Peace and security

Contemporary approaches for tackling international peace and security issues require not only a coherent global approach, but also mutually reinforcing responses involving an effective United Nations system in tandem with strong regional organizations. We focus on strengthening United Nations peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts and on enhancing the effectiveness of military and civilian approaches to the protection of civilians.

Publications
New GGI Advice Report: LAC Contributions to UN Peace Operations
Joachim Koops
María José Maldonado
GGI is pleased to announce the publication of its latest in-depth report titled “Contributions of Latin America and the Caribbean to UN Peace Operations and Recommendations to Increase this Participation” published in cooperation with the Light Coordination Mechanism / United Nations Peacekeeping Integrated Training Service.
Armed Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh: Crisis, Exodus, and Ethnic Cleansing
Matthew Tentler
The mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh has been a source of ethnic conflict for centuries. At the end of the Soviet Union, this conflict took on a new intensity, as the various former Socialist Republics sought independence and territorial acquisition. The First (1988-1994) and Second (2020) Nagorno-Karabakh Wars were substantial in destabilizing the region and severing the long-term relational potential between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The most recent Azerbaijani military operation has resulted in the dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh’s self-declared government, the Republic of Artsakh, and a regional humanitarian crisis due to the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh fleeing.
Thinking of Eloho – One Year On
Joachim Koops
One year ago, family, friends, acquaintances and former work colleagues got together in New York to honour, commemorate and celebrate the life of a loving husband, father, friend, wonderful former colleague and extraordinary human being. At the same time, the funeral marked the acute sense of pain and loss.
The Strategic Compass and the EU's Security & Defence Partnerships
Joachim Koops
Ramon Pacheco Pardo
GGI led a new study for the EP’s Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) on the EU’s Global Security and Defence Partnerships in the wake of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Franco-German Perspectives: Europe's Moment of Geopolitics
Landry Charrier
Hans-Dieter Heumann
President Macron’s remarks on Taiwan and the immediate reactions by policy-makers and commentators felt like a déjà vu. While he wanted to talk about the importance of European strategic autonomy, his partners understood equidistance and turning away from the US. Not that the timing was bad. A few hours earlier, China had launched a large-scale military maneuver off Taiwan with the aim of testing the sealing off of the island state. A clear message from President Macron would have strengthened France's position in the Indo-Pacific and drawn attention to the key point of his interview of early April. But things turned out differently. The speech he gave two days later in The Hague was drowned out by the never-ending criticism related to his earlier remarks on Taiwan. Yet, his earlier remarks laid the foundations for a European economic doctrine that deserves more substantial attention and more discussion. Unfortunately, this did not happen either.
NATO Allies and the Protection of Civilians
Joachim Koops
NATO as an organization and Allies have made significant progress in developing PoC policies and guidance. However, it is less clear how prepared the Alliance is to implement and mobilize its PoC approach in a future crisis.
Doing less with more? The difficult return of Western troop contributing countries to UN Peacekeeping
Alexandra Novosseloff
John Karlsrud
Among others, the deployment of the UN stabilization mission to Mali (MINUSMA) in 2013 has been characterized by a number of researchers as a ‘return’ of Western troop contributors to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping in Africa. The aim of this report is to look at the reality of that ‘return,’ and whether it has enhanced the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping overall and of the UN mission in Mali in particular. In policy and academic circles, the return has been hailed as an opportunity for Western member states to contribute niche capabilities such as ISRs including surveillance drones, military transport and attack helicopters, special forces, and to share experiences and practices developed over a long period of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism warfare in e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq. In Mali, the UN mission is mired in a situation where these experiences were considered as relevant, all the more so as some considered that new UN peacekeeping missions could be deployed to Libya, Somalia, Syria, or in Yemen, thereby making Mali a key testing ground for the future from this perspective. However, while Western countries may indeed have lessons to share, the report argues that so far their contribution to MINUSMA has been a very mixed blessing. The report explores these challenges and impact of them on the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping, defined as the ability to sustain peace over time.
EU-CELAC partnership: make it real, make it political
Joachim Koops
The EU’s foreign direct investment in Latin American and Caribbean States is more than the EU’s investment in Russia, India and China combined.
Civil Society Reforms in Uzbekistan: More than Government Chicanery?
Hubertus Jürgenliemk
‘Central Asia has a centuries-old tradition of bringing Europe and Asia together’ states the EU’s Central Asia Strategy (2007). One promising avenue for bridging the European Union and Central Asian countries is via civil society. As one of the most traditional and least likely candidates, Uzbekistan has recently shown signs of opening to Civil Society Organisations. Before this background, this Briefing Paper asks if the opening by the government is genuine or pure chicanery? If the latter, how can we explain that one of the most authoritarian countries on Earth raises expectations it cannot satisfy?
Assessing the EU’s Joint Communication on the Comprehensive Approach: Implications for EU Crisis Response and Conflict Prevention
Giulia Tercovich
Joachim Koops
On 11 December 2013, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the European Commission published their Joint Communication on ‘The EU’s Comprehensive Approach to external conflict and crises’. Long-awaited in academic and policy circles, the 12-page document builds on a variety of aspects already flagged up in the EEAS mid-term review, but offers for the first time an official EU position paper on the often elusive concept of the EU’s ‘Comprehensive Approach’. This GGI Briefing Paper provides a critical analysis of the Joint Communication and assesses its proposals in the context of the EU’s on-going post-Lisbon institutional transformations and policy advances in the field of early warning, conflict prevention and crisis response. The paper argues that important progress has been made mostly at the EU- internal level of the comprehensive approach, namely in the fields of institution-building, the development of early warning indicators and the facilitation of information-gathering and information-flows. Yet, the external dimension of the EU’s comprehensive approach (i.e., the EU’s cooperation with key international and regional organizations) remains woefully underdeveloped and needs to be addressed urgently in parallel to internal reforms.
Projects
Informing Conflict Prevention, Response and Resolution (INFOCORE)
INFOCORE is an international collaborative research project funded under the 7th European Framework Program of the European Commission. It comprises leading experts from all social sciences dealing, and includes nine renowned research institutions from seven countries. Its main aim is to investigate the role(s) that media play in the emergence or prevention, the escalation or de-escalation, the management, resolution, and reconciliation of violent conflict. INFOCORE provides a systematically comparative assessment of various kinds of media, interacting with a wide range of relevant actors and producing diverse kinds of conflict coverage. It focuses on three main conflict regions – the Middle East, the West Balkans, and the African Great Lakes area. Its findings address both the socially interactive production process behind the creation of conflict coverage, and the dynamics of information and meaning disseminated via the media. INFOCORE focuses on the conditions that bring about different media roles in the cycle of conflict and peace building. It generates knowledge on the social processes underlying the production of conflict news, and the inherent dynamics of conflict news contents, in a systematically comparative fashion. Based on this perspective, the project identifies the conditions under which media play specific constructive or destructive roles in preventing, managing, and resolving violent conflict, and building sustainable peace. INFOCORE reconstructs the production process of conflict-related media contents, focusing on the interactions between professional journalists, political actors, experts/NGOs, and lay publics. It analyzes these actors’ different roles as sources or advocates, mediators, users and audiences in the production of professional news media, social media, and semi-public expert analysis. To assess the roles of media for shaping conflict perceptions and responses to ongoing conflicts, INFOCORE analyzes the dynamics of conflict news content over time. It identifies recurrent patterns of information diffusion and the polarization/consolidation of specific frames and determines the main contextual factors that influence the roles media play in conflict and peace building. Specifically, the project assesses the roles of individual agendas and resources, professional norms, media organizations and systems, political systems, and characteristics of the conflict situation. The INFOCORE project team has taken up its work on January 1, 2014. Its findings and selected data will be accessible to all public. During and beyond the project duration, we invite collaboration by interested researchers and practitioners.