Expectations that the end of Suharto’s thirty-two years of authoritarian rule in Indonesia in 1998 would usher in an era of political reform, including the end to separatist rebellions, human rights abuses, and military impunity, were dashed by the intensification of old conflicts and outbreak of new forms of violence. Despite initial optimism, efforts to address human rights violations during the New Order stalled. This article surveys the various forms of conflict in Indonesia over the past twenty years and the major trends in scholarship, together with the smaller body of literature framed specifically in terms of peacebuilding. It concludes that much of the literature on peacebuilding has been driven by institutional interests and the incentives created by the funding of these institutions.

We addressed the research question, how does the host community perceive the effects of Rohingya influx to Bangladesh, from their perspectives using a questionnaire survey, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions. Bangladesh sheltered over a million Rohingyas, fleeing genocide and serious crimes against humanity, on humanitarian grounds. The local people welcomed them and offered direct support and assistance. Our findings suggest that their immediate sympathy for Rohingyas faded over time due to various factors. An overwhelming majority perceived the Rohingyas as pressure on their land and resources and being deprived on numerous grounds outweighed the disproportionate economic incentives of the influx. The findings offer fresh insights into the challenges of hosting refugees in the local communities because of the diverse impacts of forced displacement.

India and hence modifies their strategic priorities. The prevailing security dynamics in the region, such as changing nature of conflicts, introduction of new technologies, evolving deterrent force postures, and suspension of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs), have increased states’ reliance on arms build-up and decreased their inclination to arms control and disarmament. This paper offers a Pakistani perspective on how the prevailing regional environment seems less favorable to nuclear disarmament and more inclined to deterrent force modernization. To explain the above rationale, this study takes guidance from primary and secondary sources to assess disarmament challenges, and discusses the prospects for creating a new security environment in the region to promote a renewed consensus on nuclear disarmament.

This article examines the outcomes of collective forms of engagement in the ASEAN region. By examining how convening power in these south-south engagements has worked since the Bandung Conference, the paper reviews how the mode of consensus building adopted in 1955 has been channelled into regional cooperation. In particular, the paper considers the implications of these forms of cooperation for the consensus building that characterizes ASEAN today. The paper uses the processes evident in the ASEAN Development Outlook to set out the consequences of these findings for how the UN system can set out more effective criteria for global South cooperation. This has direct implications for institutional mechanisms for advancing capacity and expertise in new forms of cooperation between the global North and global South.

Various parts of the United Nations (UN) system have been part of the definition and implementation of technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC), South-South cooperation (SSC) and triangular cooperation (TrC) over the years since the Buenos Aires Plan of Action of 1978 (BAPA). This paper will take the view that there is a perception that South-South and triangular cooperation have not achieved their potential to be transformative because accompanying changes needed for the modalities have not been pursued fully and thus these development modalities seemingly remain largely cosmetic. To respond to this perception, the authors will review what was expected of the United Nations development systems (UNDS) from Bandung to Buenos Aires and what has been achieved since noting the constraints of lack of data and measurement.

What is missing from the ongoing Afghan peace talks is public opinion: whether the Afghan people are in broad agreement with the peace process and its potential outcomes. The current study is based on the opinions of 704 people from across twenty-five provinces of Afghanistan. The study uses a quantitative and qualitative approach to delve into public opinion on the process. The general finding of this study is that while almost all Afghans want peace, most are unwilling to accept a peace deal that would cost them their constitutional gains, including human rights, minority rights, gender equality, and an Islamic republic. Besides this, most Afghans would be unwilling to vote for the Taliban in any elections.

This article explores how a leading Korean literary critic, Kim Kirim (1908-?), understood the controversial term “fascism” in his writings. If we associate fascism with wartime Japanese totalitarianism, it is difficult to understand why and how he warned against fascism in liberated Korea. By interpreting his use of the term “fascism” from the colonial to the liberation period, we are able to gain a better understanding of the international relations between imperial Japan and colonial Korea, as well as of the internal relations between North and South Korea from 1945 to 1950. Such an approach allows us to see the struggle for mutual respect among Korean writers experiencing the ideological conflict and exclusive sectarianism immediately before the outbreak of the Korean War.

This study seeks to assess how the conflict in Somalia has transformed over the years and examines the merits of adopting a hybrid approach to peacebuilding. The article argues that given the changes experienced in the conflict and the sociopolitical and cultural characteristics of the Somali Society, a hybrid peace strategy which combines the traditional Xeer approach and contemporary counter-terrorism strategies can fill the gaps previous peace efforts failed to achieve. This approach has the potential to re-establish the horizontal and vertical social contracts between the people themselves and with the government which had been lost prior to and during the conflict.

With the North Korean waves of armament race in 2017-19, noted by the diplomacy of the Trump Administration, de-nuclearization has become a top priority for the Korean peninsula. In the meantime potentials for economic reforms in North Korea, perhaps even to the point of systemic change, are still open issues, as the need to feed people and improve the dismal economic performance remains high on the agenda. What lessons might be learned from the systemic change of Central and Eastern Europe for the context of East Asia? Implications based on International Relation (IR) theory are suggested.

Human security should not be considered as a mere academic rhetoric-it is, in fact, a political tool aimed at transforming individuals from conditions of exploitation and domination to that of political participation and accountability. This paper adopts political governance perspectives to analyze human security in Africa. It argues that without accountable democratic governance, the expressed objectives of human security would be difficult to achieve in Africa. By this focus, the paper adopts a broader view of human security, satisfying both the governance and development prerequisites of the concept, which has underpinned [in] security in Africa. The overall estimation of human security in Africa is that only a marginal improvement has been made in the region, especially over the last decade.

This article analyzes the role of the Justice and Peace Commission (JPC) of the Archdiocese of Bamenda in the management and prevention of inter-ethnic conflicts in the Northwest Region of Cameroon. It demonstrates that the active participation of this institution in peacebuilding is marked by partial success. There is much belief in the capacity of faith-based institutions to manage conflicts. However, evidence on the role of this Catholic Commission in terms of engagement and mediation in peacebuilding among warring ethnic communities is not encouraging. While its dialogue approach has significantly checked violence, its Peace Education Programme has failed to build an entrenched culture of peace. It operates in a context of significant obstacles and direly needs to beef up its operations.

This study investigates the effects of a peace education camp, designed and organized by women peace advocates, in shaping the beliefs and attitudes of youth leaders after a violent incident that threatened the gains of a peace process in the Philippines. The study uses quantitative methodology and a two observation (pretest-posttest) design. Seventy students participated in the research. The Beliefs and Attitudes toward Peace Issues (BATPI) scale developed by the researcher was employed. Data analysis procedures used the t-test for paired samples. Results showed that beliefs and attitudes of participants toward peace and the peace process significantly improved after the peace education camp. Implications and applications of findings are discussed and recommendations are offered.

The effectiveness of the nuclear non-proliferation regime is no longer as sturdy as it once was and new infusions of creativity are greatly needed. Concentrating on positive incentives may better promote non-proliferation. Incentives targeting industry have a higher chance of success due to their vast influence in multiple governments. The IAEA’s ElBaradei Report is one conceptualizatoin of an intergovernmental nuclear fuel supply bank. As a multilateral approach, nuclear fuel banks promote more opportunities for diplomacy amongst states. While it is only one approach to overcoming the current crisis of the non-proliferation regime, it has the potential to make a huge difference in how the world handles nuclear power on a supranational basis.

Kashmir is a territorial dispute embedded in the politico-diplomatic events that shook the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The most immediate outcome of this dispute has been the human tragedy unfolding in Indian administered Kashmir, where a popular armed rebellion broke out in 1989. The brutalities of the rebellion reverberate across Kashmir, flashed in the common memories of people, especially the young who have been exposed to various socio-cultural vulnerabilities. Young Kashmiris have not known a stable and peaceful society and, therefore, rebelling has become part of the youth culture. They are politically hyper-engaged with more radical political views entailing revolutionary violence as a handy mechanism for preserving societal security, territorial fortification, and justice in Kashmir.

More than fifteen years of intense internal armed conflict has made Pakistan home to one of the largest populations of internally displaced persons (IDPs). This article investigates the impact of conflict on socioeconomic well-being through measuring changes in post conflict levels of schooling, livelihood, and income, and also seeks to understand the challenges faced by IDPs from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas located in Jalozai Camp, Khyber Punkhtoonkhwa (KP). The results of a survey analysis indicate significant gaps in educational attainment due to displacement and this impacts socioeconomic well-being.

Post-war reconstruction in Sri Lanka, which is aided by many countries, is aimed at consolidating the unitary state structure as part of a geo-strategic security complex in the Indian Ocean Region. In this process, discourses of democratization and human rights have been reconfigured to contain or totally remove any threat to the unitary state emerging from the Tamils in the North and East whose claim to self-determination is seen as a major challenge to the geo-strategic complex in South Asia. In such a context, the bio-politics of the development-security nexus and neo-liberal governmentality operates by strengthening the hegemony of the Sinhala state against the Tamils and weakening or destroying the essential foundations of Tamil nationhood. Without recognizing these local and global dynamics every peacebuilding attempt will fail.

Building peace to prevent the recurrence of conflict is an inevitable role of United Nations peacekeeping operations today. As this activity increasingly occurs in populated, low-intensity conflict areas, relations between peacekeepers and civil communities become significant. Peacebuilding cannot achieve any level of success unless it is directly relevant to the communal needs of the local people. Building an alliance for peace in civil communities is vital not only for strengthening civil community-peacekeeper relations but also for fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility in local minds. By examining the peacebuilding experience of South Asian states, this article shows that the complex, sensitive and volatile nature of today’s operational environments have necessitated employing soft aspects of military science as part of a community-centered approach to peacebuilding.

This article examines the impact of a natural disaster on the political dynamics of an ethno-nationalist conflict. The humanitarian space generated by the 2004 tsunami could have revived the peace process between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as evidenced by the joint mechanism that was formed for rehabilitation and reconstruction. However, the impact of the tsunami carried a potential for both peacebuilding and escalation of the conflict. The growing securitization of South Asia, led by the United States, upheld a militaristic approach and strengthened the Sri Lankan state against the LTTE. The militaristic approach to the decades-long conflict was advanced and eventually resulted in a massive war which claimed thousands of lives. The tsunami was a missed political opportunity.

Although Southeast Asia was brutally occupied by Imperial Japan during World War II, the region has reconciled with postwar Japan. That Southeast Asia is not hostile to Japan today is due to several reasons: the relatively short duration of the Japanese occupation, the pragmatic needs of the Southeast Asian states to deal with immediate security and economic problems rather than to dwell on the past, and the efforts of Japan to be a good neighbor to Southeast Asia since the enunciation of the 1977 Fukuda Doctrine. Public opinion surveys of Southeast Asians towards Japan today and the content analysis of the history textbooks of various ASEAN states show little hostility towards Japan.

In the years immediately before and after the 1998 Lysøen Declaration, a striking feature of the initiatives associated with the human security agenda was the prominent role of civil society coalitions, which was widely regarded as indispensible to the signal successes of this period. However, the dramatic breakthroughs of this “new diplomacy” were the products of a propitious conjuncture of conditions that contained the seeds of their subsequent loss of momentum. Yet the human security work of civil society organizations (CSOs) continues, in less prominent but still important ways, to be woven into the fabric of the more cosmopolitan practices promoted by the agenda. In the meantime, their setbacks contain important lessons-both for CSOs and for the policymakers inclined to collaborate with them.

This article discusses the role of the United Nations in the development of the concept of human security since the 1998 Lysøen Declaration. The UN’s role in the evolution of understandings of human security in international society is examined, emphasizing conceptual development, the incubation of ideas, consensus building, legitimation and codification, and practice. It also considers the limitations on the organization in promoting human security, given its state-centric character and substantial contestation of the idea of sovereignty in international society. The analysis suggests that the organization has played a significant role in the effort to define, promote, legitimize and implement elements of human security, but faces serious constraints given its state-centric nature.