A bus carrying around 60 passengers, including at least 20 local policemen, was winding through a thick forest in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh on Monday when it suddenly exploded. At least 30 people were killed. Most of the rest were injured. Indian authorities were quick to pin the bomb attack on the country’s four-decade-old Naxalite-Maoist rebellion, named for Naxalbari, the town where the group first attacked government security forces in 1967. Naxalite fighters have been known to target security checkpoints along bus routes, and have warned bus operators not to allow police on board their vehicles. The Naxals, [...]
Peacekeeping is a tragic business. That may seem obvious, if only because, when reading about United Nations peacekeeping operations, you come across the word “tragedy” a lot. It describes what happened in Bosnia and Rwanda all too neatly. There’s no better word for what took place in Haiti, where more than 100 U.N. personnel were among the 250,000 dead in January’s earthquake. But, as English professors have tried to explain to generations of dozy students, “tragic” is more than just a synonym for “awful.” Great tragedies — Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, Scarface — aren’t just about suffering. They center on protagonists [...]
It is now widely recognized — including in the highest-level policy statements of the United Nations, European Union, African Union and NATO — that managing conflict requires a multidimensional, comprehensive, whole-of-government or integrated approach. All these approaches have a similar aim: to achieve greater harmonization and synchronization among the international and local actors, as well as across the analysis, planning, implementation and evaluation phases of the program cycle. One-dimensional or single-facet conflict-management responses are now viewed as superficial and counterproductive, in that they address only some aspects of a wider system. They thus tend to distort, shift or redirect tensions [...]
