Month: September 2015

The West Should Not Hold Its Breath in Expecting Real Change to Emerge from the 2015 Presidential Election in Belarus

Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin at the 2012 CSTO meeting in Moscow. Image: The Presidential Press and Information Office/Wikimedia

This article was originally published by LSE EUROPP, a blog hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science on 27 August, 2015.

On 21 August the Central Elections Committee of Belarus announced that five presidential candidates had submitted enough signatures to run in elections scheduled for 11 October this year. In the 2010 presidential elections, the authorities saw the Belarusian opposition as the main threat and crushed protests, putting several presidential candidates in jail. After the recent events in Ukraine the authorities seem to view Russia as a more serious threat although they would not publically admit it.

Belarus only had real elections during a brief period of competitive politics in the early 1990s, prior to the election of current President Alexander Lukashenko in 1994. This is why for many Belarusians, particularly older generations, elections are not an opportunity to change their leadership but something of an old ritual.

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Categories
Terrorism

Is the Islamic State Winning or Losing?

Jihadist waving the flag of the Islamic State. Image: Alatele fr/Flickr

This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 1 September, 2015.

A little over a year ago, thousands of Yazidi refugees huddled at the top of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. They faced extermination at the hands of the Islamic State, or ISIL, and their plight was grave enough to trigger the United States to launch a humanitarian rescue mission to deliver food and protect the refugees. The United States military started dropping food to the refugees on August 7 and on August 8 started dropping bombs on Islamic State fighters.

August 2014 was a watershed month in the battle against ISIL. It represented the moment that ISIL burst into American national consciousness. It was also the month that ISIL first beheaded American captives, and the month that the group reached its greatest territorial expansion as its forces invaded parts of Iraqi Kurdistan and appeared to threaten Baghdad.

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Categories
CSS Blog

Mediation Perspectives: What Monsters Can Teach us about Religion and Conflict

A cute Monster overlooking a crowd of people
Image: dylan Snow/flickr

One of my favorite group exercises in mediation training is the monster game. It begins with the participants forming a big circle and designating someone to be the first monster. The monster then speaks the name of one participant in the circle and slowly approaches him/her making a dangerous looking monster face and terrible monster-like noises. The rules are simple: when you are attacked, you are not allowed to move until you’ve said the name of another participant in the circle. You need to do so before the monster physically touches you. If you can’t give a name in time, or you start moving before you have given a new name, you are “dead” and have to leave the circle. The “survivor” then becomes the new monster and the game continues.

While the aim of the game is to stay alive, many participants don’t survive the first few times they get attacked. That’s because when we get scared, our brains don’t function the way they usually do and raw survival instincts take over. Our first reaction is to escape from the threat as fast as we can. That’s also why we regularly use the monster game in mediation training – complex mediation processes may take unexpected turns. For instance, participants might experience emotions such as insecurity and doubt, or even outright fear and panic. These emotions are neither good nor bad, but merely provide us with information that there is a (perceived) monster in the room. However, our immediate and instinctual reaction may set us back in the sensitive mediation processes we are involved in – just as they may inhibit us from producing the name of another participant in the monster game.

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Historical Memory and its Impact on Sino-Japanese Relations

Nanjing Massacre Bronze Head

Yesterday marked an important anniversary in the history of modern China. In keeping with Western Europe, the United States and others, the country commemorated the 70th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War and remembered its war dead. Beijing declared September 3 to be a national holiday, so that all Chinese citizens could take part in events. However, the rhetoric and tenor of the Chinese commemorations was different in many respects from the somber, understated and generally uncontroversial American and European ceremonies.

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Categories
Terrorism Regional Stability

American Commandos Use Niger for Training and More

US AFRICA COMMAND Flintlock 2014 in Niger.

This article was originally published by Offiziere.ch on 24 August 2015. Republished with permission.

The Pentagon is looking to open up a new gas station for its planes in southern Niger. As terrorists and militant groups have cropped up across North and West Africa, Washington has turned to Niger as an important hub for military activates in the region (see also “US Expands African Drone Aprons“, offiziere.ch, April 6, 2015; Joseph Trevithick, “Niger is the New Hub for American Ops in North, West Africa“, offiziere.ch, May 20, 2014).

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