Mitigating humanitarian crises during non-international armed conflicts:the role of human rights and ceasefire agreements

Situations of humanitarian crisis are often caused by armed conflicts. Given the prevalence of non-international armed conflicts today, ways of ameliorating these situations are at the forefront of concerns. The international humanitarian law rules governing non-international armed conflict remain much less developed than those for international armed conflicts. This is exacerbated by the lack of direct human rights obligations for non-state armed groups, which makes governing the behaviour of non-state parties to non-international armed conflicts (non-state armed groups) even more challenging. Although several initiatives have been taken to encourage non-state actors to mitigate situations of humanitarian crisis, the role of human rights law is in need of further clarification. The paper aims to assess what role human rights may have in improving humanitarian crises, suggesting one specific way: The paper will first discuss the international laws applicable to situations of non-international armed conflict, before critically analysing some of the initiatives that have already been taken to govern the behaviour of non-state armed groups. Part 3 will assess the possibility of using cease-fire agreements to impose specific human rights obligations on all parties to a non-international armed conflict. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn in Part 4 as to the role that human rights and ceasefire agreements could have during humanitarian crises

Preventing Violence in Seven Countries: Global Convergence in Policies

Do governments take the measures that are supported by the best scientific evidence available? We present a brief review of the situation in: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our findings show surprisingly similar developments across countries. While all seven countries are moving towards evidence-based decision making regarding policies and programs to prevent violence, there remain a number of difficulties before this end can be achieved. For example, there continue to be few randomized controlled trials or rigorous quasi-experimental studies on aggression and violence. Results from experimental research are essential to both policy makers and researchers to determine the effectiveness of programs as well as increase our knowledge of the problem. Additionally, all noted that media attention for violence is high in their country, often leading to management by crisis with the result that policies are not based on evidence, but instead seek to appease public outrage. And perhaps because of attendant organizational problems (i.e., in many countries violence prevention was not under the guise of one particular agency or ministry), most have not developed a coordinated policy focusing on the prevention of violence and physical aggression. It is hypothesized that leaders in democratic countries, who must run for election every 4 to 6 years, may feel a need to focus on short-term planning rather than long-term preventive policies since the costs, but not the benefits for the latter would be incurred while they still served in office. We also noted a general absence of expertise beyond those within scientific circles. The need for these ideas to be more widely accepted will be an essential ingredient to real and sustaining change. This means that there must be better communication and increased understanding between researchers and policy makers. Toward those ends, the recent establishment of the Campbell Collaboration, formed to provide international systematic reviews of program effectiveness, will make these results more available and accessible to politicians, administrators and those charged with making key policy decision

Maritime Economy: Definition and Main Aspects

The maritime economy can be defined as the whole range of activities related to the sea, in other words whose conditions of development depend on the sea. This factual definition needs to be specified according to the degree of dependence: total, for the entire production mode, or partial, for the manufacturing of certain products or the supply of certain services. Furthermore, the definition raises a series of questions. A question of coverage: is it possible to list and delineate the whole range of "maritime" economic activities? A question of measuring the economic value of this range: is it possible to give a definition and a quantitative assessment of this range? By means of which indicators? A question of coherence: is the whole range composed of activities unrelated to each other? Or do they have commercial relationships and conditions of development (environmental, regulatory) leading, to a certain extent, to consider them jointly? The present chapter aims to address these issues on a European scale

An emerging EU energy diplomacy? Discursive shifts, enduring practices

The European Union's (EU) external energy policy has been steadily taking shape since the mid-2000s. EU authorities appear to have even taken on functions that could be classified as ‘energy diplomacy’, i.e., the use of foreign policy means to secure access to foreign energy supplies. With the aim of gauging and accounting for these developments, this article undertakes a double analytical move, one conceptual and one theoretical. Conceptually, it distinguishes between energy governance and energy diplomacy as tools for better comprehending the type and scope of policy change. Theoretically, it draws on discursive institutionalism to examine how and why policies change (or endure) by looking at the role of ideas in two dimensions of social action that are not often analysed side by side: policy discourses and policy practices. The article illustrates the practical relevance of this distinction through empirically examining the EU's promotion of diversification of natural gas supplies