Home Blog Page 92

The Ukraine War is Contributing to a Dangerous Cycle of Hunger and Violence

By
Tia Savarese
-
0

The world is facing an unprecedented hunger crisis. In 2019, 135 million people faced acute food insecurity while today, that number has more than doubled to 345 million people.

This crisis is driven by the Russia-Ukraine war and is further compounded by the effects of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. The war in Ukraine has severely impacted Ukraine’s wheat production, global inflation due to rising energy prices, and stretched supply chains. Regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia significantly depend on wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia. Egypt depended on 82% of its wheat and Somalia and Benin acquired all of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia. According to the Chief Economist and Director of Research, Assessment, and Monitoring at the UN World Food Programme (WFP), Arif Husain, there are a total of 36 countries that relied on at least 50% of wheat imported from Ukraine. Both Ukraine and Russia exported about 1/3 of the world’s wheat and half of the world’s sunflower oil, and are major suppliers of fertilizer. The war has so far prevented the export of 20 million tons of grain to these dependent regions, wheat prices have increased by as much as 750%, and energy prices reached their highest level since 1973.

The war and sanctions against Russia for the invasion have led to significant global risk. While the international community is largely united in its support for, and aid to, Ukraine, this focus has diverted attention and funds from other regions and crises. Countries such as Yemen, Myanmar, Colombia, and the whole Horn of Africa, for example, have seen a loss in donor commitments as money is prioritized toward Ukraine. The insufficient international aid has worsened with the rapidly growing prices of food and export costs. The WFP is an organization instrumental in providing food and resources to countries in need, especially famine watch spots such as Yemen, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. Current conditions have increased the number of famine watch spots in WFP’s food aid program while rising costs continue to cut its provided rations. For instance, food aid will be cut for 2 million people in South Sudan and “resilience and livelihood activities, and school feeding and nutrition programs” will be cut for 4 million people in Yemen. 

The war in Ukraine is not the only factor contributing to the hunger crisis. Numerous countries are facing climate shocks which were compounded by the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the war, food prices were already at a ten-year high and nearly 56% of the world’s low-income countries were in debt distress. The pandemic gravely affected supply chains, poverty levels, and national governments’ abilities to provide social welfare for their citizens. 

Furthermore, the Horn of Africa was already suffering from a record-breaking drought before the war, putting the lives of millions at risk of facing famine. 1.7 billion people were impacted by climate-related disasters in the past 10 years. Climate change impacts crop yields, livestock, food availability and quality, and distribution and transportation. 

Isobel Coleman, the Deputy Administrator for Policy and Programming at USAID, emphasizes the argument made by numerous food experts: hunger and conflict create a dangerous cycle of violence. Conflict impacts food imports and displaces farmers, prices increase, and the resulting hardships often result in increased violence. Hunger impacts displacement as people seek better livelihoods elsewhere, and the consequent decrease in farmers impedes agricultural production. The current crisis far surpasses the conditions faced during the 2007-2008 food price crisis and the 2011 Arab Spring, generating serious concern among conflict experts who emphasize the driving link between hunger and conflict. Widespread protests and political violence arose as a result of these events in the past. As countries such as Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Peru already face political instability and protests, this food crisis will exacerbate destabilization and escalate violence.

According to UN findings, the most effective solutions to prevent the continuation of this dangerous cycle include small-scale farming, long-term development investment, and protecting supply chains that provide critical resources such as fertilizer and seeds to farmers. Food experts urge the international community to finance facilities for food, fuel, and fertilizer for countries in need. Supporting local and long-term development projects is the key to ensuring effective support and development. These projects can include local agricultural production, climate education, food reserve management, crisis monitoring, or funding of social welfare programs. On a wider scale, as climate experts have consistently urged, conservation at the individual level is integral and makes a significant difference. 

Religion, Peace and Transitional Justice

By
Yoav Kapshuk and Mora Deitch
-
0
Soldiers belonging to the Burundian contingent of the African Union Mission in Somalia march on the Al Shabab held town of Ragaele in the Hiraan region of Somalia on September 30. AMISOM Photo. Original public domain image from Flickr

The drastic escalation of religious armed conflicts in recent decades has become one of the most persistent challenges for the global effort to reach peace and justice. Examples of religious armed conflicts in recent years include the conflict with Boko Haram and the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) in Nigeria.  Another recent example is a major outbreak of violence between Jews and Muslims in May 2021, which started in the area of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.  

Indeed, some previous studies show that religious conflicts can be deadly, difficult to settle, and more likely to endorse repression. Yet, a growing body of literature suggests that religion may play an ambivalent role: that it promotes violence but also is a force for peace, reconciliation, and justice. Moreover, researchers claim that the concept of reconciliation has deep religious roots and that religion has played a pivotal role in developing and spreading transitional justice practices. Transitional justice is defined by the UN Secretary-General as ‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation’. The concept of TJ includes a variety of elements to deal with past injustices such as truth and reconciliation commissions and reparation programs. Our research focuses on the ambivalent role of religion and on the connection between religion and transitional justice mechanisms. In addition, it examines whether transitional justice may lead to a complete peace agreement.

Our study uses quantitative analysis utilizing the Transitional Justice in Peace Processes (TJPP) Dataset, which contains innovative information on worldwide peace negotiations between 1989 and 2014. The TJPP dataset identifies six elements of transitional justice: truth commissions and reconciliation processes (symbolic aspect), reparations programs and rehabilitation of refugees (material aspect), amnesties and prisoners’ release (legal aspect). As for religious armed conflicts, we focus on two different definitions. The first definition refers to religious identity dissimilarity, which measures the difference in the religious identity of the rival groups who belong either to different religions or to different denominations within the same religion. The second definition refers to the presence of religious content, which relates to a main religious goal or demand, such as the demand for a rigid religious policy or maintaining holy places.

The findings demonstrate the following: (1) Peace processes of religious content-based conflicts are more likely to include transitional justice elements. However, these peace processes are more likely to include material elements of transitional justice rather than symbolic or legal ones. (2) Peace processes of religious identity-based conflicts are more likely to include transitional justice elements as well. However, this connection is rather weak and inconsistent. In addition, these peace processes are less likely to include symbolic elements of transitional justice. (3) Despite the great use of transitional justice elements, religious peace processes, of either kind, are not significantly associated with reaching a full peace agreement. A possible reason for this finding is that peace processes of religious conflicts lack the relevant transitional justice elements crucial for success, such as a strong reconciliation process. This implies that religion is indeed ambivalent – it uses some transitional justice elements – yet lacks a strong reconciliation process as suggested in previous research. For example, previous attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict included material components of transitional justice such as the release of prisoners but did not include symbolic components such as reconciliation.

These findings have important implications for theories linking religion and transitional justice. They can serve as a basis for additional future research to explore the complex connection between religion, peace, and justice. They also indicate that it is desirable for mediators and negotiators in future peace processes of religious conflicts to consider putting more emphasis on the symbolic aspect of transitional justice.

***

The study was published on 22 April 2022 in Peacebuilding and available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21647259.2022.2065791

How Can The Ukraine War Impact Food Security In Somalia?

By
John Simms and Tia Savarese
-
0

The Ukraine-Russia conflict has led to an escalating threat to global food security. Somalia is amongst the most impacted countries, relying nearly 100% on both Ukraine and Russia for grain. Having already endured continuous political instability, extreme droughts, and increasing prices of fertilizers and fuel, Somalians may soon have some relief. A recent deal signed between Ukraine and Russia will allow for millions of tons of grain to be exported across the Black Sea, with a huge portion likely to reach the Horn of Africa.

How can nonviolent actors increase peace and humanitarianism in Yemen?

By
Moosa Elayah
-
0

Externally driven, state-focused peace initiatives often have little success in reducing violence and ending war. As such, understanding the activities and dilemmas of civil society (CS)   during war is pivotal. Building on mounting criticism of mainstream peacebuilding as imposing a top-down set of essentially Western, state-centric solutions, a recent ‘local turn’ in peace and conflict studies has argued that peace processes need to be based on local agencies and bottom-up processes. However, much remains unclear about how bottom-up peacebuilding works.  In Yemen, the role of CS is shaped and constrained by the complex reality of war. The potential of CS to act as an agent of peace is severely curtailed in circumstances of violent conflict, limiting the space for operation and  timeframes for action. Under such circumstances, freedom of expression does not exist and CSOs are largely unable to hold the government and other warring parties accountable for their actions. Local CSOs are critical of international donors, who’s  foreign aid money is often encapsulated in a politicized CS. Furthermore, the accountability, transparency and governance of CSOs also represents its own challenges. Distrust among CSOs, between CSOs and political actors, between CSOs and donors, and between CSOs and citizens, is extremely high. It is thus not possible to speak of ‘Yemeni CS’ as a whole or discuss its role in peacebuilding as if it were a singular actor, as much of the literature on these topics suggests. CS in Yemen, therefore, cannot be seen apart from the political conflict; it is part and parcel of it. The ‘civil’ values promoted by donors sit uncomfortably with the political realities in the war-torn country. Even worse, the flexibly of CSOs allows for their misuse by political actors on different sides of the conflict, who create their own CSOs by adopting labels that are fashionable with donors, such as ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘humanitarian aid’,  to tap into donor funds.

The results of this study suggest that bottom-up peacebuilding with CS  is more difficult than expected and that donors need to seek alternative solutions in conflicted states. Preventing co-optation by the political elite requires ‘deep’ knowledge of local (family-tribal and social class) structures. Such alternative solutions may well entail working with different local counterparts, such as e-activists and traditional and community leaders. The role of these actors has hardly been studied within the Yemeni setting; more knowledge about their activities and potential could benefit efforts to address the drivers and consequences of the war. Approaching CS more like a public sphere, rather than focusing only on established organizations, could help researchers and donors alike to broaden their focus and seek out-of-the-box approaches to the dramatic and complex problems faced by war-torn countries such as Yemen. 

Through my expanded research in this field, I found out that humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war for power and financial gain, and thus is a contributing factor in the continuation of the conflict. The solution means of restoring donor confidence and dealing with some of the issues is to provide cash aid rather than food aid. When NGOs are unable to distribute food aid successfully, some of the funds could be transferred to cash. This could be more traceable, efficient, and transparent. There are, of course,  challenges in adopting cash transfers, such as how transferable the practices in other countries are to countries in conflict. Yemen would make a useful case study if this policy was adopted. 

How the UN Learned that Protecting the Environment is Central to Creating Peace

By
Natalia Dalmer
-
0

Building lasting peace has always posed complex challenges for the international community. In the post-World War II international order, the United Nations (UN) maintained peace and security through peacekeeping, which quickly became the organization’s most prominent tool to help societies emerge from conflict. However, since the UN’s early days, the understanding of peace changed from one predominantly based on stopping interstate wars to one in which justice, development, environmental protection, and other transnational issues have become critical. The international community increasingly understands peace as a multidimensional construct whose establishment and maintenance are not only the outcome of peace negotiations or military successes but also about holistic efforts in the civilian sector. In the 1970s, academic discourse began focusing on creating structures for peace through peacebuilding. Two decades later, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali placed peacebuilding in his report An Agenda for Peace, making it a priority of virtually every organization in the UN System. 

Since then, the understanding of peacebuilding has evolved thanks to the work of committed international actors. Amongst others, environmental protection has come to be considered an essential component for the establishment of a peaceful global order. This is partly due to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) work, which has highlighted the various connections between environmental degradation, conflict, and insecurity. This is quite a significant achievement because the links are complex and were not initially evident to the international community. 

First and foremost, the Programme has pointed out how violent conflicts damage the environment in the regions where they are fought. Among the UNEP’s earliest tasks in post-conflict contexts was to assess the damage to the environment caused by war. In the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, for example, it addressed the environmental damage caused by the conflict, particularly by the NATO intervention. In addition, it is now widely recognized that environmental degradation from poor management of natural resources can increase the potential for conflict within and between regions, with climate change proving to be a threat multiplier. 

Similar to the UNEP, UN peacekeeping missions also experienced the mutual negative influence of environmental degradation and conflict. Their adverse environmental footprint not only led to a loss of trust and even rejection by the populations in their deployment areas but by failing to address the environmental components of many conflicts, they also did not do enough to reduce risk factors for conflict flare-ups. The work of UN peacekeeping missions and other international actors consistently demonstrated that environmental factors play a role at different stages of the conflict cycle and therefore need to be addressed early on to prevent violence and build sustainable peace. 

To systematically and substantively close the knowledge gap on the links between environment and peace, international actors had to engage in a learning process to uncover the various linkages. The establishment of the UN’s peacebuilding architecture created an opportunity for UNEP to establish its Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding programme and reach out to the scientific and practitioner communities to generate knowledge on the relationship between the two issues. It first allowed the UNEP to cooperate with scholars to build a knowledge base. The Programme also reached out to different policy actors in the UN System to share their experiences and work on policies that consider the environmental dimension of peacekeeping, conflict mediation, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants, and the role of the environment in empowering women in peacebuilding. Lastly, the UNEP helped promote the uptake of best practices by assisting implementing actors in incorporating environmental concerns into their work. For example, it supported various UN peacekeeping missions to become more environmentally sustainable and contributed to environmental diplomacy by promoting dialogue between stakeholders on sharing natural resources, such as between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Environmental peacebuilding highlights the relevance of experiences, learning, and cooperation to address the multidimensional nature of peacebuilding and thus contributes to international peace and security. The United Nations System should reduce structural barriers that hinder or impede coordination and cooperation between those working for a better environment and those working for peace. In addition, international bureaucracies should be given sufficient autonomy through both advocacy and funding structures that allow latitude to collaborate and learn freely.

Literature for further reading

UNEP, 2016, Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding Programme. Final Report 2016. United Nations Environment Programme. Geneva, Switzerland.

Ide, Tobias; Bruch, Carl; Carius, Alexander; Conca, Ken; Dabelko, Geoffrey D.; Matthew, Richard; Weinthal, Erika (2021): The past and future(s) of environmental peacebuilding. In International Affairs 97 (1), pp. 1-16.

1...919293...188Page 92 of 188