The Value of Future Officers’ Foreign Language Training for Participating in International Peacekeeping Operations

The article deals with providing future officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with foreign language training for participating in international peacekeeping operations. The purpose was to analyze specifics of foreign language training for international peacekeeping operations. The content and essence of future officers’ foreign language training for participating in international peacekeeping operations were studied. Further, the state of future officers’ foreign language training for participating in international peacekeeping operations in higher military educational institutions of Ukraine was determined and consequent proposals for improving the content of future officers’ foreign language training for participating in international peacekeeping operations were elaborated. The main research methods were as follows: comparative, problem-based and retrospective information analysis; testing of cadets, surveying the officers of the Armed Forces, enhancing the pronunciation and articulation of cadets. The results of cadet testing showed the need to improve the content of future officers’ foreign language training for participating in international peacekeeping operations. The survey of the officers serving with the Armed Forces of Ukraine confirmed the urgent need to provide foreign language training in higher military educational institutions of Ukraine. According to the results of various survey forms applied, the main ways to improve the content of the future officers’ foreign language training aimed at participating in international peacekeeping operations were identified: the use of open training platforms, the use of information and communication technologies, use of mind mapping, situational tasks, interactive technologies.

International peacekeeping and the UN criminal justice: Political and legal correlation and similarity

The article identifies and reveals objective political and legal correlations between international peacekeeping activities and international criminal justice, which allows positioning the latter as the final phase of the UN peacekeeping practice. The need to take into acco unt such correlation in domestic peacekeeping is substantiated on the basis of lobbying in the world for the perception of such practice of Russia from the angle of reconciliation of the conflicting parties; geopolitical obstacle to the implementation of any form of genocide; ensuring international peace and security. The need is substantiated to increase the international significance of our country using unconventional foreign policy approaches and technologies in the interests of systematically getting ahead of Russia’s geopolitical competitors in the international political, legal, and peacekeeping sphere.

Peacekeeping

International peacekeeping after the Second World War began as a modest means of subduing conflicts between states and grew in importance, partly to facilitate processes of decolonization. This analysis pays particular attention to the concept of peacekeeping and its evolution in the light of conflict within states, the majority of which had achieved sovereign independence from imperial rule in the years after 1939. Paradoxically, former colonies came to dominate force contributions to UN operations. Another aspect explored is the aspiration for peacekeeping to require “robust” mandates against terrorism or counterinsurgency and for protecting civilians. By the 2000s peacekeeping formed the keystone of a UN integrated crisis management “architecture” to support peacebuilding and neoliberal economic development. The chapter contends that while peacekeeping had undoubtedly secured many lives, its relationship to peacebuilding broadly sustained asymmetries and inequalities in the global system.

BRICS in International Legal Space: Humanitarian Imperatives of International Security

The article is devoted to the examination of the formation of new vectors for international relations development within the global format of cooperation. The establishment and unification of BRICS in the international legal sphere through a wide range of common interests and views of its members towards issues facing the modern world reflect objective tendencies of world development to the formation of amultipolar international relations system and determination of particular large country actors of broad integration and having many dimensions. The authors reveal particular characteristics of the international-legal status of BRICS, which make it possible to have an effective impact on challenges facing the modern world. The legal BRICS status differs crucially from traditional legal approaches to international organizations. Acting as a special subject of world politics, creating more trusted interaction conditions, BRICS focuses its attention on the alternative world order principles within the new model of global relations. Such a format of multilateral cooperation, as well as more trusted and additional mechanisms of international interaction, gives the members an opportunity to demonstrate their geopolitical and geoeconomic world significance, and in addition their demanded humanitarian role, which, as the analysis of the mentioned actor demonstrates, is aimed at forming its own interaction model. The logic of the BRICS agenda extension to the level of an important global management system element demonstrates the goal in the field of action and, accordingly, intensive progress of humanitarian imperatives. For these humanitarian imperatives, the issues of international peacekeeping, security, protection, encouraging human rights and providing stable development are an objective necessity, especially for active demonstration of the members’ viewpoints on the international scene. For understanding the process of the alignment of international security humanitarian imperatives it is necessary to study the existing objective needs in conjunction with each country, member of BRICS.

Medical Support of the Sinai Multinational Force and Observers: An Update, 2020

ABSTRACT The Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai is a 13-nation international peacekeeping organization with the mission to implement the security provisions of the 1979 Egyptian–Israeli Treaty of Peace and continues today after approximately four decades. Despite not having significant changes to its core mission of force health protection, the medical team has recently evolved to face several challenges, with a coronavirus pandemic and a fatal helicopter crash. This article describes the medical challenges and experiences of the medical team from August 2019 to December 2020, highlighting changes from previous years. This article also updates three previous articles on the subject published in Military Medicine in 1983, 1991, and 2003.

A Bumpy Ride: China’s Search to Be a Responsible Power

Summary Recent years have seen China trying to play the role of a responsible power. It has made great efforts in this regard, including actively participating in international peacekeeping operations, collaborating with other countries to deal with the climate change and trying to help in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. However, China’s efforts have met with stiff resistance from the West, especially from the Donald Trump-led United States. How does one explain this turn of events? This essay argues that the speed of China’s rise; the Western perception of China’s domestic development; the failure to address domestic problems on the part of some major Western countries, especially the United States; and the role that the Trump administration played provide important clues to such a development.

Beyond the Purview of International Criminal Judgments

This chapter examines three aspects of mass atrocity situations that have generally received little or no attention within the judgments of international criminal courts: first, the structural and slow violence that tends to exist prior to, during, and after the outbreak of situations of mass atrocity; second, the interventions of international actors, including the policies and practices of colonial powers, international financial institutions, and international peacekeeping forces; and finally, the roles performed by bystander communities and resisters during episodes of mass violence. By highlighting these blind spots, the chapter directs attention to the narrative limits of international criminal courts and highlights the risk that their judgments may undermine more nuanced understandings of human agency in mass atrocity contexts, whilst legitimating some of the structural and slow forms of violence and international interventions that they marginalise or exclude.