What can decision makers learn from people living in violent conflict?

Almost one third of the world’s population are affected daily by violence yet policies addressing conflict still focus on the ‘big picture’ and do little to place people at the centre of interventions. How could a more ‘micro’ approach which understands how people are affected by conflict lead to policies and peace agreements that are more effective on the ground?

MICROCON, a five-year research programme which focuses on the micro-level analysis of conflict will be holding a conference this week week to debate this issue. Among the topics being covered, participants will explore household coping strategies, how living with violence affects people’s health and the ways in which people in areas of violence adapt to survive.

Delegates, who are expected to be drawn from across the development sector, will also discuss the role that research has to play in informing policy and practice in these contexts.

During the conference, MICROCON will be unveiling their latest research findings to reveal what they believe will lead to innovative policies, more effective interventions and whether an emphasis on evidence-based policy is making a difference.

“The impacts to people living in violent conflict have been ignored for too long.” says Programme Director Dr Patricia Justino. “MICROCON hopes to change the way decisions are made about conflict so that these individuals aren’t forgotten. Development agencies and policy makers need to remember that ordinary people matter.”

This is a pivotal moment in research into violence and conflict, and MICROCON are keen to share the forthcoming debates beyond the conference walls. Highlights from the two day event will be captured in a number of ways. Visit the MICROCON website for live tweeting, video, podcasts and more.

‘Policy and practice in violent contexts: What can the latest research teach us?’ runs from 30 June – 1 July at the Institute of Development Studies, UK.

How Republican are Alassane Ouattara’s “Republican Forces”?

Posted by Moussa Fofana and Yvan Guichaoua

 

Laurent Gbagbo’s stubborn efforts to cling to power despite his electoral defeat have pushed his rival Alassane Ouattara to use force to gain effective presidency of Côte d’Ivoire. This choice is politically costly. It partially alters the legitimacy Ouattara won through the ballot box. It also raises the profiles of those who ousted Gbagbo through the gun: the former rebels, who were opportunistically rebranded “Republican Forces of Côte d’Ivoire” (RFCI) just before the assault against the security forces which remained loyal to the ex-president.

The political promotion of the ex-rebels triggers a series of questions respectively pertaining to their capacity to ensure security in the country, to the intentions of their chiefs, to the future of the forms of governance they have established in the north and to the process of demobilization of their low-level combatants.

It is worth stressing that the bulk of Ouattara’s troops do not generally correspond to the portrait of ‘traditional warriors’ from the north seeking ethnic revenge – this idea is more ideological than empirically grounded. The few serious sociological investigations available show the wide array of drivers of enlistment in the ex-rebel forces. Some may be opportunistic and personal. Others have to do with the deep moral outrage caused by the institutionalization of the discriminatory ideology of “Ivoirité” under Bédié and Gbagbo which made many Northerners feel like second-class citizens.

Furthermore, new untrained recruits might have been mobilized in Abidjan immediately before the fall of Gbagbo but most of the pro-Ouattara fighters were professional soldiers or enrolled in a process of professionalization as part of the integration programs stemming from the 2007 Ouagadougou peace accords. The army that fought for Ouattara in 2011 bears little resemblance to the hastily mobilized forces that fought Gbagbo’s troops in the aftermath of the failed coup in 2002. Ouattara’s RFCI were also rapidly reinforced by regular army soldiers abandoning Gbagbo as defeat got closer. The ‘Republican’ quality of this new and unusual composite of security forces still needs to be tested, though.

The first test concerns the capacity of the RFCI to secure the country’s territory and prevent atrocities. The RFCI’s accomplishments so far are hardly commendable. The minimum, consisting in capturing Gbagbo alive and avoiding the bloodbath prophesized by his followers, has been achieved. But, according to the international NGO Human Rights Watch, some members of the RFCI were involved in the massacres perpetrated in Duekoue. Similarly, the conquest of Abidjan was accompanied by bloody reprisals for the attacks perpetrated by the pro-Gbagbo militias after the elections in November.

A second major security concern relates to the future of the ‘comzones’, which is the name given to rebel officers who have been ruling the northern territories for almost a decade and who commanded the troops which ultimately dislodged Gbagbo. The comzones are important for at least two reasons: because of their ability to mobilise militarily and because of their hold on informal economic and political networks which buttress the forms of governance dominant in the north. Therefore, the comzones’ expectations in the post-Gbagbo era are not only related to their contribution to Ouattara’s rise to power; they also depend on the opportunity cost of relinquishing the advantages they derive from their northern fiefdoms. The popular legitimacy of the newly nominated préfets and the fulfilment of Ouattara’s promises of decentralization will be key assets permitting political and economic transition and the dismantling of comzones’ influence in the north.

On a personal level, the comzones’ ambitions vary. Some have already expressed their intention to quit the army. Others hope to move up the military hierarchy. The man holding the key role in the shaping of the comzones’ future is Guillaume Soro, Ouattara’s current Prime Minister, whose trajectory so far has been questionable. Crimes that were perpetrated by the ‘New Forces’ under his command expose him to international prosecution and the recent killing of his old rival Ibrahim Coulibaly in Abidjan shows that interpersonal vendettas among ex-rebels are not over. Soro is due to leave office as part of an electoral deal between Ouattara and his circumstantial ally Henri Konan Bédié. Soro’s resignation will be a welcome signal that power now belongs to civil authorities.

A third yardstick in Ivorian security politics concerns the demobilization of thousands of combatants from all sides. Most pro-Ouattara combatants expect some kind of compensation for what they perceive as a sacrifice for the cause while pro-Gbagbo militias may still trade their surrender. Reintegration programs plan to offer mostly economic reward to those returning to civilian life, and fresh flows of funding should satisfy the most pressing demands. In the longer term however, the dangerous effects on people’s lives of years of socialization through the gun will have to be addressed.

The window of opportunity to restore Republican behaviour among reconfigured Ivorian security forces is narrow. The resolve shown by Ivorian authorities to introduce positive changes will be the best indicator for Ivoirians that impunity and arbitrariness inherited from the war are over.

Feminist Curiosity: Taking a critical view of wars and violence

 

Posted by Colette Harris

Cynthia Enloe, that superb analyst of gender and international conflict, constantly reminds us of the importance of using a feminist curiosity. She defines this as a kind of curiosity that refuses to be lazy about the uncritical acceptance of ‘naturalised’ expressions – ‘peace activists’, ‘child soldiers’, or ‘occupation authorities’, for instance – and instead insists on taking them to pieces to examine how they work. By this she means examining the work they do in concealing hegemonic power relations.

I use hegemonic here in the Gramscian sense of naturalised and thus concealed power in the form of ideology created by elites for the very purpose of preventing the rest of us from even having this kind of curiosity in the first place, let alone doing anything with it. A feminist curiosity then can be interpreted as one that takes women’s lives seriously, not because women merit greater attention than men but rather because the significant amount of political manoeuvring that goes on to make them seem unimportant suggests something crucial is being concealed here that we need to examine in order to understand the functioning of politics more generally. [1]

A feminist curiosity can further be of use in examining and unpacking the power system enshrined in that political category termed ‘gender’, in which male/female symbolises an intrinsic relationship of inequality. Here, I want to move the discussion beyond personal relationships to the issue of masculinism – that is, to a way of doing/thinking/conceptualising/articulating infused with an outlook resulting from a hegemonic view of the world deriving from privileging traits associated with middle-class white masculinity, while those associated with femininity are correspondingly devalued.

 Commonly associated traits include:

Masculine = strong, prudent, responsible, objective, and willing to fight, rational and a strategic, global thinker

Feminine = weak, emotional, irrational, passive, nurturing, needing protection from violence, localised thinking, limited to domestic horizons

In this way masculinism supports multiple hierarchisations of human society – including racism as well as sexism. [2]
Indeed, masculinism has long been used to devalue men of the global south, portrayed as effeminate or hypermasculine, both negative terms used in comparison with the ideal white middle-class European male, as well as lower-class white men. [3]

It has further been shown that masculinist language is routinely used by those encouraging involvement in violence. This ranges from Carol Cohn’s [4] and Myriam Miedzian‘s [5] studies of rhetoric used at the top levels of the US government including by presidents, to my own studies of men on the ground being incited to participate in violence in African and Asian wars.

Masculinism is further intrinsically involved in the language of militarism, with phrases that practically cry out for dissection, such as ‘collateral damage’, ‘friendly fire’ and ‘failed states’. Thus, the effects of the binary divisions discussed above go far beyond the meanings ascribed to male and female bodies and the resulting power inequalities, to the way gender ‘functions as a symbolic system: our ideas about gender permeate and shape our ideas about … politics, weapons, and warfare’.

The work of Enloe, Cohn and many others shows us the importance of exercising our own curiosity as we watch on our television sets, read in our newspapers or listen on the wireless to accounts by journalists, politicians and analysts presenting issues around violent conflict. We need to apply such curiosity to documentaries such as John Pilger’s latest (The war you don’t see [6]) in which he interviews the heads of the BBC and ITV news services, as well as well-known print journalists, about why they had not been more curious about the stories governments were telling them about their reasons for invading Iraq.

We need to apply our curiosity in fact to every war story we hear and similarly ask why it is being reported in this way, who benefits from its being reported like this, whether it matters if we allow ourselves to be hoodwinked and how we can prevent this.

One way we can do this is to cultivate tools for applying our feminist curiosity through studying the works of the above authors and others who apply a similar curiosity to their own political analyses. We need to understand that not only is it important to be critical about what is said but also about the very criteria selected for analysis. True curiosity will find us burrowing deep beneath the surface to tease out the links that have been obscured perhaps deliberately in order to prevent our understanding them.

Many of Enloe’s lectures are available on Youtube. I particularly recommend her ‘Women and Men in the Iraq War: What Can Feminist Curiosity Reveal?’ even for those of you not from the United States as it tells us so much we hadn’t even thought of about militarism and the costs of war both in human and economic terms. While on the surface Enloe mainly focuses on women, careful listening will reveal the fact that what she is actually doing is to pull apart the platitudes that hide from us what the politicians and other elites don’t want us to know about the mechanisms by which they deliberately manipulate the public into supporting their wars, while quietly ensuring the costs are born by individuals and their families.

Other videos available on YouTube and elsewhere help us cultivate if not a feminist curiosity then at least a highly critical political one. The documentaries of Adam Curtis and John Pilger, the lectures of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, all of these help us cultivate our curiosity in useful directions that can help us understand more about the militarism and war culture in which our nations and with them we ourselves are embedded.

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[1]
Cynthia Enloe (2004) The curious feminist, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

 Cynthia Enloe (2007) Globalization and militarism: feminists make the link, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield

[2]
Kimberly Hutchings (2008) Cognitive short cuts, in Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (eds), Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, London: Zed, 23-46.

Charlotte Hooper (1998) Masculinist Practices and Gender Politics: The Operation of Multiple Masculinities in International Relations, in Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart (eds), The “Man“ Question in International Relations, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 28-53.

[3]
Mrinalini Sinha (1997) Colonial Masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali‘ in the late nineteenth century, New Delhi: Kali for Women.

[4]
E.g. Carol Cohn (1993),Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking gender and thinking war, in Gendering War Talk, Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (editors) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 225-246.

[5]
Myriam Miedzian (1992) Boys will be boys: breaking the link between masculinity and violence, London: Virago.

[6]
Broadcast in the UK on ITV1 on 14^th December 2010, it is now available in segments at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y3wuRjwMCQ&feature=related. Pilger’s The invisible government is also well worth watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-uq7O1RqQQ&feature=related

Conflict Traps: How does poverty cause war, and how does war cause poverty?

Posted by Patricia Justino

This year’s World Development Report, published a couple of weeks ago, emphasises the fact that one of the biggest drivers of poverty in the developing world is violent conflict. One of the biggest risks for developing countries, it argues, is that of being caught in a conflict trap – a vicious circle whereby poverty stokes conflict, and conflict in turn increases poverty.

Over the past few years, one of MICROCON’s main aims has been to unpack the interaction between poverty and conflict at the micro-level, in order to uncover the role of dynamic local processes in the outbreak and duration of civil wars, and the impact of armed conflicts on the livelihoods of individuals and households affected by violence.

I would like to use this blog post to briefly summarise some of our main findings about the main channels that link poverty and conflict, as well as the findings from a related research network, the Households in Conflict Network.

I will start with the impacts of war on poverty. Research to date tells us this impact operates through several channels. The first two of these are ‘physical capital’ and ‘human capital’. Physical capital refers mainly to assets such as houses, land, labour, cattle and other productive assets. These are often destroyed or looted during wars, which deprives households of important sources of livelihood, although other households may benefit from looting and the redistribution of assets.

Human capital refers to the characteristics of households which allow them to perform labour and so to earn a living. Such capital can be lost through the deaths of, and injuries to, household members, as well as through psychological trauma, malnutrition and the denial of education. Such losses can severely impair households’ earning ability.

The nature and extent of the impact of these types of war-induced shocks is determined to a large extent by the way in which different individuals and households respond to war-induced shocks. There is currently little understanding about how war-time and post-war coping strategies differ, but it seems clear that people adopt a complex set of strategies such as diversification of land holdings and crop cultivation, storage of grain, resorting to sales of assets, and migration – and such strategies may also include fighting, looting, support for armed groups and participation in illegal activities.

One of the most under-researched areas in looking at the impact of war on poverty is that of institutional change. Institutional change can have a considerable impact on the level and dynamics of poverty in wartime, because they affect the nature, organisation and use of violence in civil wars. Two areas of institutional change remain particularly under-researched.

First, is the way in which war changes social cohesion and norms of cooperation. The impact of these changes on individual and household poverty levels and dynamics can be significant because these changes affect people’s ability to rely on community relations in times of difficulty, including accessing particular employment or credit arrangements. These effects are largely determined by changes in household composition and the displacement and migration of households to safer areas. They are also caused by the dynamics of the conflict itself, such as people denouncing each other, different groups turning against each other and changes in levels of trust.

Conversely, some studies have found that there can be some positive effects of exposure to violence, especially through increased political participation of those affected. However, evidence on both positive and negative effects is still scarce, and there is a need for more studies that combine in-depth social analysis with larger quantitative studies.

Second, is the effect of war on political institutions and local governance. These effects are likely to be important in contexts of civil war because during such wars property rights are insecure and often cannot be enforced because the state has lost the monopoly of violence and the rule of law does not operate.

There is also likely to be profound institutional transformation during violent conflict. The type of institutions that emerge during violent conflict determines the access of households to education opportunities, to buy land and other assets, to borrow funds and invest them in productive activities and to have a voice in socio-political decisions in their communities.

The reverse chain of causation – from poverty to war – has been the subject of a significant body of work over the past decade. An influential body of cross-national empirical work has yielded some important findings, most famously that civil wars are more likely to take place in poor countries. However, the cross-country work gives us only limited accounts of the mechanisms through which low incomes amongst a large portion of society affect the outbreak of civil war.

Why would those living under precarious economic conditions participate in and support civil wars? Traditional political science literature attributes participation in violence to the presence of material incentives, and many studies have supported this view. A related view has also been supported, that it may be too costly for people not to participate, due for instance to the danger of being associated with the other side of the conflict.

In addition, many other studies have shown that many people may become soldiers for less directly material reasons, from misery and a lack of voice, to a whole range of socio-emotional motivations such as grief, anger, pride in participation, or to gain a new sense of hope and dignity.

Literature on the role of poverty in collective mobilisation is contradictory, with some emphasising the role of ‘greed’ in mobilisation, whilst others present evidence for the role of inequalities and grievances conceptualised in a variety of ways. How can we account for these seemingly contradictory findings? While poverty, inequality, social exclusion, discrimination and other sources of grievances exist in most societies, only a handful of countries have experienced civil wars because not all countries have in place appropriate structures and institutions that allow the translation of grievances into acts of violence and rebellion.

In addition, armed conflict cannot be sustained without material and financial support. Therefore, poverty per se is unlikely to be a sufficient condition to trigger civil war, but may be instrumental to the organisation of collective violence when other conditions are in place.

In spite of considerable progress in our understanding of the channels linking poverty and war over the past decade, our knowledge is still quite limited. It is vital that progress continues to be made towards better estimation of the effects of civil wars on individual and household poverty levels and dynamics, and more systematic theorisation of channels whereby warfare affects poverty. This will contribute towards more realistic post-conflict social policies to reduce poverty and increase economic resilience amongst those living with violence. It will also have important implications for the sustainability of peace as protection strategies adopted by individuals and households in conflict areas have a considerable impact on the organisation and duration of warfare.

You can find a more detailed analysis of these issues in my MICROCON paper ‘War and Poverty’.

Introducing a New MICROCON Book: ‘The European Union, Civil Society and Conflict’

Posted by Nathalie Tocci and Nona Mikhelidze

  

The European Union considers conflict resolution as a cardinal objective of its foreign policy. It makes use of a number of foreign policy instruments to promote peace abroad, which cover a range of sectors affecting the conditions and incentives underpinning conflicts at macro and micro levels. Particularly when it comes to influencing the micro conditions of conflict, the EU has started recognizing the importance of engaging with civil society, especially civil society organizations (CSOs) that are present and active at the local level in conflict countries.

Engaging with local civil societies can both represent a goal in itself as well as a means to enhance the effectiveness of EU peace policies in conflict contexts. Yet the precise interrelationships between the EU, civil society and conflicts in the Union’s southern and eastern neighbourhoods has never been examined and the potential complementarity between civil society and EU actors in conflict contexts has never been explored.

Up until recently, the EU tended to view and tackle violent mass conflicts exclusively in a top-down fashion. It interacted with, presented incentives to and attempted to mediate between conflict leaders and powerful external actors. Yet particularly in those conflicts commonly defined as protracted and in which peace processes are “frozen”, the EU has increasingly appreciated the need to engage, work with and influence mid-level and grassroots civil society actors, who in turn impact upon the evolution of societies on the ground.

As civil society actors themselves have recognized for many years, particularly when top-level peace settlements prove elusive, acting at the grassroots level can represent the only feasible and effective peace strategy. Moreover, in view of the EU’s own sui generis internal nature, EU actors are prone in principle to viewing and intervening in conflicts in a bottom-up and structural manner.

Many EU foreign policy instruments, particularly those available in the neighbourhood, hold the potential of affecting the conditions and incentives playing out at the mid or micro levels of conflict. In particular, the European Neighbourhood Policy alongside complementary initiatives such as the Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership, building upon existing EU contractual ties with neighbouring countries (e.g., the Association Agreements with the southern Mediterranean countries and the Partnership and Cooperation Agreements with the former Soviet countries), hold the promise of enhancing the depth and breadth of EU involvement in neighbourhood conflicts.

Not only does the ENP consider conflict resolution as one of its key priorities. But the manner in which the ENP is structured and developed raises the scope for the EU’s micro and mid-level involvement in conflicts. The ENP with its focus on civil society alongside governments could change the incentives and actions of mid- and micro-level players in conflicts, including NGOs, research centres, community-based groups, student and women groups, social movements, charities and foundations, media actors, and business and professional associations.  

With this context in mind, the aim of a new book published recently by MICROCON, entitled ‘The European Union, Civil Society and Conflict’ is to explore the role of the EU in conflicts at the mid- and micro-levels by engaging with local civil societies, as well as to identify how the complementarity between the EU and local civil societies could be strengthened at the service of conflict transformation. This book aims further to advance the current scholarly debate regarding the role of civil society in conflict and conflict transformation. These questions are tackled by analysing five case studies in the European eastern and southern neighbourhoods: Georgia/Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Israel/Palestine and Western Sahara. Through the comparative examination of these cases, this volume draws policy guidelines tailored to governmental and non-governmental action.

Over the course of 2007-2010, the project unfolded in three main phases (1- elaboration of a theoretical framework, 2- case studies in five conflict areas, and 3- comparative analysis). The results gathered in this volume have been intensely discussed both within the research project and with external audiences, and in particular with academics and civil society representatives in two conferences in Sofia (June 2008) and Berlin (July 2009) and one workshop in Rome (May 2009).

By exploring the nexus linking the EU, conflict and civil society the book is unique in the present market by contributing concomitantly to the literatures on European Union foreign policy, conflict resolution and civil society.

The Genesis of Terrorism in the Sahara: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

Posted by Yvan Guichaoua

In January 2011, a terrorist group self-branded Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) kidnapped a young French NGO worker and his visiting friend in one of the poshest restaurants of Niamey, Niger’s state capital. En route to a probable hideout in Mali’s mountainous north, the kidnappers and their hostages were stopped by the military intervention of French troops during which the two Frenchmen eventually died. This episode is so far the most spectacular action carried out by AQIM which stunningly demonstrated its capacity to hit any target in the vast Saharan zone it has been roaming for years.

The group is now considered a major terrorist threat in the area. Presently, it still holds five European hostages (four French workers of the multinational AREVA kidnapped in the northern Niger mining town Arlit and an Italian tourist abducted near Djanet in Algeria) and shows no hurry to release them. Many more Europeans have been detained by AQIM since January 2007, the group’s official birth date. One of them was executed, another one died in obscure circumstances but most of them have been released against the payment of generous ransoms. Crucially though, most of AQIM’s victims are nationals of the countries where the armed outfit operates: Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania.

AQIM’s operational capacity in the Sahara today is the outcome of a gradual encroachment in a territory to which it did not originally belong. AQIM is the outgrowth of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), created by Islamist radicals during the Algerian civil war and repelled southward by Algerian security forces. Historically, it had little social support base it could rely on in the desert. It had little following, too (a few hundred men at most). The core of its combatants is composed of Jihadist fighters trained in Afghanistan and sharing a strong warlike ethos.

How can a violent group sustain itself in a region it is largely alien to? The hardly controllable Saharan terrain might be an enabling factor but does not constitute the sole explanation: AQIM didn’t fill in a political void. I would argue that the GSPC, which became AQIM in 2007, managed to gain a foothold in Algeria’s bordering Saharan countries through a combination of smart business strategies, astute efforts to foster a modus vivendi with local populations and, indirectly, permissive circumstances engendered by regional central governments’ policies. Importantly, too, taking the name Al Qaeda in the first place was a far from benign move: it almost magically upgraded the disparate gathering of Jihadists to the status of unitary transnational threat, making the fetishism of acronym work at full steam among the western diplomacies and media.

The economic and consequently logistical consolidation of AQIM was permitted by the bonanza of ransoms paid by the hostages’ home countries but also a deep involvement of the Salafist group in cross border trafficking. All sorts of commodities travel the desert illegally: food, electrical appliances, cigarettes but also stolen cars, drugs and arms. Another bountiful trans-Saharan business also consists in transporting human “loads” – as local drivers put it – of African migrants back and forth. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of AQIM’s most prominent figures, is said to control significant shares of these pervasive traffics and to extort taxes from other smugglers. Anecdotally, when I asked young inhabitants of Tamanrasset what they knew about AQIM in 2009, the first answers that came up pointed to their reputation as big traffickers and the mechanical excellence of their cars. It is worth noting that AQIM, while probably a big player, does not fully control cross-border smuggling which flourishes throughout West Africa and rapidly becomes institutionalised, reaching state circles. In the same way, ransom extortion does not just benefit AQIM but also intermediaries and negotiations brokers connected to states.

Along with carving out a sizeable space in the local political economy, AQIM chiefs built alliances with some local Tuareg leaders, involving sufficient collaboration to let AQIM’s activities prosper. Such alliances are by no means the rule and might only be temporary. They owe little to religious or ideological connections (although AQIM figures might have a fanbase among the region’s disenfranchised youths) and, more likely, a lot to the micro-politics of parochial and economic rivalries in the area. Some background circumstances also enabled them: for decades now, sections of the economically and politically marginalized Tuareg society have been taking up arms against the central governments of Niamey and Bamako without achieving much in developmental or political terms. Protracted low intensity insurgency in Mali and Niger’s respective northern provinces was not only accompanied by reluctance among some Tuaregs to cooperate with their national central authorities but it has also facilitated the proliferation of banditry in the region, providing AQIM with enthusiastic potential subcontractors. Many of the latest kidnappings claimed by AQIM were actually not perpetrated by AQIM members but by local criminals selling back their catches to the Salafist outfit.

Confronted by AQIM’s growing influence in the Sahara, the national authorities of the region  and their military backers, France and the United States, have provided discordant responses. The US seem to collaborate actively with Algeria, which has been infuriated by European governments’ proneness to cede to AQIM’s demands in exchange of the liberation of their hostages. Similarly, Algerian authorities point accusing fingers to the alleged incompetence of the Malian military. Meanwhile, France has developed privileged security cooperation with Mauritania, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, which is not welcomed by Algeria, and whose results remain to be seen. One does not need to endorse conspiracy theories to realise that the countries supposedly involved in the counter-terrorist effort have differing agendas and views over the strategies to follow and their timing.

The spectacular rise of a secular revolutionary movement in Arab countries in the past weeks is certainly not good news for Al Qaeda on a global level. As far as AQIM is concerned though, there is much more to consider than just the weakening of an ideology. The criminalisation of the Sahel’s political economy might cause more enduring damage than the Jihad.

This article originally appeared in the openDemocracy Security section.

Darfur: In search of durable solutions

Posted by Chiara Altare.

While the world’s attention has turned to south Sudan and its preparation for independence on 9^th July, life is going on in the region of Darfur, which has been affected by conflict since 2003. The question is: how are people managing to make a living?

In the past eight years of violence, the majority of the Darfur population has been somehow affected by the conflict, violence and displacement, either directly or indirectly. 2 to 300,000 people have died, some 3 million people have been displaced, livelihood opportunities have changed and people have adapted their livelihoods to the new situation.

Although violence has significantly decreased and humanitarian assistance has been provided, the overall situation has improved less than expected and desired: global acute malnutrition among children under the age of 5 has been decreasing since 2003 in many of the areas from which data is available, especially in West and South Darfur. However, it has not gone below the internationally recognized threshold for emergency (10%) indicating that the situation remains precarious.

In North Darfur, malnutrition and food insecurity remain high, which, in a situation of limited humanitarian access, can easily become a new emergency. The biggest improvement can be seen in mortality (both among adults and children), which has significantly decreased, thanks to both a reduction in violence and an increased provision of medical assistance. Both the crude mortality rate and under 5 mortality rate are well below emergency level.

This applies however only to the areas where humanitarian assistance is possible: unfortunately several regions are not accessible to any humanitarian assistance and therefore not covered with medical and nutrition programmes. This implies that the severity of the situation in these areas is unknown.  

Long term prospects do not promise any clear improvement: the current peace consultations in Doha are not reaching the expected agreement among the numerous actors involved and therefore no peace agreement seems possible in the near future. In addition, recent escalating attacks of the army and rebel groups on the civilian population caused new displacement in North Darfur where around 15,000 people moved to Zamzam camp (between December 2010 and February 2011), making living conditions in the already crowded camp even more critical. Assistance to the civilian population therefore remains limited due to both insecurity and governmental restrictions for humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions. 

In the meantime, the Darfur population is showing an extreme ability to adapt: through diversification of economic activities, adaptation to the urban setting, changing food and life habits, and accepting humanitarian assistance. However, how sustainable can this be? What are the real chances for the population living in camps or in the camp periphery or among the host communities? Which opportunities are available for those who may plan to return to their place of origin in rural areas?

The search for durable solutions is one of the key priorities of the government of Sudan as presented in the Humanitarian Assistance Strategy in Darfur (November 2010) which stresses the need for a shift from emergency assistance to recovery and long term interventions. This reorientation however has to be carefully planned so as to ensure that humanitarian needs are not underestimated. The call is for a contiguum approach, in which humanitarian interventions occur simultaneously with developmental interventions according to the different needs of the population throughout the large and diverse region of Darfur.

In this context, two of the MICROCON partners (IDS and CRED) together with the Ahfad University for Women (Omdurman, Sudan) have started a study on livelihoods, nutrition and public health in Darfur. The study is funded by the European Commission and involves the FAO, UNICEF, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, the Federal Ministry of Health as well as the Humanitarian Assistance Commission. The study aims at investigating how livelihoods have changed since 2003 and how this has affected the health and nutrition status of the household members.

There are two innovations in this study: first, it combines information on both livelihoods, and nutritional/health characteristics of the Darfur households. Only by bringing together these two sets of information will it be possible to better understand the underlying causes of malnutrition and identify which types of households are more vulnerable. This will facilitate targeting specific population groups who are more at risk.

Second, the study will gather both qualitative and quantitative data. A household survey is currently being prepared: demographic, social, economic information will be collected, together with anthropometric measurement and data on feeding and care practices. With this tool, we aim to capture important information from a representative sample which will provide us with a comprehensive understanding of livelihoods in Darfur. Qualitative data will complement this information and provide a deeper insight into how lives have been affected by the conflict and what are the expectations of the population for the coming years. 

The results of the study will be available towards the end of this year and will be used by the Sudanese government and the international community for readdressing their interventions in Darfur.