Events, New Releases & Announcements
In the News!
What's Happening!
Guest Speakers
Security & Defence Seminars
Sub-State Security Dilemma - Afghanistan
Dr. Florian Kuehn, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg
1200h Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Room 411, Robert Sutherland Hall, Queen's University
Public Forum
"Rebuilding Haiti"
7.00 pm, Monday, March 8, 2010
Conference Room 202, Robert Sutherland Hall, Queen's University
EVERYONE WELCOME
Conferences & Workshops
"Security Governance by Comprehensive Approach: NATO and the International Community in Afghanistan"
with the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg
25-26 March 2010
Hamburg, Germany
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"Canadian Perspectives on the Comprehensive Approach"
15-16 April 2010
Conference Room 202, Robert Sutherland Hall, Queen's University
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"NATO's New Strategic Concept" Workshop
with Centre for Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba
23 April 2010
Queen's University
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"Co-operative Security in the International Arctic"
10-11 May 2010
Robert Sutherland Hall, Queen's University
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KCIS 2010 "Security and Governance: Foundations for International Stability"
21-23 June 2010
Four Points Sheraton Kingston
Newest Publication!
DARFUR: Reflections on the Crisis and the Responses
J. Andrew Grant (ed)
(September 2009)
For more than five years, international concern with the humanitarian crisis in western Sudan has paralleled that with the armed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While in the latter two cases robust intervention overthrowing brutal regimes was succeeded by a difficult international presence with uncertain prospects, in the case of Darfur the difficulty and uncertainty are up front, and a robust, decisive intervention remains unlikely.
Why has this been so? In different ways, these papers underline the paradoxes that Darfur poses for the international community in general and for Canada in particular. First, while it seems a case tailor-made for the Responsibility to Protect as enunciated in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, it has proved a non-starter even for the compromised version of the doctrine adopted by the United Nations in 2005. Second, beyond purely humanitarian concerns, the very considerations that render international action urgent – the regional spillover to Chad and the unstable Horn of Africa, the stakes for the UN, the EU and African security organizations, and the usual great-power rivalries – also serve to hobble it.
Third, while the Afghanistan mission was brought to Canadians by government and the military without a lot of public involvement, Darfur is a relatively “popular” international cause driven by civil society and the media. It appeals to Canadians who regret the recent decline of Africa among Canadian priorities and who see Darfur as a “purer” form of humanitarian intervention than Afghanistan. On the other hand, the more that Canadians learn of its complexities, not to mention the diplomatic and logistical requisites of a large-scale intervention there, the more Darfur may come to look like another Afghanistan, not an alternative to it.
