Canadian Consortium on Human Security
January 2007 I Vol.5, Issue 1
Human Security Events and Publications
1. Research and Analysis: Senlis Council
The Senlis Council is an international policy think tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels. The Council’s work encompasses foreign policy, security, development and counter-narcotics policies and aims to provide innovative analysis and proposals within these areas. The extensive program currently underway in Afghanistan focuses on global policy development in conjunction with field research to investigate the relationships between counter-narcotics, military, and development policies and their consequences on Afghanistan’s reconstruction efforts. Senlis Afghanistan has field offices in the Afghan cities of Lashkar Gah and Kandahar.
Senlis regularly releases reports on Afghanistan. The most recent reports can be found here.
2. Web Resource: Peace Operations Monitor now online!
Peace Operations Monitor is a web-based resource providing up-to-date factual information on complex peace operations. It provides an independent source of information about the mandates, multifaceted composition, structures, performance and challenges of military and civilian aspects of UN and other peace operations. It draws on publicly available data from UN, NATO, national government, media, academic, and NGO sources regarding military deployments and humanitarian, development and peacebuilding activities to reveal a more comprehensive picture of selected international peace operations.
Monitoring Peace Operations in Afghanistan is now ready. This, the pilot stage of the project, maps out a contemporary and significant mission that Canada is engaged in - Afghanistan - where new models of military-humanitarian relationships known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) have created much debate and controversy.
Peace Operations Monitor is a project of the Peace Operations Working Group (POWG), a working group of the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee (CPCC). The POWG provides a platform for the engagement of Canadian individuals and civil society organizations related to complex peace operations. Funding for this first phase was provided by the World Federalist Movement – Canada and the University of Calgary Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. Sudan and Haiti are the next areas of focus for the POM.
For further information Contact Dave Peabody, Coordinator, Peace Operations Working Group.
3. Paper: Assessing the Circumstances and Forms of Canada’s Involvement in Fragile States: Towards a Methodology of Relevance and Impact
Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CIFP) at Carleton University has published a rigorous analysis of Canada’s current efforts to develop its analytical capacity with respect to failed and fragile states. Similar initiatives extend from the Human Security agenda advanced by successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in the latter half of the 1990s to current initiatives including the Responsibilities Agenda, the new Global Peace and Security Fund, and the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force (START).
CIFP’s Fragile States Analysis and Assessment project is successor to previous attempts by CIDA, along with various domestic and international partners, to create analytical and assessment tools to aid in policy and programming decision-making in unstable or otherwise conflict-prone areas. The paper includes a section on key findings from the Canadian experience. One of the main findings is that failed and fragile state policies are often not informed by regular situation analyses. Where such analyses are factored into programming, it is often a “one-off” exercise or an external analysis that does not reflect monitoring. Given the dynamic and complex nature of conflict, systematic monitoring and analysis in combination with structural risk assessments are prerequisites for appropriate and sustainable action. The paper is now available online.
4. Policy Brief: Human Security Centre Policy Brief
The Human Security Brief 2006 updates the 2005 Human Security Report's conflict trend data and analyzes the findings of two recently released datasets that track trends in war terminations and organized violence against civilians. The new data in this publication from the Human Security Centre indicate that the post-Cold War decline in armed conflicts and related fatalities has continued, with Sub-Saharan Africa seeing the greatest decrease in political violence. Other encouraging trends include continuing declines in the number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians, and a drop in refugee numbers and military coups. But some findings are far from positive. Four of the world's six regions have experienced increased numbers of conflicts since 2002, the last five years have seen a huge spike in the estimated death toll from terrorism, while negotiated settlements, which are responsible for an increasing proportion of conflict terminations, have worryingly high failure rates.
5. Workshop: Coordinated Approaches to Security, Development and Peacemaking: Lessons Learned from Afghanistan and Liberia, at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary
This workshop, hosted from March 30-31, 2007 at the Rozsa Centre, University of Calgary, addresses the following themes: Do current attempts to implement coordinated approaches, such as Canada’s 3-Ds policy, work in practice? Do they really improve the impacts of international assistance in conflict-affected countries?
The workshop will focus on the experience of recent international interventions in Afghanistan and Liberia, as case studies. The two-day workshop brings together representatives of the main actors in such peace operations: experienced personnel from aid agencies, government policymakers, the military, NGOs, together with analysts of peacebuilding and peace operations and representatives from the case study countries. The objective is to take stock of how efforts to more closely align outside assistance are working in practice, from the perspective of multiple actors in the field.
This event is co-organized by Lara Olson, Associate (NGOs, Aid and Conflict) at CMSS, and Dr. Hrach Gregorian, President, Institute of World Affairs in Washington, D.C.
