The African Union’s Coercive Diplomacy in Burundi

Burundi-Child

This article was originally published by the IPI Global Observatory on 18 December, 2015.

The African Union Peace and Security Council (PSC) broke new ground yesterday by adopting a communiqué that threatened to launch a 5,000 strong force to protect civilians in Burundi. The communiqué gave the Burundian government 96 hours to consent to the operation or face the scenario of the AU deploying the force anyway. Although Burundi was a member of the PSC—and was actually its designated chair for December 2015—the council utilized Article 8(9) of the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the PSC (2002) to ask the Burundian delegation to remove themselves from the chamber during the substantive deliberations on this issue.

If the Burundian government consents to its deployment, the force, dubbed the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (MAPROBU), will still confront many practical challenges, not least how to stabilize the country and help facilitate a political settlement of the crisis there, which is thought to have killed hundreds of people, mainly civilians, in the past few months. However, if the Burundian government calls the AU’s bluff and refuses to invite MAPROBU onto its territory, this raises an even more fundamental set of challenges for the AU. Whatever happens, this communiqué is a novel form of coercive diplomacy exercised by the AU that raises many important questions for African governments, regional organizations, the United Nations, and other stakeholders in Burundi’s ongoing crisis, not least the country’s citizens. This report briefly discusses five of those questions.

Categories
Terrorism

The Changing Face of Deadly Conflict

Anti-Violence art

This article was originally published as part of the Crisis Group’s The Future of Conflict project on 21 December, 2015.

Policymakers trying to prevent and resolve deadly conflict — and those, like the International Crisis Group, seeking to influence them — are all too unhappily familiar with that corollary to Murphy’s Law which tells us: “If you’re feeling good, don’t worry: you’ll get over it”. The continuing decline in the reality and prospect of war between states gives us much to be pleased about, as does the reduction — more than most people think — in the number and intensity of wars and incidents of mass violence within states, at least those driven by the familiar forces of greed for territory or government power, or the fears or grievances of particular groups.

But we have all been deeply sobered by the re-emergence, within and across state boundaries, and on a scale not seen for centuries, of a new breed of conflict: extreme violence driven by non-state actors motivated by religious ideology. Starting with al-Qaeda and its offshoots and imitators in Africa and Asia, this has been now given most alarming expression with the emergence of the Islamic State (IS), or Da’esh — its leadership now focused on Syria and Iraq, but rapidly finding supporters elsewhere, like Boko Haram in West Africa and a number of jihadi groups in North Africa and South East Asia. The strategies and tools that have been working elsewhere to date have had little or no traction in this context, and all of us need to go back to the drawing board.

The Strategist: The Work of an Unconventional Political Scientist

Risk Board in the Middle East

This article was originally published by the Harvard International Review on 11 December, 2015.

In Sparrow’s narrative, the private and the public are intimately related, interconnected, and form a unity to explain relevant chapters of the American past.

Political scientist Bartholomew Sparrow has written what might be considered an unconventional work, The Strategist, a biography of Brent Scowcroft. His book is unconventional because biographies, even political biographies, are not typically written by political scientists – they are written by historians, journalists, or amateurs with a lot of energy and a fine pen. The political science community does not reward this work. We are scientists, not storytellers. We write about the science of politics, not about the lives of politicians. We are scientists who want, as professor Dietrich Rueschemeyer stated in Capitalist Development and Democracy to “go beyond conventional history’s preoccupation with historical particularity and aim for theoretical generalizations,” and consequently, the specific, the detail, and the particular are unnecessary and avoidable. Almost twenty years ago the eminent political scientist Margaret Levi argued in A Model, a Method, and a Map: Rational Choice in Comparative Historical Analysis that “the rationalists are almost willing to sacrifice nuance for generalizability, detail for logic, a forfeiture most other comparativists would decline.” In this view, Sparrow’s biography of Scowcroft is not only unconventional, but is also an anomaly in political science.

Interview – Ivan Krastev

Merged Europe and Russia flag

This interview was originally published by E-International Relations on 16 December, 2015.

Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), Austria. A founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he is also a member of the global advisory board of Open Society Foundations, and of the advisory council of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). Mr. Krastev is also associate editor of Europe’s World and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and Transit – Europäische Revue. He has written extensively on democracy, Eastern Europe, the politics of his native Bulgaria and relations between Russia and the West.

Russia’s New National Security Strategy: Familiar Themes, Gaudy Rhetoric

Putin stencils, courtesy by Jonathan Davis/flickr

This article was originally published by the War on the Rocks on 4 January, 2016.

On the last day of 2015, Vladimir Putin put his signature on the decree adopting Russia’s new National Security Strategy out to 2020. Inevitably it is something to pore over looking for clues about Putin’s future intentions and the Kremlin’s assessment of the risks and opportunities ahead. The document can be downloaded as a PDF from the Kremlin website, and there is a pretty decent overview of the main points from RT.

In comparison with the last strategy, adopted in 2009, it comes across at first blush as pretty extreme. The new document contains fiercer and more explicit criticism of the West. The key issue is what Moscow calls the West’s efforts to “levers of tension in the Eurasian region” in order to undermine Russian national interests. In particular, the strategy condemns “the support of the United States and the European Union of an unconstitutional government coup in Ukraine which has led to a deep schism in Ukrainian society and the outbreak of armed conflict.”