Crisisgroup

Krieg ist auf dem Vormarsch. Das zeigt der Blick zurück, denn seit rund fünf Jahren steigt weltweit die Zahl der Konflikte und damit der Opfer und der Flüchtlinge. Dies wird sich wohl auch in diesem Jahr fortsetzen, mit alten und neuen Kriegen. Nur Kolumbien bietet Anlass zur Hoffnung.

On the surface, 2015 came to a close in a moment of relative tranquility after a turbulent year for China’s neighborhood. But the calm is misleading: the optics of regional diplomacy have become increasingly detached from the reality of the underlying tensions; this risks obscuring deepening fault lines.

Reunir una lista de las guerras a las que más atención y apoyo debe prestar la comunidad internacional en 2016 es difícil, y no por buenos motivos. Tras el fin de la guerra fría, durante veinte años, el número de conflictos mortales disminuyó. Había menos guerras y mataban a menos gente. Sin embargo, hace cinco años, esa tendencia positiva se invirtió, y desde entonces cada año hay más conflictos, más víctimas y más personas desplazadas. No parece que en 2016 vaya a mejorar la situación de 2015: lo que está en alza no es la paz, sino la guerra.

The month saw an intensification of deadly violence in Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, with over 80 people killed following clashes with security forces. The African Union Peace and Security Council (AU PSC) made a welcome statement of intent to deploy forces to halt the slide toward civil war and mass atrocities. In Afghanistan, fighting raged between government and Taliban forces, particularly in Helmand province, while in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Niger, political tensions heightened. In a positive step forward, a peace deal was signed in Libya but uncertainties remain over the viability of the agreement. As stressed by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, President and CEO of the International Crisis Group, in today’s Ten Conflicts to Watch in 2016, it “should be seen as a beginning, not an end, to the peace process”.

Pulling together a list of the wars most in need of international attention and support in 2016 is challenging for all the wrong reasons. For 20 years after the end of the Cold War, deadly conflict was in decline. Fewer wars were killing fewer people the world over. Five years ago, however, that positive trend went into reverse, and each year since has seen more conflict, more victims, and more people displaced. 2016 is unlikely to bring an improvement from the woes of 2015: It is war — not peace — that has momentum.

Crisis Group welcomes yesterday’s bold decision of the African Union Peace and Security Council (AU PSC) authorising the deployment of an African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (MAPROBU) to halt the slide toward civil war and mass atrocities. The humanitarian situation in the country is increasingly dire. More than 200,000 refugees have fled across its borders, and each dawn reveals fresh corpses in the streets of the capital, Bujumbura. UN officials warn that without immediate action the situation risks descending into “catastrophic violence”.

Foreign ministers representing the primary external players in Syria’s conflict will gather in New York on Friday, and the stakes are high. In two meetings in Vienna spearheaded by the United States and Russia this fall, states backing President Bashar Assad’s regime and its primary, non-jihadist opponents agreed to push for a renewal of negotiations between the Syrian sides in January 2016 and set an ambitious timeline for those talks to achieve a national ceasefire and transition to “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance.”

The idea that “peace processes must be well-supported politically, technically and financially”, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stated in the introduction to the UN Guidance for Effective Mediation, is something of a truism. Certainly, no one would ever advocate poor political technical or financial support to a peace process. But the appearance of mediation support as a dedicated activity, along with formal mechanisms to pursue it, is a relatively recent development with significant implications for the work of multilateral envoys.

A major breach of the agreement signed in Addis Ababa and Juba in August to end South Sudan’s now two-year old civil war is increasingly likely. While low-level conflict is continuing in Unity state, conflict is now escalating in the Equatorias and Western Bahr el Ghazal. Many of the disparate members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-In Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) reject the agreement, while the government shies from implementing a deal it believes is to its detriment. The heads of state of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD, the regional body that mediated the agreement), former Botswanan President Festus Moghae, head of the agreement’s Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC), and key states that partnered with IGAD, including China, Norway, the U.S. and the UK, must take urgent, united action to put the peace process back on track or South Sudan will enter the new year at war again.

Diplomats are working at fever pitch to resolve the long-running crisis in Libya, with one eye on halting waves of refugees headed for Europe and the other on uprooting Islamic State from the North African coast.

Few countries have done more, more quickly to combat corruption than impoverished, violence-wracked Guatemala. In less than a year prosecutors have linked nearly 100 officials and business people to schemes that may have robbed the state of more than $120 million in customs revenues, while earning fortunes in kickbacks.

Islamic State gunmen brought death to the streets of Paris on November 13, leaving the European Union in a state of shock. This is a turning point at which Europe must decide how best to defend its way of life. The way forward should be guided by three principles: defending liberty, ensuring the equality of Muslim communities, and radically improving EU-wide security measures including exchange of information and defence of external borders - See more at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/twt/after-paris-europe-s-challenge#sthash.VYhBr0Vh.dpuf

I diplomatici stanno lavorando febbrilmente ma ci sono pericoli derivanti da un processo veloce che consacrasse un governo di unità nazionale senza aver consolidato l'appoggio interno o affrontato questioni relative alla sicurezza

UN-led negotiations to unite the divided country — it has two parliaments, two governments, two militia coalitions that have been competing for control of a rapidly failing state since summer 2014 — are stalling. Fighting continues apace in Benghazi, the city that was the first to rebel against the rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011 and is now a byword for extremism. The Islamic State is growing by the day in the Gulf of Sirte in the center of the country, imposing its cruel dictates and making inroads elsewhere in the country. Criminal gangs – often the same militias that have had the run of the country since Gaddafi’s fall – are doing a brisk trade in people smuggling, sending off desperate migrants and refugees on rickety boats across the Mediterranean.

相次ぐテロ、出口の見えないシリアと中東の国々の内戦、膠着（こうちゃく）状態のウクライナ情勢——。危機に包まれて、２０１５年が間もなく暮れる。私たちは今、歴史のどんな局面にいるのか。２０１６年に希望はあるか。紛争解決に長年携わるジャンマリー・ゲーノ氏を、パリ同時多発テロ後の緊張が続くブリュッセルに訪ねた。

The International Crisis Group considers the international conference on 13 December in Rome an opportunity to bring together a divided Libya through an inclusive political process. Under the co-chairmanship of Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, it will bring together the "P5+5" group that has backed the talks – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) and Germany, Italy, Spain, the European Union and the UN, as well as Libya’s neighbours.

The Political and Security Crisis in Burundi

Violence at the hands of the Basque separatist organization ETA was for many years an anomalous feature of Spain’s transition to democracy. This report, which draws on the author’s book Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2014), explains why this was the case, examines both the factors that contributed to ETA’s October 2011 announcement of an end to violence and the obstacles encountered in moving forward from that announcement to disarmament and dissolution, and extracts lessons relevant for other contexts.

In their 2003 article “Where Do the Peacekeepers Go?”, Michael Gilligan and Stephen John Stedman observed that the literature on the determinants of peacekeeping suffered from several methodological problems. The most prominent of these was “a tendency to select cases on the basis of the dependent variable and, by doing so, to restrict the sample to peacekeeping operations that the UN has chosen to undertake”. This led characteristics that these cases had in common to be used as the basis for understanding UN intervention, while ignoring the cases of civil wars or interstate aggression in which UN peacekeepers had not been present. The result was analysis that could not fully address the factors responsible for the decision to intervene.

Venezuela is on the edge. In a stunning defeat of the country’s ruling party—the greatest setback in over ten years for the movement created by the late Hugo Chávez—voters overwhelmingly supported the opposition Democratic Unity (MUD) alliance in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. In the early hours of December 7, the election authority (CNE) said the MUD had won 99 of 167 seats, with 22 still to be determined. The MUD, however, claimed 112, which would just be enough to give it two-thirds “super-majority” needed, for example, to convene a constituent assembly.