Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Throughout the Iraq War, Private Military Companies proved their ability to handle many of the peace operation missions conducted by the multilateral forces. Furthermore, PMCs are now part of the Total Force in Iraq that the US military forces heavily rely on. With significant weight put on PMCs’ logistics in conducting warfare and operations, we wonder if this may be the future model of military operations. By looking at the debates and discussion in academic community and international organizations, this presentation will look at what should be the appropriate demarcation of roles between official defense organizations and private military contractors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Information Operations are an integral and central part to stability and peace missions. Metric theory to inform these operations will be discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper will seek to expand the remit of the 'next stage' in peace operations theory by providing a framework in which to understand developing countries? contributions to peacekeeping operations. The scope of its global military deployments are one of the central charges laid against the United States by those critics who accuse the US of neo-imperialism. But the US is far from being the only country to deploy troops on a global scale. With peacekeeping forces deployed in Haiti and Sudan reaching full strength, the year 2005 witnessed the deployment of UN peacekeepers reach levels not seen since the early 1990s. The overwhelming majority of these troops come from developing countries. How are we to think about such large deployments of peacekeepers from developing countries in a unipolar world order? Noting that contribution to peacekeeping represents a gap within the 'next stage' literature of peace operations theory (Bellamy and Williams, 2004), I shall advance a 'subaltern realist' perspective (Ayoob, 1997), to argue that the notion of 'sovereignty as responsibility' has increasingly called the legitimacy of the non-Western state into question. This pressure has compelled developing countries into demonstrating their functioning capacity as states and their ability to project coercive power across borders.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the use of force in so-called security and stabilisation operations in which the recourse to coercion is justified, among other reasons, by the necessity to enforce a political order founded upon a theory of positive peace (in which peace is not only a balance of power) while simultaneously military means are used to neutralise the enemy in order to impose peace through war. While focusing on the dynamics of external intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, these operations will be approached through the analytical categories and theories of classical clausewitzian wars (in which the symbolical legitimacy of the other is recognised), police operations (founded upon the principle of law-enforcement and thus of the imposition of a symbolical order) and struggles for legitimacy (in which the symbolical order referred to by the other is not recognised). Is there any space for political and symbolical mediation? Are these conflicts a relational process or on the contrary an expression of the radical otherness of the enemy? These are important questions in a context in which the ultimate political-military aim is said to be the (re)construction of a political order. While drawing from insights offered by political theory, theory of international relations and historical sociology, some of the peculiar practices implemented by the international military forces on the fields of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq will also be highlighted. Such diverse themes as the moral status of the victims, the nature of the interpretative community in the name of which one is intervening and the symbolical status of the enemy will be analysed, in order to assess the possibility for symbolical mediation in these conflicts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is part of a larger project seeking to understand the complexities of multilateral military operations. We have previously examined how much discretion is given to the commanders on the ground.The next step is to consider how civilians and m