Suchergebnisse

This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for the conduct of postmortems after major foreign policy surprises for the European Union and its member states. It proposes a taxonomy of surprise which elucidates how officials or organisations experience both sudden and slower-burning threats. It argues that foreign policy surprises in European settings require a closer look at who was surprised, in what way, and when. The paper outlines six vital performance criteria and three key attenuating factors, allowing us to better ground judgements about foreign policy performance as well as to advance realistic recommendations on how to improve.

Die Masterarbeit widmet sich der rechtsextremen Identitären Bewegung und ihren Strategien zur gesellschaftlichen Einflussnahme. Als strategisch zentrale Dimensionen werden die Bereiche Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, Informationskultur, Rhetorik, Ästhetik, Intellektualität und Zielgruppen herausgearbeitet. Ausgehend von der Strategieanalyse erfolgt eine Ableitung von Herausforderungen, die sich für die Soziale Arbeit als Menschenrechtsprofession ergeben. Zu diesen Herausforderungen zählen die Vereinnahmung sozialarbeiterischer Methoden und gesellschaftliche Diskursverschiebungen durch die Identitäre Bewegung sowie ihre Attraktivität für junge Menschen, steigender Rechtfertigungsdruck auf die Soziale Arbeit und die intellektuelle Selbstinszenierung der Gruppierung. Aufgrund der politischen Dimension der Thematik wird in diesem Zuge auch der Frage nach einem politischen Mandat Sozialer Arbeit nachgegangen. Das fünfte Kapitel behandelt potentielle Handlungsmöglichkeiten und Grenzen Sozialer Arbeit. Hier wird zunächst die Erforderlichkeit einer professionellen und selbstreflektierten Haltung beleuchtet, um den Herausforderungen begegnen zu können. Im Anschluss folgt die adressat_innenbezogene Ebene und es werden Handlungsspielräume aufgezeigt, die sich in den Bereichen der Bildungsarbeit, des digitalen Raumes sowie in der Jugend- und Gemeinwesenarbeit als miteinander verwobene Felder er-geben.

It is often argued that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly visible in media discourses on armed conflict and thus play a growing role in shaping states' foreign policies. However, there is little investigation of their influence on specific conflict coverage and what types of NGOs are influential, in what way and under what conditions. The authors elaborate a 'supply and demand' model of growing or declining NGO influence to theorize these dynamics and take Syria's civil war from 2011–2014 as a 'best case' for testing it. They conducted an interpretative analysis of NGO output and media coverage to investigate the relative visibility of NGOs in the media over time. Further, they examine how different NGOs were referred to during two highly salient phases of the conflict for debates about foreign policy: the first escalation of protests and their repression in 2011 and the use of chemical weapons in 2013. They find evidence of rising NGO visibility and growing reliance on new types of semi-local NGOs for the provision of factual news about the conflict and human rights violations. Yet, large international NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch remained the most influential in pushing normative frames and advocating a tough stance on the Assad regime. The article discusses the implications of the findings for the theoretical argument and for broader accounts of NGOs influence.

What does it take for warnings about violent conflict and war to be listened to, believed and acted upon? Why are warnings from some sources noticed and largely accepted, while others are ignored or disbelieved? These questions are central to considering the feasibility of preventing harm to the economic and security interests of states. Challenging conventional accounts that tend to blame decision-makers' lack of receptivity and political will, the authors offer a new theoretical framework explaining how distinct 'paths of persuasion' are shaped by a select number of factors, including conflict characteristics, political contexts, and source-recipient relations. This is the first study to systematically integrate persuasion attempts by analysts, diplomats and senior officials with those by journalists and NGO staff. Its ambitious comparative design encompasses three states (the US, UK, and Germany) and international organisations (the UN, EU, and OSCE) and looks in depth at four conflict cases: Rwanda (1994), Darfur (2003), Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014).

Abstract
The article uses the case of the development of the European Union Battlegroups to the Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) to better understand the changing learning capacity of the EU in its military Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The article develops a theoretical framework to capture the most significant factors affecting learning by drawing on insights from the literatures on organizational learning and policy failure, with a specific focus on military organizations and CSDP. This framework is then used to study to what degree the EU has learnt the right lessons from the creeping failure of the Battlegroups, which factors affected learning, and to what degree the EU suffers from specific learning pathologies. The article draws on elite interviews, secondary and grey literature, and the high-level practitioner experience of one author. It finds that the EU has improved its learning capacities and correctly identified most of the military-operational root causes of the failure, yet struggled to correctly identify or address the political–strategic ones. This article offers insights to practitioners on where to best target efforts to improve learning. The theoretical framework could help to illuminate the challenges of political–military learning in multi-national regional organizations under difficult epistemic conditions.

The article draws on the first findings of the INFOCORE project to better understand the ways in which different types of media matter to the emergence, escalation or, conversely, the pacification and prevention of violence. The authors make the case for combining an interactionist approach of media influence, which is centred on the effects of evidential claims, frames and agendas made by various actors over time, with greater sensitivity for the factors that make conflict cases so different. They argue that the specific role played by the media depends, chiefly: (a) on the ways in which it transforms conflict actors' claims, interpretations and prescriptions into media content; and (b) their ability to amplify these contents and endow them with reach, visibility and consonance. They found significant variation in media roles across six conflict cases and suggest that they are best explained four interlocking conditioning factors: (i) the degree to which the media landscape is diverse and free, or conversely, controlled and instrumentalized by conflict parties; (ii) societal attitudes to and uses of different media by audiences; (iii) different degrees of conflict intensity and dynamics between the conflict parties; (iv) the degree and nature of the involvement of regional and international actors. The article maintains that de-escalatory media influence will be most effective over the longer term, in settings of low intensity conflict and when tailored carefully to local conditions.

AbstractMost empirical contributions to the normative power Europe (NPE) debate concentrate on whether and when the EU promotes its core internal norms abroad. In contrast, we investigate how norms emerging from international fora come to be accepted and internalised by the EU in the first place. We examine the case of the emerging responsibility to protect norm (R2P) and argue that the EU's implementation has been more limited and slower than one would expect from the NPE procedural ethics of 'living by example'. We examine the potential reasons for this failure to 'live by example': the role of persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; the role of inducements and costs; the goodness of fit between R2P and existing EU norms; and the clarity of the norm. We find that the lack of goodness of fit and clarity of the norm are important factors, but argue that low levels of bureaucratic receptivity were the greatest obstacle.