General Announcements - April 28, 2011
First Findings From Study of Compliance with Security Council Resolutions Presented at Convention
Under which circumstances and why do warring factions comply with third-parties’ demands for the cessation of hostilities, and when do such calls go unheeded?
The existing literature on multilateral conflict management and compliance with international regimes does not offer empirical answers to these questions, leaving researchers and policy-makers alike with little guidance on how the multilateral actors can most effectively impact on the behavior of governments and rebel groups engaged in armed conflict.
At this year’s International Studies Association Convention, Christoph Mikulaschek, IPI Senior Policy Analyst, presented a paper that aims at closing this lacuna.
The paper, presented in Montreal on March 16, 2011, offers the first empirical findings on compliance with UN Security Council resolutions in civil war. Based on the current literature on cooperation, compliance, and conflict management, it develops a theory of compliance with United Nations Security Council resolutions in civil wars.
Using a new dataset coded and compiled for this study at the International Peace Institute, this theory is tested by analyzing civil-war parties’ compliance with all requests for military de-escalation addressed by the Security Council to factions in twenty-four civil wars between 1989 and 2003, using multilevel MLE models.
The paper represents the first large-n quantitative analysis of compliance with United Nations Security Council resolutions in armed conflict. The paper finds that compliance with Security Council resolutions in civil wars is strongly correlated with the conflict-management ecology and the compliance strategy pursued by the United Nations, and that it is also associated with great-power dynamics in the Security Council and the linkage between the Council’s effort and ongoing peace processes.
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The Global Observatory
Interview with John Prendergast, Co-Founder, Enough Project
Mr. Prendergast discusses the international justice system and the new ground forged by Invisible Children's Kony2012 campaign.
Key Global Events to Watch in May
A list of key upcoming meetings and events with implications for global affairs.
The Global Observatory is a new website by IPI, providing timely analysis on peace and security issues, interviews with leading policymakers, interactive maps, and more.
Recent Events
May 10, 2012
Arbour: What the Rule of Law Means
“In my understanding of the rule of law, fundamentally, what the rule of law means is that it embraces the principle of equality before the law,” Louise Arbour, president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), told an IPI audience on May 10, 2012. Ms. Arbour outlined that this means that no one is above the law and everyone has both equal protection and equal benefit of the law. 
May 03, 2012
Shachtman: Cyber Threats Akin to South Bronx, Not Pearl Harbor
“There’s not a danger of a cyber Pearl Harbor… it’s more like the South Bronx circa 1999, where there’s a danger that it becomes such a tough neighborhood that no one wants to set up shop there and people move out,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Danger Room blog at Wired magazine and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told an IPI audience at a panel on cyber security on May 3, 2011.
April 27, 2012
Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems
An April 27th roundtable discussion at IPI titled “Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems” examined the progress, prospects and challenges of regional and international early warning and response mechanisms to monitor, anticipate, and mitigate potential conflict situations in Africa.