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In the spring of 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimea, the German chancellor Angela Merkel took to the air. She jetted some 20,000 kms around the globe, visiting nine cities in seven days – from Washington to Moscow, from Paris to Kiev – holding one meeting after another with key world leaders in the hope of brokering a peace-deal. Haunted by the centenary of 1914, Merkel saw summitry as the only way to stop Europe from ‘sleepwalking’ into another great war.

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Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter never got on. Theirs was, in fact, one of the most explosive relationships in postwar, transatlantic history and it strained to the limit the bond between West Germany and America. The problems all started before Carter became president, when the German chancellor unwisely chose to meddle in American electoral politics.

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Which Nordic state had sovereignty over Iceland until 1918? Which state was allowed to discriminate against a transgender woman by annulling her marriage? Who disputed ownership of Eastern Greenland before the Permanent Court of International Justice? In preparation for the European Society of International Law's 11th annual conference, this year held in Oslo, test your knowledge of Nordic countries in international law with our quiz.

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The American Society of International Law’s annual meeting (8 – 11 April 2015) will focus on the theme ‘Adapting to a Rapidly Changing World’. In preparation for this meeting, we have asked some key authors to share their thoughts on the ways in which their specific areas of international law have adapted to our rapidly changing world.

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The story of peace is as old as the story of humanity itself, and certainly as old as war. It is a story of progress, often in very difficult circumstances. Historically, peace has often been taken, to imply an absence of overt violence or war between or sometimes within states–in other words, a negative peace. War is often thought to be the natural state of humanity, peace of any sort being fragile and fleeting. I would challenge this view. Peace in its various forms has been by far humanity’s more common experience—as the archaeological, ethnographic, and historic records indicate. Much of history has been relatively peaceful and orderly, while frameworks for security, law, redistribution of resources, and justice have constantly been advancing. Peace has been at the centre of the human experience, and a sophisticated version of peace has become widely accepted in modernity, representing a more positive form of peace.

Peace has been organized domestically within the state, internationally through global organizations and institutions, or transnationally through actors whose ambit covers all of these levels. Peace can be public or private. Peace has often been a hidden phenomenon, subservient to power and interests.

The longer term aspiration for a self-sustaining, positive peace via a process aimed at a comprehensive outcome has rarely been attained, however, even with the combined assistance—in recent times—of international donors, the United Nations, World Bank, military forces, or international NGOs.

Peace is also a rather ambiguous concept. Authoritarian governments and powerful states have, throughout history, had a tendency to impose their version of peace on their own citizens as well as those of other states, as with the Soviet Union’s suppression of dissent amongst its own population and those of its satellite states, such as East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Peace and war may be closely connected, such as when military force is deployed to make peace, as with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) airstrikes in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and in Yugoslavia in 1999.

Both George Orwell (1903–50), in his novel 1984, and the French social theorist Michel Foucault (1926–84) noted the dangers of the relationship between war and peace in their well-known aphorisms: ‘peace is war’, ‘war is peace’. Nevertheless, peace is closely associated with a variety of political, social, economic, and cultural struggles against the horrors of war and oppression. Peace activism has normally been based on campaigns for individual and group rights and needs, for material and legal equality between groups, genders, races, and religions, disarmament, and to build international institutions. This has required the construction of local and international associations, networks, and institutions, which coalesced around widely accepted agendas. Peace activism supported internationally organized civil society campaigns against slavery in the 18th century, and for basic human dignity and rights ever since. Various peace movements have struggled for independence and self-determination, or for voting rights and disarmament (most famously perhaps, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).

Ordinary people can, and have often, mobilized for peace in societal terms using peaceful methods of resistance. A wealth of historical and contemporary evidence supports a popular desire for a broad, positive form of peace. Recent research indicates that its development will tend to be hybrid. A hybrid peace framework ultimately must represent a wide range of social practices, identities, as well as indicating the coexistence of different forms of state, and a widely pluralist international community.

Featured image credit: Dove. CC0 via Pixabay.

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By Sascha-Dominik Bachmann

Russia’s offensive policy of territorial annexation (of the Crimea), the threat of using military force and the actual support of separatist groups on the territory of Ukraine has left the West and NATO practically helpless to respond. NATO seems to be unwilling to agree on a more robust response, thus revealing a political division among its member states. This unwillingness can partly be explained with Europe’s dependency on Russian gas supplies but also in the recognition of legal limitations and considerations, such as NATO’s Article 5 (which only authorizes the use of collective self defence in cases of an attack on a NATO member state).

Borrowing the term from the so-called “Jasmine Revolution” of the failed “Arab Spring” of 2011 which challenged the existing political landscape in the Maghreb, it does not seem farfetched to see the events of this spring as the emergence of a new power balance in the region. As it was the case with the two historical examples, the overall outcome will be different from what was initially expected. While some of the protests led, with the deposition of Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, to actual regime change, soon the “old order” of autocratic governments was reestablished, as the cases of Bahrain, Egypt, and Syria show. It overall also brought Russia back into the region as the main player. Russia’s (re-)annexation of Crimea in April of 2014 is a fait accompli and unlikely to be revised anytime and the ongoing support of separatist groups in the eastern parts of Ukraine where the Russian speaking minority is in the majority, such as Donetsk and Luhansk, has seen an increase in open military combat.

Ukraine is already a divided country, with fighting taking place along its ethnic lines. The break-up of the old Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its ensuing humanitarian catastrophe may serve as a stark reminder of things to come. Yet, it is the prospect of such a civil war which has also removed the necessity for open Russian military intervention; Russia has begun to fight the war by proxy, by using covert military operatives and/or mercenaries. Reflecting these developments and having nothing further to gain from an invasion, Russia announced the withdrawal of regular combat troops from the border this week.

Perevalne, Ukraine – March 4, 2014: Russian soldier guarding an Ukrainian military base near Simferopol city. The Russian military forces invaded Ukrainian Crimea peninsula on February 28, 2014. © AndreyKrav via iStockphoto

The changes to the world since the end of the “Cold War” in 1991 shaped the political landscape and also military strategy and doctrine. What we have seen so far was the evolving of a more liberal view on war as an instrument and continuation of politics — especially in the form of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Examples for this new liberalism in waging war, may be found in the US-led Iraqi campaigns of 1991 and 2003, the war in Afghanistan, Russia’s occupation of Georgian territories during the summer of 2008, the two Chechen campaigns and many more small scale interventions around the globe.

Some of these operations were questionable in terms of legality and legitimacy, and might qualify as the prohibited use of force in terms of Article 2(4) UN Charter. The planning and conducting of these operation would in the future fall within the scope of Article 8 bis of the ICC Statute (in its revised post Kampala 2011 version and coming in force only after 2017), potentially giving raise to criminal responsibility of the political leaders involved.

After adopting a ‘retro’ USSR foreign policy Putin needed and found new strategic allies. In May he entered into a gas deal with China which has the potential not only to disrupt vital energy supply to Europe but also to question the emergence of a future long term cooperation based on mutual economic interest and trust. If these developments herald the coming of a new ‘Cold War’ remains to be seen.

What is evident, though, is that the Cold War’s ‘Strategic Stability’ dogma, which prevented any military direct confrontation between NATO and the Soviet led Warsaw Pact, does not exist in the 21st century. New technologies such as ‘Cyber’ and the use of “New wars” along asymmetric lines of conflict” — which constitute “a dichotomous choice between counterinsurgency and conventional war” — will play a bigger role in the future conduct of hostilities. Such (multi-)modal threats have become known as ‘Hybrid Threats’. Recognized in NATO’s Bi-Strategic Command Capstone Concept of 2010, hybrid threats are defined as “those posed by adversaries, with the ability to simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional means adaptively in pursuit of their objectives.” NATO decided in June 2012 to cease work on CHT at its organizational level but encouraged its member states and associated NATO Excellence Centres to continue working on Hybrid Threats.

Before the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the classification of the conflict as a ‘hybrid war’ by Ukraine’s national security chief, this decision might turn out to have been made too early.

Sascha-Dominik Bachmann is an Associate Professor in International Law (Bournemouth University); State Exam in Law (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich), Assessor Jur, LL.M (Stellenbosch), LL.D (Johannesburg); Sascha-Dominik is a Lieutenant Colonel in the German Army Reserves and had multiple deployments in peacekeeping missions in operational and advisory roles as part of NATO/KFOR from 2002 to 2006. During that time he was also an exchange officer to the 23rd US Marine Regiment. He wants to thank Noach Bachmann for his input. This blog post draws from Sascha’s article “Targeted Killings: Contemporary Challenges, Risks and Opportunities” in the Journal of Conflict Security Law and available to read for free for a limited time. Read his previous blog post on drone killings.

The Journal of Conflict & Security Law is a refereed journal aimed at academics, government officials, military lawyers and lawyers working in the area, as well as individuals interested in the areas of arms control law, the law of armed conflict and collective security law. The journal aims to further understanding of each of the specific areas covered, but also aims to promote the study of the interfaces and relations between them.

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By Richard S. Grossman

Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine has left its neighbors—particularly those with sizable Russian-speaking populations such as Kazakhstan, Latvia, Estonia, and what is left of Ukraine—looking over their shoulder wondering if they are next on Vladimir Putin’s list of territorial acquisitions. The seizure has also left Europe and United States looking for a coherent response.

Neither the Americans nor the Europeans will go to war over Crimea. Military intervention would be costly, unpopular at home, and not necessarily successful. Unless a fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (which includes Latvia and Estonia) were attacked by Russia, thereby requiring a military response under the terms of the NATO treaty, the West will not go to war to check Putin’s land grabs.

So far, the West’s response—aside from harsh rhetoric—has been economic, not military. Both the United States and Europe have imposed travel and financial sanctions on a handful of close associates of Putin (which have had limited effect), with promises of escalation should Russia continue on its expansionist path.

What is the historical record on sanctions? And what are the chances for success if the West does escalate?

The earliest known use of economic sanctions was Pericles’s Megarian decree, enacted in 432 BCE, in which the Athenian leader “…banished [the Megarians] both from our land and from our markets and from the sea and from the continent” (Aristophanes, The Acharnians). The results of these sanctions, according to Aristophanes, was starvation among the Megarians.

Hufbauer, Schott, Elliot, and Oegg (2008) catalogue more than 170 instances of economic sanctions between 1910 and 2000. They find that only about one third of all sanctions efforts were even partially successful, although the success depends critically on the sanction’s goal. Limited goals (e.g. the release of a political prisoner) have been successful about half of the time; more ambitious goals (e.g. disruption of a military adventure, military impairment, regime change, or democratization) are successful between a fifth and a third of the time. Of course, these figures depend crucially on a whole host of additional factors, including the cost borne by the country imposing sanctions, the resilience of the country being sanctioned, and the necessity of international cooperation for the sanctions to be fully implemented.

Despite these cautionary statistics, sanctions can sometimes be effective. According to the US Congressional Research Service, recent US sanctions reduced Iranian oil exports by 60% and led to a decline in the value of the Iranian currency by 50%, forcing Iranian leaders to accept an interim agreement with the United States and its allies in November 2013. On the other hand, US sanctions against Cuba have been in place for more than 50 years and, although having helped to impoverish the island, they have not brought about the hoped for regime change.

Current thinking on sanctions favors what are known as “targeted” or “smart” sanctions. That is, rather than embargoing an entire economy (e.g. the US embargo of Cuba), targeted sanctions aim to hit particular individuals or sectors of the economy via travel bans, asset freezes, arms embargo, etc. Russian human rights campaigner and former World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the way to get to Putin through such smart sanctions, writing:

“If the West punishes Russia with sanctions and a trade war, that might be effective eventually, but it would also be cruel to the 140 million Russians who live under Mr. Putin’s rule. And it would be unnecessary. Instead, sanction the 140 oligarchs who would dump Mr. Putin in the trash tomorrow if he cannot protect their assets abroad. Target their visas, their mansions and IPOs in London, their yachts and Swiss bank accounts. Use banks, not tanks.”

If such sanctions were technically and legally possible—and that the expansionist urge comes from Putin himself and would not be echoed by his successor—this could be the quickest and most effective way to solve the problem.

A slower, but nonetheless sensible course is to squeeze Russia’s most important economic sector—energy. Russian energy exports in 2012 accounted for half of all government revenues. Sanctions that restrict Russia’s ability to export oil and gas would deal a devastating blow to the economy, which has already suffered from the uncertainty surrounding Russian intervention in Ukraine. By mid-March the Russian stock market was down over 10% for the year; the ruble was close to its record low against the dollar; and 10-year Russian borrowing costs were nearly 10%–more than 3% higher than those of the still crippled Greek economy—indicating that international lenders are already wary of the Russian economy.

A difficulty in targeting the Russian energy sector—aside from the widespread pain imposed on ordinary Russians–is that the Europeans are heavily dependent on it, importing nearly one third of their energy from Russia. Given the precarious position of its economy at the moment, an energy crisis is the last thing Europe needs. Although alternative energy sources not will appear overnight, old and new sources could eventually fill the gap, including greater domestic production and rethinking Germany’s plans to close its nuclear plants. Loosening export restrictions on the now-booming US natural gas industry would provide yet another alternative energy source to Europe and increase the effectiveness of sanctions. Freeing the industrialized world from dependence on dictators to fulfill their energy needs can only help the West’s long-term growth prospects and make it less susceptible to threats from rogue states.

If we are patient, squeezing Russia’s energy sector might work. In the short run, however, sanctioning the oligarchs may be the West’s best shot.

Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them and Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800. His homepage is RichardSGrossman.com, he blogs at UnsettledAccount.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @RSGrossman. You can also read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Image credits: (1) Vladimir Putin. Russian Presidential Press and Information Office. CC BY 3.0 by kremlin.ru. (2) Abrakupchinskaya oil exploration drilling rig in Evenkiysky District. Photo by ShavPS. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia.

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By Jared Genser

With the recent end of the NATO mission in Libya, it is an opportune moment to reflect on what took place and what it may mean for global efforts to prevent mass atrocities. Protests demanding an end to Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year reign began on February 14th and spread across the country. The Libyan government immediately dispatched the army to crush the unrest. In a speech a week later, Gaddafi said he would rather die a martyr than to step down, and called on his supporters to attack and “cleanse Libya house by house” until protestors surrender. Some six months later, Gaddafi’s response to the contagion from the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt triggered a series of measures being imposed by the UN Security Council, including what became a NATO-sponsored “no-fly” zone. These measures ultimately resulted in Gaddafi’s ousting from power.

The overarching justification for the international intervention was the “responsibility to protect” (RtoP), a still-evolving doctrine which says all states have an obligation to prevent mass atrocities, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. In the wake of the Libya action, however, a fierce debate has raged over whether its use in this case will help or hurt this approach from being used to help future victims of mass atrocities.

Since its adoption, the doctrine has most notably applied in the case of Kenya’s post-election violence in 2007-2008 and as justification for lesser action in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kyrgyzstan, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. Its application in Libya, however, was only the second time it has been explicitly invoked by the Security Council regarding the situation in a specific country.

In response to Gaddafi’s unyielding assaults on civilians in Libya, the Security Council adopted a unanimous resolution which imposed an arms embargo on Libya, targeted financial sanctions and travel bans against Gaddafi, his family members, and senior regime officials, and referred the situation to the International Criminal Court for investigation of those involved in what was referred to as possible crimes against humanity. In the subsequent six weeks, while the international community debated how to proceed, Gaddafi moved relentlessly moved to quell the uprising, reportedly killing thousands of unarmed civilians.

With the urgency created by Gaddafi’s threats, the presence of his troops just outside Benghazi and a critical public statement by the Arab League urging the immediate imposition of a no-fly zone on Libya, the Security Council adopted a new resolution. Among other actions, it authorized UN member states to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians, created a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, and urged enforcement of an arms embargo and asset freeze on Libyan government as well as on key officials and their families.

It was these efforts, after substantial success and failure, which ultimately resulted in the overthrow of Gaddafi many months later. It is in that context there have been a range of perspectives regarding the Libyan intervention which will ultimately shape its legacy.

First, there is a concern that in the name of civilian protection, RtoP was used to justify a regime-change agenda, which was never the purpose of the doctrine. Second, there has been a global focus on the “sharp end” of RtoP being deployed in Libya. This broader agenda of atrocity prevention can easily be lost when an exception of military intervention, at one extreme of a possible response, swallows the entire doctrine, which is much more comprehensive. And third, there is a conc

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By Louis René Beres

Osama bin Laden was assassinated by U.S. special forces on May 1, 2011. Although media emphasis thus far has been focused almost entirely on the pertinent operational and political issues surrounding this “high value” killing, there are also important jurisprudential aspects to the case. These aspects require similar attention. Whether or not killing Osama was a genuinely purposeful assassination from a strategic perspective, a question that will be debated for years to come, we should now also inquire:  Was it legal?

Assassination is ordinarily a crime under international law. Still, in certain residual circumstances, the targeted killing of principal terrorist leaders can be defended as a fully permissible example of  law-enforcement. In the best of all possible worlds, there would never be any need for such decentralized or “vigilante” expressions of international justice, but – we don’t yet live in such a world. Rather, enduring in our present and still anarchic global legal order, as President Barack Obama correctly understood, the only real alternative to precise self-defense actions against terrorists is apt to be a worsening global instability, and also escalating terrorist violence against the innocent.

Almost by definition, the idea of assassination as remediation seems an oxymoron. At a minimum, this idea seemingly precludes all normal due processes of law. Yet, since the current state system’s inception in the seventeenth century, following the Thirty Years’ War and the resultant Peace of Westphalia (1648), international relations have not been governed by the same civil protections as individual states. In this world legal system, which lacks effective supra-national authority, Al Qaeda leader bin Laden was indisputably responsible for the mass killings of many noncombatant men, women and children. Had he not been assassinated by the United States, his egregious crimes would almost certainly have gone entirely unpunished.

The indiscriminacy of Al Qaeda operations under bin Laden was never the result of inadvertence. It was, instead, the intentional outcome of profoundly murderous principles that lay deeply embedded in the leader’s view of Jihad. For bin Laden, there could never be any meaningful distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. For bin Laden, all that mattered was the distinction between Muslims and “unbelievers.”

As for the lives of unbelievers, it was all very simple.  These lives had no value. They had no sanctity.

Every government has the right and obligation to protect its own citizens. In certain circumstances, this may even extend to assassination. The point has long been understood in Washington, where every president in recent memory has given nodding or more direct approval to “high value” assassination operations. Of course,  lower-value or more tactical assassination efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have become a very regular feature of U.S. special operations.

There are some points of legal comparison with the recent NATO strike that killed Moammar Gadhafi’s second-youngest son, and his three grandchildren. While this was a thinly-disguised assassination attempt that went awry, the target, although certainly a supporter of his own brand of terrorists, had effectively been immunized from any deliberate NATO harms by the U.N. Security Council’s  limited definition of humanitarian intervention.

It is generally

David Kilcullen is a former Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Patraeus in Iraq as well as a former advisor to General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Kilcullen is also Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and the author of The Accidental Guerrilla (2009). His new book, Counterinsurgency, is a no-nonsense picture of modern warfare informed by his experiences on the ground in some of today’s worst trouble spots–including Iraq and Afghanistan. In this excerpt, Kilcullen shares a few insights as to how progress in the Afghan campaign can be properly tracked and assessed.

WHY METRICS MATTER
In 2009 in Afghanistan, ISAF seems to be in an adaptation battle against a rapidly evolving insurgency that has repeatedly absorbed and adapted to past efforts to defeat it, including at least two previous troop surges and three changes of strategy. To end this insurgency and achieve peace, we may need more than just extra troops, new resources, and a new campaign plan: as General Stanley McChrystal has emphasized, we need a new operational culture. Organizations manage what they measure, and they measure what their leaders tell them to report on. Thus, one key way for a leadership team to shift an organization’s focus is to change reporting requirements and the associated measures of performance and effectiveness.

As important, and more urgent, we need to track our progress against the ISAF campaign plan, the Afghan people’s expectations, and the newly announced strategy for the war. The U.S. Congress , in particular, needs measures to track progress in the “surge” against the President Obama’s self-imposed eighteen-month timetable. To be effective, these measures must track three distinct but closely related elements:

1.   Trends in the war (i.e., how the environment, the enemy, the population, and the Afghan government are changing)

2.   ISAF’s progress against the campaign plan and the overall strategy including validation (whether we are doing the right things) and evaluation (how well we are doing them)

3.   Performance of individuals and organizations against best-practice norms for counterinsurgency, reconstruction, and stability operations

Metrics must also be meaningful to multiple audiences, including NATO commanders, intelligence and operations staffs, political leaders, members of the legislature in troop-contributing nations, academic analysts, journalists, and–most important–ordinary Afghans and people around the world.

We should also note that if metrics are widely published, then they become known to the enemy, who can “game” them in order to undermine public confidence and perpetuate the conflict. Thus, we must strike a balance between clarity and openness on the one hand and adaptability and security on the other.

SHARED DIAGNOSIS
Because

Norman Moss's study of America and Britain in the Postwar years, Picking Up the Reigns, is reviewed in the current issue of Kirkus: "Journalist and historian Moss examines the years 1946-49, when the United States assumed the role of world leader. The end of World War II brought about many significant questions. Would Britain remain a world power? Would the Russians, America's uneasy wartime ally, remain friendly? Would Europe, devastated in nearly every way, simply go belly up? Would Germany revert to its warlike ways? Would America return to its traditional isolationism? We know now that the answer to all these questions was a resounding "no," but at the time the contours of any new world order remained unclear. Moss's nutshell version of the creation of the postwar world includes all the major events and cites all the crucial players. Though he alludes to other global episodes that played a role—Mao's assumption of power in China, the Soviet acquisition of the nuclear bomb, the fighting in Palestine between Arabs and Jews—the author focuses on Europe and the transfer of power from Britain to the United States. Moss offers a close-up view of the ravaged British economy, the war weariness of the people and the initial reluctance, then resignation, with which Britain, loath to think itself so weak, passed the baton to the Americans. Against the backdrop of the nascent Cold War, through the Marshall Plan and NATO and out of motives both humanitarian and self-interested, America inserted itself into European affairs with characteristic enthusiasm and cultural insensitivity. Moss adroitly conveys the mixture of relief, resentment, awe and dismay that this shift engendered, noting that while U.S. military, cultural and economic dominance abides, the mantle of global leadership still rests uneasily on American shoulders. A handy guide to the creation of a world order that remains, in many respects, undisturbed."