Internal security crises, from environmental disaster, extreme poverty and deprivation, armed conflicts, or ethnic or religious conflict, provide sites of opportunity for those seeking to internationalize conflicts. Domestic conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have started as internal problems, but have taken on regional and international dimensions as parties to the conflict within the country and sympathetic external forces have joined forces with each other for mutual gain. This book examines the international dimension to internal conflicts and asks: under what conditions do domestic conflicts become opportunities for regional or global actors to become involved? Why have some countries been able to successfully deal with this problem while others have not? Who are the actors who seek to internationalize conflicts? Why and with what means do they become involved and how do their agendas get internalized/localized? Cases include: the separatist movements in the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Aceh (Indonesia); and the civil wars in Rwanda/Congo, and Sierra Leone/Liberia, Lebanon, and Iraq. This book finds that a combination of greater democratization internally, coupled with constructive outside mediation efforts, can produce conditions necessary to prevent conflicts from escalating or diffusing, and can facilitate peace-building. Several chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Asian Security.

Internal conflicts threaten many countries and regions globally. The first part of this book examines the sources of internal conflicts and the ways these may affect neighbouring states and the international community. The second part covers specific problems, policy instruments and key actors.

This insightful book debates whether conflict within states has emerged as the Achilles Heel of the international community. It covers a wide-range of issues including the roots of internal conflict, small arms supplies, intervention, human rights and international humanitarian law, refugees and post-conflict reconstruction. Internal Conflict and the International Community provides supplementary reading for third level undergraduates, post-graduates and scholars of international relations, comparative politics, development studies, international law and security and defence studies.

The main aim of this book is to inquire into the system of norms regulating the `internationalization' of internal conflicts. The traditional distinction between international and internal conflict, which entails different legal consequences, is in practice very difficult to detect due to the presence, in many instances, of elements typical of both situations. Through a careful and extraordinarily useful examination of all relevant cases of `internationalized' internal conflict since 1956, the validity of the traditional framework of rules concerning foreign intervention in internal conflict is reassessed. At the same time, the applicability to these situations of the rules typical of international conflicts are analyzed with a view to providing the existence of a continuum between the two situations, not only as a matter of fact but also with respect to their legal regulation.

First published in 1992, this edited collection argues that conflicts have a growing tendency both to intensify and to lengthen, thus increasing the likelihood of external actors being drawn into the on-going violence. Here, leading experts in comparative and international politics examine this tendency of communal conflicts to spill over into the international arena. They also look at the conditions under which these processes do not occur and are mediated successfully. The authors combine theoretical perspectives with case studies, covering examples from the origins of the First World War, to state building in Iraq, and whether it was a precursor of the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf Crisis. They present both a global overview and a focus on the state as the single most important intermediary in the internationalization process. A comprehensive and relevant reissue, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of International Relations, Comparative Politics and Strategic Studies.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of factors that transform a prima facie non-international armed conflict (NIAC) into an international armed conflict (IAC) and the consequences that follow from this process of internationalization. It examines in detail the historical development as well as the current state of the relevant rules of international humanitarian law. The discussion is grounded in general international law, complemented with abundant references to case law, and illustrated by examples from twentieth and twenty-first century armed conflicts. In Part I, the book puts forward a thorough catalogue of modalities of conflict internationalization that includes outside intervention, State dissolution, and recognition of belligerency. It then specifically considers the legal qualification of complex situations that feature more than two conflict parties and contrasts the mechanism of internationalization of armed conflicts with the reverse process of de-internationalization. Part II of the book challenges the conventional wisdom that members of non-State armed groups do not normally benefit from combatant status. It argues that the majority of fighters belonging to non-State armed groups in most types of internationalized armed conflicts are in fact eligible for combatant status. Finally, Part III turns to belligerent occupation, traditionally understood as a leading example of a notion that cannot be transposed to armed conflicts occurring in the territory of a single State. By contrast, the book argues in favour of the applicability of the law of belligerent occupation to internationalized armed conflicts.

War, Conflict and Human Rights is an innovative inter-disciplinary textbook, combining aspects of law, politics and conflict analysis to examine the relationship between human rights and armed conflict. This third edition has been fully revised and updated, and contains a completely new chapter on business, conflict and human rights. Making use of both theoretical and practical approaches, the authors: examine the tensions and complementarities between protection of human rights and resolution of conflict – the competing political demands and the challenges posed by internal armed conflict and the increasing role of nonstate actors, including corporations, in armed conflicts; explore the scope and effects of human rights violations in contemporary armed conflicts, such as in Sierra Leone, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the former Yugoslavia; assess the legal and institutional accountability mechanisms developed in the wake of armed conflict to punish violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law such as the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, hybrid or internationalized tribunals and the International Criminal Court; discuss continuing and emergent global trends and challenges in the fields of human rights and conflict analysis. This volume will be essential reading for students of war and conflict studies, human rights and international humanitarian law, and highly recommended for students of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, international security, transitional justice and international relations generally.

This volume provides an in-depth consideration of Africa and how it fares in today’s globalised world. Its varied, but interrelated, perspectives touch on contemporary issues in international relations, especially as they relate to Africa’s development and global impacts. It highlights Africa’s experiences and positions on nuclear proliferation, gender equality, foreign policies, health, governance, war and changing power configurations with the economic emergence of China. It will appeal to historians, international relations experts, statesmen, policymakers and analysts, diplomats, students and general readers.

This book, first published in 1990, examines the theories on ‘nonoffensive’ or ‘nonprovocative’ defence that arose at the end of the Cold War. The debate around the theories is analysed here, including the claims that nonoffensive defence would lead to conventional stability, security at lower levels of armaments, and reduce suspicion leading to peace and stability.

This book is a practical guide on the use of various data analytics and visualization techniques and tools in the banking and financial sectors. It focuses on how combining expertise from interdisciplinary areas, such as machine learning and business analytics, can bring forward a shared vision on the benefits of data science from the research point of view to the evaluation of policies. It highlights how data science is reshaping the business sector. It includes examples of novel big data sources and some successful applications on the use of advanced machine learning, natural language processing, networks analysis, and time series analysis and forecasting, among others, in the banking and finance. It includes several case studies where innovative data science models is used to analyse, test or model some crucial phenomena in banking and finance. At the same time, the book is making an appeal for a further adoption of these novel applications in the field of economics and finance so that they can reach their full potential and support policy-makers and the related stakeholders in the transformational recovery of our societies. The book is for stakeholders involved in research and innovation in the banking and financial sectors, but also those in the fields of computing, IT and managerial information systems, helping through this new theory to better specify the new opportunities and challenges. The many real cases addressed in this book also provide a detailed guide allowing the reader to realize the latest methodological discoveries and the use of the different Machine Learning approaches (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, deep, etc.) and to learn how to use and evaluate performance of new data science tools and frameworks