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ACCORD-AJCR-2019-2
Abstract and Figures
This study attempts to draw attention to the Boko Haram insurgency and
its implications for national security in Nigeria. Using a historical method
of research and content analysis, it adopts a descriptive and exploratory
approach. It shows how the Boko Haram insurgency has resulted in a dire
humanitarian situation evident from the human casualties, human rights
abuses, population displacement and refugee debacle, livelihood crisis,
and public insecurity – which portend negatively for the maintenance
of national security in Nigeria. The study discusses how the counterterrorism in northeast Nigeria appears to have caused more harm than
good and how the terrorist conflict is far from reaching a stalemate ripe
for resolution. It is recommended that the Nigerian government should
refocus its efforts on a people-centric, community-based and intelligence driven, whole-of-government approach to better police its borders, improve
the capacity of the security forces, enhance interagency cooperation and
improve cooperation in the sub-region. The Government should empower
the local communities to reach out to the perpetrators of the insurgency
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Since the end of the Cold War, international interventions have increasingly been deployed to deal with internal conflict. Liberal peacebuilding has been a guiding concept for many of these interventions, in particular those deployed by the UN. This article argues that liberal peacebuilding is waning in importance, both as a guiding concept and in practice. After long engagements in Afghanistan and the enduring effects of the financial crisis, Western states are shifting their strategy from liberal peacebuilding to stabilization and counterterrorism. In Africa, regional ad hoc coalitions set up to fight terrorists and other armed groups are on the rise, and progressively included in UN peacekeeping operations. To examine these shifts more closely, the article focuses on the crisis in Mali since 2012 and the growing Western security presence in neighbouring Niger. The article concludes that the turn from liberal peacebuilding to stabilization and counterterrorism is likely to be counterproductive, as it will lead to more oppressive governments and more disillusioned people joining the ranks of opposition and terrorist groups, as well as undermine the UN in general and UN peace operations in particular.
Information analysts are often hindered by uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and equivocality when trying to support peacekeeping operations. This article puts forward a conceptual framework that explains what each of these information challenges entails and how uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and equivocality hamper peacekeeping efforts. To assess the conceptual value of linking these information challenges to peacekeeping efforts, this article zooms in on the information support system within the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), though other cases are also considered. The peacekeeping information collection and analysis efforts in Mali illustrate that peacekeeping missions ideally should be equipped with the capacity to overcome information challenges related to uncertainty and complexity in order to support the tactical and operational level of peacekeeping missions. In order to understand decision-making context and support the strategic level, it is also important that information analysts within peacekeeping mission can reduce information challenges related to ambiguity and equivocality. The importance of understanding the decision-making context speaks to the emphasis on sequenced mandates in the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) report. In order to timely adjust the mandate of a peacekeeping mission, the leadership of a peacekeeping mission needs to be alerted of any changes in the decision-making context.
Recent scholarship has discerned an increasing tendency of the UN Security Council to push the boundaries of UN peacekeeping beyond traditional doctrine by equipping peace operations with ever more robust and even peace enforcement mandates. The first and most frequently cited example of this turn is the so-called Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) in the DR Congo. Yet, a comprehensive account of the FIB experience is still missing. Authorized in March 2013 to launch offensive military operations against insurgent groups, the FIB may come to epitomize a sea change in the transition from robust peacekeeping to a qualitatively different kind of UN peace operation. Thus, studying the FIB can offer important insights about the advantages and challenges that may be in store for the UN, should the organization indeed turn towards peace enforcement. The articles analyses the origins, performance and consequences of the FIB in terms of conflict resolution and state-building. It also examines its organizational impact on the UN peace operation in which it was embedded (Monusco). It finds that the FIB has not proven to be the game changer. Instead, it had unintended negative consequences both on state-building and the performance of UN peacekeepers.
This essay recalls the immediate and longer-term responses of the US and its allies to the events of 9/11. It contends that the die for contemporary developments in transnational terrorism was cast in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 – in particular the launching of sustained ‘anti-terrorist’ military combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more covert ‘kinetic’ operations elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. The essay seeks specifically to expose the counter-productivity of using military operations as the primary antidote to transnational terrorism. Focusing on the African ‘laboratory’ and the spread of transnational terrorism and Islamic militancy, particularly in West and East Africa, the essay concludes that radical Islamists have mastered the ‘battle of the narrative’ and that the Western penchant for dispensing a kinetic brand of medication is feeding rather than fighting the virus of global terrorism.
The article examined the nature, dynamics and implications of the interactions of interventions and project contexts. It emphasised the centrality of the resources of interventions in driving the mutual, bi-directional impacts of both interventions and project context. Using a grounded theory (GT) research approach, the study investigated the interactions of the Niger Delta Development Commission’s (NDDC) interventions in Odi community in Bayelsa State, Nigeria. A peace and conflict impact theory that emerged offers eight concepts: resource-status of intervention, black hole of interactions (Bhis), likely deprivation, malevolent charity–beggar relationship, oppressiveness and divisiveness of intervention, local capacities for peace (LCP) and federal government presence as a theoretical explanation of the phenomena. It argues that the resource-status the interventions enjoy compels competition from actors at various levels, in a socio-political and cultural space characterised by bad governance and endemic corruption. The competition begins with shady deals among influential actors as they appropriate the resources, constituting Bhis. The combined effects of the resource-status of intervention, Bhis and bad governance and endemic corruption provide sufficient conditions for spirals of negative impacts—likely deprivation, the malevolent charity–beggar relationship, oppressiveness and divisiveness of intervention—down the intervention programming stages. Thus, the potential positive impacts of the interventions are significantly reduced. However, the LCP and federal government presence that the interventions represent cushion the effect of the negative impacts.