Ireland

Author(s):  
Ian Speller

This chapter explores the evolution of Irish defence policy from the end of the cold war through to 2017. It provides an analysis of national strategy, military doctrine, and force structures and reveals how these have evolved to meet new challenges and opportunities. The chapter explains how successive governments have sought to balance a reluctance to devote significant resources to defence and the desire to maintain the longs-tanding tradition of neutrality with a commitment to international engagement through the UN and active participation in a number of UN peacekeeping missions overseas. It also examines how the relationship with NATO and the EU has evolved. The chapter explores changes to the role and structure of the Defence Forces since the 1990s and concludes with an examination of existing policy and future challenges in the aftermath of the 2015 defence review.

Author(s):  
Wim Klinkert

The defence policy of the Netherlands and Belgium has changed substantially following the end of the cold war. Both countries suspended conscription early on and actively participated in many (UN) peacekeeping missions. Both countries also experienced traumatic events that influenced their defence policy: in Ruanda for the Belgians in 1994 and in Bosnia (Srebrenica) for the Dutch (1995). Drastic budget cuts and the integration of the new, but small, professional armies within new NATO and EU defence structures (CSDP and NRF) are also themes with which both countries struggled. Both countries embraced pooling and sharing and cultivated European defence cooperation, especially within Benelux but also with Germany, the UK, and increasingly with other partners. Simultaneously they also attached much value to their ties with the USA. The Dutch furthermore attach great importance to the development of the international legal order and the safeguarding of the flow of trade by sea.


2014 ◽  
Vol 108 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
LISA HULTMAN ◽  
JACOB KATHMAN ◽  
MEGAN SHANNON

While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-384
Author(s):  
Ayodele Akenroye

The end of the Cold War witnessed the resurgence of ethnic conflicts in Africa, which necessitated the deployment of peacekeeping missions in many crisis contexts. The risk of HIV transmission increases in post-conflict environments where peacekeepers are at risk of contracting and spreading HIV/AIDS. In response, UN Security Council Resolution 1308 (2000) stressed the need for the UN to incorporate HIV/AIDS prevention awareness skills and advice in its training for peacekeepers. However, troops in peacekeeping missions remain under national command, thus limiting the UN prerogatives. This article discusses the risk of peacekeepers contracting or transmitting HIV/AIDS, as well as the role of peacekeeping missions in controlling the spread of the disease, and offers an account of the steps taken within UN peacekeeping missions and African regional peacekeeping initiatives to tackle the challenges of HIV/AIDS. While HIV/AIDS remains a scourge that could weaken peacekeeping in Africa, it seems that inertia has set in, making it even more difficult to tackle the complexity of this phenomenon.


2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 249-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashed Uz Zaman ◽  
Niloy Ranjan Biswas

United Nations (un) peacekeeping missions have become an important feature of world politics since the end of the Cold War. In recent times, the intensity of peacekeeping missions has increased and new challenges have also emerged. Under such circumstances, the un has often highlighted the importance of regional organizations getting more involved in undertaking and sustaining such missions. South Asian countries provide a large number of troops to un missions and yet, a regional collaboration has not been accorded much importance by countries of the region. This paper argues, given the emerging challenges, South Asian countries may have to resort to a regional approach with regard to peacekeeping missions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Tomoya KURODA

Today, the relationship between EU and Asian countries is at a turning point. During the Cold War, there was quite a large gap in status between the EC and ASEAN. The EC was highly institutionalised and the most advanced regional organisation, while ASEAN was simply an association of developing countries. However, in the post-Cold War era, Asia has gained a more important status compared to Europe. A striking example is the establishment of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in 1996, where heads of states were treated as ‘equal partners’. This article addresses the following question as the main point of its research: Why and how did the EC establish institutional bonds with ASEAN countries? Despite this corpus of research, studies of the factors behind the EC’s shift towards institutionalised relationships with ASEAN have not examined the geopolitical interests at stake. This paper, thus, aims to give an overall picture of EC-ASEAN institutional relations in the 1970s, with particular attention to the global strategies of EC member states, based on a multi-archival approach. Thus, this paper analyses a neglected origin of the EU-Asia relationship.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-64 ◽  

After the end of the Cold-War, the EU started advancing its Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP/CSDP), making them part of reform that eventually led to the Lisbon Treaty. The article argues that this endeavour was above all a project of polity-construction: it endowed European integration with new purpose, imagining the EU as a polity that legitimately asserted itself globally as a civilising power. The article investigates how such polity-construction was generated during multilateral negotiations on the EU constitution and what different meanings it took on once inserted in national media debates in Poland and France. The argument is made that EU community-building is more adequately captured when looked at as ‘recontextualising polity-construction’, triggered top-down in legitimations of EU institution-building, than as ‘identity’ emerging bottom-up from societal imagination.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Wallace

The European Union has declared ambitious objectives for a common European foreign policy since the end of the cold war. Through successive revisions of its constitutional treaties, it has built may of the institutions that might support such a common policy. Incremental changes and adaptation through experience of successive crises have strengthened practices of cooperation and consultation. Yet the retention of sovereignty over foreign and defence policy by national governments, and the unwillingness of national governments and parliaments to engage in any EU-wide reconsideration of strategic needs and objectives has left these common institutions without the permissive consensus needed to support effective shared action. National inhibitions about subordinating particular interests and assumptions to a wider European consensus have left the EU institutions without the ability either to promote shared European interests or to act effectively when those interests are threatened.


Author(s):  
Richard Gowan

European soldiers played a major part in United Nations peacekeeping during the cold war, and were heavily involved in missions in the Balkans and Africa in the early 1990s. The disasters of Rwanda and Srebrenica led most European states, with exceptions such as Ireland and Sweden, to limit their role in blue-helmet peacekeeping missions. European multinational forces and EU-flagged missions have, however, backed up UN missions in cases such as Sierra Leone, and Europeans returned to UN peacekeeping in cases including Lebanon and Mali. Officers used to NATO and EU standards remain wary of UN command and control, medical evacuation, and intelligence gathering. When Europeans deploy in UN missions, they often find their non-Western comrades ‘exotic’. Nonetheless, since the end of major operations in Afghanistan, a number of European countries have taken UN operations more seriously, especially as a tool to handle threats of terrorism and uncontrolled migration from Africa.


2020 ◽  
pp. 27-34
Author(s):  
Vladimir Batiuk

In this article, the ''Cold War'' is understood as a situation where the relationship between the leading States is determined by ideological confrontation and, at the same time, the presence of nuclear weapons precludes the development of this confrontation into a large-scale armed conflict. Such a situation has developed in the years 1945–1989, during the first Cold War. We see that something similar is repeated in our time-with all the new nuances in the ideological struggle and in the nuclear arms race.


Author(s):  
Tatsiana Shaban

The European Union’s neighbourhood is complex and still far from being stable. In Ukraine, significant progress has occurred in many areas of transition; however, much work remains to be done, especially in the field of regional development and governance where many legacies of the Soviet model remain. At the crossroads between East and West, Ukraine presents an interesting case of policy development as an expression of European Union (EU) external governance. This paper asks the question: why was the relationship between the EU and Ukraine fairly unsuccessful at promoting stability in the region and in Ukraine? What was missing in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in Ukraine that rendered the EU unable to prevent a conflict on the ground? By identifying security, territorial, and institutional challenges and opportunities the EU has faced in Ukraine, this paper underlines the most important factors accounting for the performance of its external governance and crisis management in Ukraine.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v12i2.1310


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