of food and water. The defenseless Africans are tortured with hot irons, electric shocks, or whippings. Women are separated from the men, detained in secluded rooms, and subjected to repeated sexual abuse and rape at the hands of their captors. According to the PHR report, many migrants were abused in one or more of these ways every two to three days – sometimes for months – until the demanded money arrived.

Yet even the migrants who finally do find their way over the border into Israel find no safe haven.

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New ISN Partner: Institute for Economics and Peace

New ISN Partner

The ISN happily welcomes the Institute for Economics and Peace as a new partner.

Based in Sydney, Australia, the Institute is an independent not-for-profit research organization dedicated to developing the inter-relationships between business, peace and economic development.

The Institute’s flagship project is the Global Peace Index (GPI), a yearly ranking listing 149 nations according to their ‘absence of violence’. The GPI is composed of qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources, which combine factors internal to a country and external to it.

The Institute for Economics and Peace conducts research in the following areas:

  • Statistical analyses to identify the structures and causes of peace;
  • Economic assessment of the value of increased levels of peacefulness to global GDP;
  • Definition and implication of the “Peace Industry”;
  • Exploration of multinational attitudinal surveys and their relevance to societal peacefulness;
  • Analyses of the relationship between peace, markets, costs and profit;
  • Investigation of the world’s most peaceful industries;
  • Development of statistical methods to determine how to calculate the probable impact of reducing levels of violence and increasing levels of peacefulness on a company’s market size.

In addition to research, the Institute also conducts education, generates dialogue, and publicizes the output of its activities with a view to impacting the public agenda.

We are very glad to have the Institute for Economics and Peace as part of the International Relations and Security Network and look forward to a fruitful cooperation.