Enhancing international cooperation: from necessity to urgency in responding to intrastate conflict.

Sisk, Timothy D.

IT WAS A PLEASURE TO SERVE A TERM AS COEDITOR OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE together with Tom Farer. Most important, I want to give acknowledgment and unending gratitude to Matthew Klick, who served ably as managing editor of the journal during this tenure.

As Torn Farer points out in this issue, our introductory piece in the first issue of volume 16, "Enhancing International Cooperation," expressed our view that the current system of global governance is woefully inadequate to deal with the dramatic economic, social, and political evolution of the international system in the past two decades. Looking forward, we argued that new institutions, approaches, and partnerships will be needed to address these deficits of governance and the inability of the overall system to respond sufficiently to the increased need for global cooperation, and we invited aspirant authors to the journal to address these deficits.

In volumes 16 through 19 of Global Governance, as editors, we were fortunate to publish a strong array of peer-reviewed scholarly research and to provide a place for top practitioners to express their voice on leading issues concerning the inadequacies of present global regimes and ways to improve them. We saw, during our tenure, special issues emerge on critical matters such as the global governance of international migration (Khalid Koser, guest editor), the "hybrid peace governance" debates in the field of peacebuilding and statebuilding (Roberto Belloni and Anna Jarstad, guest editors), and the global and local governance of extractive resources (Gilles Carbonnier, guest editor). Also published were special focus sections on the special representatives of the UN Secretary-General, NATO's roles in post-conflict contexts (led by Alexandra Gheciu and Roland Paris), the Group of 8 in Africa (led by David Black), complex multilateral regimes (led by Amandine Orsini, Jean-Frederic Morin, and Oran Young), and transnational river systems.

In addition, there was a wide range of articles on global governance topics, from sanctions to UN management, climate change negotiations, international trade and financial flows, bioinvasion, support to democracy, power sharing in civil wars, Responsibility to Protect, new Global South alliances, and comparative studies on norm emergence, to mention just a few. There were also top-notch review essays of leading books on human rights, gender, peacebuilding, and global order. We hope that these volumes contribute to scholarly discourse on the specific topics they address and indeed to the understanding of global governance more broadly in terms of governance gaps and needed cooperative responses.

As our period of tenure of editorial stewardship of the journal comes to an end, it is fitting to address the new urgency that characterizes today's international system in terms of peace and security. In reflection, I believe this new sense of urgency has emerged to dramatically improve global governance to prevent, manage, and mitigate intrastate conflict and to provide humanitarian relief. The shameful inability of the international community to stem the civil war in Syria, which began in 2011 and by the time of this writing has resulted in more than 100,000 fatalities, created 2 million refugees, and dislocated another 4 million--just as it threatens to escalate into a broader regional conflict--underscores that thinking in terms of "necessity" is not enough when it comes to global responses to violent intrastate conflict.

The 1992 Agenda for Peace, penned by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali following the first-ever meeting of the Security Council at the level of heads of state in January 1992, ultimately shaped the ability of the world's preeminent organization to adapt to the turbulent systemic change under way in the international system. The agenda reflected the turbulence and change in the early 1990s by reaffirming that volatile transition in political systems could yield state failure, ethnocide, and genocide and pose costly humanitarian tragedies not seen since World War IT; it was a sea change in world order. The agenda emerged in the immediate aftermath of civil war and famine in Somalia, the onset of civil war and "ethnic cleansing" in former Yugoslavia, and sudden and often extensive UN engagement in the transitions of Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique. It was steeped in the need for humanitarian intervention, and the reality that the UN had a new role in protecting humanitarian relief efforts and fostering the end of war through a guided transition within states aided by a complex, multidimensional peace operation--a belief that has evolved into the principle of the Responsibility to Protect.

The fact that, overall, armed conflict increased in 2011, compared to 2010, with new onsets of civil war in Libya, Yemen, Sudan, and Syria, suggests that the international peace and security regime is both dysfunctional and inadequate. Two yawning gaps continue to exist in the international system's ability to respond to internal armed conflict looking ahead further into the twenty-first century.

First, beyond "peacebuilding" as described in the agenda, international response when conflict has already occurred (or is recurring) has been broadened to focus on statebuilding and violence reduction as an approach to recurring crises of fragility. The twenty-first century requires seeing violence beyond the simple notion of "armed conflict." The challenge today is to further adapt the UN's strategies and country-level approaches to include an explicit violence reduction agenda that captures a broader definition of what constitutes intrastate conflict. (1) The UN's ability to address societal-level armed violence, for example, through international

policing cooperation combined with microlevel development initiatives, seems inadequate, especially when the violence unfolds in otherwise stable states not affected by armed conflict (as in Mexico).

Second, there is an urgent need, in my view, to return to the agenda's brief mention of "peace enforcement units," the ability to more rapidly react to crises when they escalate into widespread violence. Unless and until there is progress on the ability of the international system to respond quickly, and robustly, in moments of crisis such as Syria's descent into civil war, the UN's ability to prevent armed conflict will remain deeply disappointing in the likely still-turbulent years that lie ahead. The upshot is that global governance as a whole is failing to provide security--perhaps the ultimate value--in today's world.

It should not be forgotten that the original Agenda for Peace in 1992 recognized that the UN must be ready to deploy rapidly in crises and, when there is consensus within the Security Council, to engage in "peace enforcement" (par. 44). The call and need for the UN to have a greater standing capacity to respond with robust force, or peace enforcement units, has been heard often since 1992, notably in the proposals of Sir Brian Urquhart for the creation of a UN volunteer force. (2) While current missions in places such as Democratic Republic of Congo have produced ad hoc solutions (in the form of an intervention force), systematically there is no recurrent mechanism for rapid and forceful response when crimes against humanity begin to unfold.

The imbroglio in Syria, today's most serious crisis, affirms the undeniable urgency for improving the UN's ability to field militarily robust forces in times of conflict to protect and enable delivery of humanitarian relief and to provide the necessary credible commitment for peace negotiations to be successful. But it is important to concede that behind this operational inability to respond forcefully and decisively to stem incipient armed conflict is the nagging problem of Security Council reform: particularly, the outmoded concept of a veto by the great powers of sixty-plus years ago and the ability of one or two mostly autocratic states (Russia and China) to prevent collective action when a despotic regime and UN member state like the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria commits gross violations of human rights.

As my time as Global Governance coeditor ends, I conclude that the biggest challenge for global governance in the years ahead will be to find a way to replace the anachronistic institutions of the post--World War II Security Council with a new institution that is more reflective of the twenty-first century world in which we live today. Apparently, the urgency of saving lives in Syria and the broader Middle East is not enough: indeed, crises such as the one in Syria seem to make true Security Council reform even more unlikely. Unless a more serious and systemic reform of the Security Council, and a more consistent and decisive engagement to stem intrastate conflict can be found, the very idea of a global governance security regime will remain contested. It is time for a new Agenda for Peace.

(1.) As argued by Robert Muggah and Keith Krause, "Closing the Gap Between Peace Operations and Post-conflict Insecurity: Towards a Violence Reduction Agenda," International Peacekeeping 16, no. 1 (2009): 136-150.

(2.) See Brian Urquhart, "For a UN Volunteer Military Force," New York Review of Books, 10 June 1993.

Notes

Timothy D. Sisk is professor and associate dean for research at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and associate faculty of the Sie Cheou Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy. He specializes in civil wars, political violence, and conflict prevention, management, and peace-building in fragile and postwar contexts. He is also an associate fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to joining the University of Denver in 1998, Sisk was a program officer and research scholar in the grant program of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.