Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe 2012 Annual Report

We end the year one participating State stronger. and, as an organization,we remain as committed as ever to our founding principles. i am pleased to welcome Mongolia as the latest country to join our (now) 57-member strong community. this demonstrates the continuing relevance of the oSCE comprehensive approach to security and the viability of the organization as a forum where security issues can be discussed and solutions sought in an open and inclusive manner. We have another first this year: the transnational threats Department was established to provide co-ordination and cohesiveness to OSCE-wide activities. the new TNTD combines OSCE resources in policing, counter-terrorism, borders and cybersecurity, offering new opportunities for enhanced co-operation in an integrated way with many partner organizations, including NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Council of Europe and the European Union. While participating States are clear in supporting a steady development of our activities to address tnts, we have seen that differences remain in other areas of our agenda. this has to do in part with the overall balance, both geopolitical and thematic, of our activities. But it also includes issues such as the QSCE role in working to resolve protracted conflicts, dealing with cybersecurity and addressing freedom of electronic media. This year I launched the first Security Days, an event which brought together prominent experts, members of think tanks, representatives of civil society and OSCE delegates, to discuss current challenges and the role of States and civil society in shaping a security community. More than 250 participants discussed Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security last June, strengthening interaction between the OSCE and relevant partners. this is one effort to bring more balance to the agenda of the organization by building up and sharpening our focus and activities in the politico-military field. The OSCE has extensive experience in monitoring and organizing elections. Under the leadership of the Chairmanship-in-office, the OSCE also successfully assisted in organizing the Serbian presidential and parliamentary elections in Kosovo. Moreover, we do this with ever-shrinking resources during this worldwide financial crisis. these difficult financial times mean that OSCE must work even more efficiently. I have tried to achieve this by creating synergies with regional and international actors and with our partners for Co-operation. we have adopted the same strategy with think tanks, academic organizations and governments. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners who work diligently with us, sharing their ideas and displaying common commitment. My appreciation also goes to Tanaiste, Eamon Gilmore, for his excellent work as Chairperson in 2012. Assisted by a very committed team, he worked with strong determination throughout the year and was particularly successful in highlighting important issues like promoting progress towards conflict resolution, freedom of expression and good governance. I would also like to express my profound gratitude to the dedicated women and men who serve the OSCE in the Secretariat, the institutions, the Field operations and the Parliamentary Assembly

Ethnic minorities and sustainable refugee return and reintegration in Kosovo

Unprecedented levels of displacement make the return of refugees and internally displaced populations a critical challenge, with post-conflict minority return especially complex. This article investigates the return process in Kosovo to identify what supports and hinders sustainability. For nearly two decades the Government of Kosovo and international partners have supported the return of minorities displaced during the 1998–1999 conflict and March 2004 riots. We draw on interviews with all major stakeholder groups in return programming and on indicative survey data from 499 returnees. Using a framework adapted from Black, Koser and Munk (‘Understanding Voluntary Return’), we focus on the Kosovo return process in recent years. The survey results indicate some sustainability but high differentiation in returnees’ satisfaction. This warrants concern, as differences in returnee perspectives run along already conflictual ethnic and spatial fault lines. In post-conflict settings, sustainable return and reintegration require more than the provision of services–they require nuanced understanding of how the shadow of conflict shapes returnee experiences. Finally, we question the orthodoxy of return discourse and highlight critical factors to support sustainable return elsewhere.</p

Preventing violent radicalization of youth through dialogic evidence-based policies

Radicalization of youth leading to violent extremism in the form of terrorism is an urgent problem considering the rise of young people joining extremist groups of different ideologies. Previous research on the impact of counter-terrorism polices has highlighted negative outcomes such as stigmatizing minority groups. Drawing on qualitative research conducted under the PROTON project (2016-2019) by CREA-UB on the social and ethical impact of counter-terrorism policies in six EU countries, the present article presents and discusses the ways in which actions characterized by creating spaces for dialogue at the grassroots level are contributing to prevent youth violent radicalization. The results highlight four core elements underlying these spaces for dialogue: providing guidance to be safe in the exploration of extremist messages and violent radicalization; the rejection of violence; that dialogue is egalitarian; and that relationships are built on trust so that adolescents and young adults feel confident to raise their doubts. If taken into account, these elements can serve to elaborate dialogic evidence-based policies. The policies which include a dialogue between the scientific evidence and the people affected by them once implemented, achieve positive social impact

The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe

The situation in collective memory studies that share a nexus with the discipline of International Relations (IR) is currently reflective of the traditionally West-centric writing of European history. This order of things has become increasingly challenged after the eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU). This article examines Poland’s and the Baltics’ recent attempts to enlarge the mnemonic vision of ‘the united Europe’ by placing their ‘subaltern pasts’ in contest with the conventionally Western European-bent understanding of the consequences of World War II in Europe. I argue that their endeavours to wrench the ‘European mnemonical map’ apart in order to become more congruent with the different historical experiences within the enlarged EU encapsulate the curious trademark of Polish and Baltic post-Cold War politics of becoming European: their combination of simultaneously seeking recognition from and resisting the hegemonic ‘core European’ narrative of what ‘Europe’ is all about

Secret, verifiable auctions from elections

Auctions and elections are seemingly disjoint. Nevertheless, similar cryptographic primitives are used in both domains. For instance, mixnets, homomorphic encryption and trapdoor bit-commitments have been used by state-of-the-art schemes in both domains. These developments have appeared independently. For example, the adoption of mixnets in elections preceded a similar adoption in auctions by over two decades. In this paper, we demonstrate a relation between auctions and elections: we present a generic construction for auctions from election schemes. Moreover, we show that the construction guarantees secrecy and verifiability, assuming the underlying election scheme satisfies analogous security properties. We demonstrate the applicability of our work by deriving auction schemes from the Helios family of election schemes. Our results advance the unification of auctions and elections, thereby facilitating the progression of both domains

A shared global perspective on hate crime?

The hate crime concept describes a set of actions that span the worlds of activism, policy, and scholarship and provides the basis for these actors to work together and open up the rule of law to communities that often exist outside its protection. However, there is huge diversity in current approaches across and within these worlds to recording, reporting, legislating against, and researching hate crime, which challenges the notion of a shared and global concept of hate crime. This article offers a framework that helps describe the processes and relationships that generate and refine national and international concepts of hate crime. In so doing, it starts to assess to what extent an internationally coherent approach to understanding and responding to targeted, bigoted violence has been achieved

The 1997 OSCE Meeting on Human Dimension Issues /

"February 1998."Shipping list no.: 98-0199-P.Mode of access: Internet