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Institute for State Effectiveness

International Humanitarian Law

 

PODCASTS OF EVENTS in 2008:

Zimbabwe: Beyond the Endgame.  Public Panel Discussion - 17th July

Ashraf Ghani & Clare Lockhart: 'Fixing Failed States' - 22nd May

Sir John Holmes: 'Meeting the New Humanitarian Challenges of the 21st Century' - 28th April

Judy Cheng-Hopkins: 'Defining the scope of responsibilities: the Great Lakes region' - 18th March

Jonathan Steele: 'Iraq: the Way Out’ - 31st January

Giullermo Bettochi: 'Somalia: legal and humanitarian challenges' - 28th January

 

 

PUBLIC EVENTS - ACADEMIC YEAR 2007/2008

Thursday 17th July

'Zimbabwe: Beyond the Endgame' - Public Panel Discussion featuring Gugulethu Moyo, Dr. Martin Rupiya, Patrick Smith and James Putzel (Chair).

As talks between Mr Mugabe and both factions of the Movement for Democratic Change open in South Africa, the crisis in Zimbabwe continues.  Western countries are pushing for more sanctions against Zimbabwe’s rulers, while President Mbeki and the African Union oppose them.  Meanwhile, the shrinking economy provides Mr Mugabe with less and less to pay the army, police and administrators. The June 27 presidential run-off was dubbed the endgame.  It proved just another stage in Zimbabwe’s unfolding catastrophe. A panel of experts discussed what might happen next. To listen to the podcast of this event click the link on the right. The flyer for the event can be viewed here.

Monday 30th June

'Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia' by Ahmed Rashid

Book launch co-hosted by the LSE Crisis States Research Centre, the LSE Centre for Civil Society, the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group, the Afghanistan Study Group, and Penguin Books Ltd.  Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist, based in Lahore, who writes for The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Review of Books, BBC Online and The Nation.  His previous books include Jihad, Taliban and The Resurgence of Central Asia.  He appears regularly on NPR, CNN, PBS and the BBC World Service.  With Descent Into Chaos Rashid returns to the region and to the corridors of power in Washington and Europe and shows us why it is so vital that we refocus our attentions on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.


Thursday 22nd May

'Fixing Failed States' by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart
Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart launched their new book 'Fixing Failed States'.  (OUP, May 2008) with a public lecture at LSE. Ashraf Ghani is a former Minister of Finance in the Afghan government and Chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness, which seeks to promote the ability of states to serve their citizens. Clare Lockhart is Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness, where she advises countries and other organisations on state-building.  She was previously UN advisor to the Bonn Process and Adviser to the Government of Afghanistan responsible for several national initiatives.  She is a lawyer, historian and specialist in institution-building and has worked at the World Bank, UN and as a barrister. More

Monday 28th April
Sir John Holmes, 'Meeting the New Humanitarian Challenges of the 21st Century'
Sir John spoke of the multiple challenges that UN agencies and other national and international NGOs would face in the coming years when seeking to deliver emergency relief and humanitarian aid.  These include: preserving 'humanitarian space' and remaining independent of political and military action in locations such as Iraq, Somalia and Darfur; increasing effective coordination between the many humanitarian actors in the field; coping with the effects of climate change; and coping with the effects of a global rise in food prices on the poorest communities. Sir John is the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

Tuesday 18th March
Judy Cheng-Hopkins, 'Defining the scope of responsibilities: the Great Lakes region'
Recently back from a visit to the Great Lakes region, the UNHCR's Assistant High Commissioner for Operations discussed the local settlement of refugees in Tanzania and the return and reintegration of refugees in Burundi.  Dr Chaloka Beyani, Legal Advisor to the Secretariat of the International Conference on the Great Lakes, situated the issue within the Great Lakes Pact which sets out a holistic legal framework in which this problem is merely one component of establishing peace and security in the region, while Dr Susan Breau, Reader in public international law, explored the interface between the 'responsibility to protect' doctrine and peacekeeping, including the facilitation of the voluntary return of refugeees and IDPs.

Monday 28th January
Guillermo Bettochi, 'Somalia: legal and humanitarian challenges'
The CSRC co-hosted a lecture, with the International Humanitarian Law project at LSE, by Guillermo Bettochi, UNHCR representative in Somalia,who spoke about internally displaced persons and refugees in the context of his recent experiences in Somalia.
A map showing IDPs in Somalia is provided by Mr Bettochi here.  


Thursday 31st January 2008 at 6.30 p.m.

'Iraq: the way out' by Jonathan Steele

 Guardian foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele gave a talk hosted by CSRC entitled ‘Iraq: the Way Out’, to correspond with the release of his new book Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq (IB Tauris, January 2008)and a 3-day serialisation of the book in The Guardian.

Steele explained that he had visited Iraq eight times since the 2003 invasion and on each occasion had found the security situation worse, as well as an increasing hostility towards the presence of the US and UK. Dozens of books have already been written about how this situation came about; but most follow the same ‘conventional wisdom’ that suggests it was the lack of a coherent plan before the invasion and a number of blunders after the invasion that caused this disaster. Steele expressed alarm at the growing strength of this orthodox interpretation and said that his book was ‘a deliberate challenge to the conventional wisdom’, which implies that the occupation could have been successful if only it was better managed. In fact, he argued, for the US and UK to occupy an Arab state in the 21st century was doomed to fail regardless of forward planning. He pointed out that ‘all occupations are inherently unpopular – people don’t like seeing foreign tanks on their streets, they don’t like seeing foreign troops in their midst and of course there has been a century-long history of Anglo-American intervention in the Middle East.’ As a result of this, he argued, ‘From the very first day more Iraqis saw it as an occupation than a liberation’.  He went on to explain that the US and UK did not face up to this reality. Paul Bremer and his colleagues took the post-1945 occupation of Japan and Germany as a template, despite the hugely differing circumstances. They ‘seemed to forget that Iraq was in the Middle East – they didn’t seem to realise they were treading on old colonial ground’. Consequently Steele argued that ‘the biggest US blunder was not dissolving the Iraqi army. It was to maintain an open-ended occupation with no date for withdrawal.’  


Wednesday 31st October
'Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop'
This new book, by CSRC Research Fellow Dr Antonio Giustozzi, examines the Neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and argues that its roots can be traced much further back than the events of 2006.  Dr Giustozzi has spent more than a decade researching and writing about Afghanistan and is an acknowledged expert on the country.  The book is published by C.Hurst & Co. October 2007.

Monday 12th November
Prof Ha-Joon Chang, ''Bad Samaritans: rich nations, poor policy and the threat to the developing world'
The Centre welcomes Prof Ha-Joon Chang to speak about his book   The book challenges the notion that free markets are the best route to development for countries of the South, arguing that a poor understanding of the history of industrialised Northern countries is leading to bad policymaking. The book was published by Random House in July 2007.

Monday 26th November at 12.30
Seminar in room H216
"South Africa and the Zimbabwe Crisis"
Prof Brian Raftopoulos is a political commentator and head of the Transitional Justice in Africa programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town.

Tuesday 11th December at 6.30 p.m.
Public Lecture in the Hong Kong Theatre
Prof. Stathis Kalyvas (Yale University)
Why are civil wars so violent?  Why are civilians their primary victims?  Is civil war violence random or can it be analysed using social science tools?  By decoupling the phenomena of war and violence, Prof Kalyvas seeks to show the logic behind such acts.   Prof Kalyvas is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale, where he directs the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence.  He is the author of "The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe" (1996) and "The Logic of Violence in Civil War" (2006).