annual report 2005 - The Watson Institute for International Studies

GLOBAL SECURITY
WATSON PROGRAMS
This program integrates theory and policy to analyze the most pressing threats
and significant vulnerabilities of global security. The prevention of violence, the
mitigation of war, and the construction of peace constitute the program’s major
concerns. Critical security issues are investigated both as conflicts among states
and as effects of new global actors, transborder flows, and complex networks.
INTRODUCTION
Among the Watson Institute’s four core research domains, the Global Security Program has the longest
history, reaching back to the Center for Foreign Policy Development (CFPD), which was established
nearly 25 years ago (see Director’s Letter page 1). Yet, this area of study has undergone the most dramatic
and expansive changes during a remarkably short period, moving through the end of the Cold War, the
creation of new states out of old, the increase of transnationalism, and the spread of global terrorism.
The Westphalian world, in which sovereign states enjoyed a monopoly on military violence and diplomatic power,
has been undermined by accelerated transborder flows of information, goods, viruses, pollutants, drugs, and
weapons. An international order, once defined by uni-, bi-, or multipolar configurations of power, increasingly
resembles a heteropolar matrix in which a wide range of different actors and technological drivers are producing
profound global effects through interconnectivity and asymmetrical conflicts.
Thanks to a global media, local conflicts and regional disasters, natural or man-made, take on a global character.
The “empire of circumstance,” as Edmund Burke once called it, dominates the world scene. Accordingly, our
program must consider how global actors deal with day-to-day contingencies and how they respond to the
unpredictable. We undertake the analysis of traditional international peace and conflict issues and less traditional
concerns like transnational crime, networked terrorism, and information warfare.
Global security researchers work individually as well as collaboratively on terrorist finances, targeted sanctions,
critical oral histories of international crises, transnational crime, global ethics, weapons stigmatization, and
information technology and security. The program in the broadest sense investigates these new configurations of
power through four major themes—new global actors, transborder flows, international institutions, and complex
networks.
A critical pluralist approach is what makes the program distinctive from its counterparts in other institutions.
We do not assume that global issues are reducible to any single actor, form of power, or field of study. We strive
to produce scholarly research, inform policy debate, and engage in social movement issues from a truly multidisciplinary,
multi-action perspective. Moreover, we reach for the innovative presentation and dissemination of
results through print and electronic media, including websites and blogging, as well as documentary production
and videoteleconferencing through a new Institute-wide initiative, the Global Media Project (see page 22).
Among the new program initiatives underway is a Global Security Manifesto, which is found on our Global
Security blog site (see page 11). The Manifesto was written to open a public debate on the security challenges of
the twenty-first century. Additionally, with the assistance of Brown University undergraduates, a Global Security
Matrix was created, providing new levels of analysis for the assessment of global threats and vulnerabilities. A
June 2005 workshop titled “Beyond Terror” also brought together leading practitioners, thinkers, and funders in
security studies to the Institute to start a dialogue on how best to address the critical issues currently overshadowed
by the war on terror.
Through the rich variety of topics currently under investigation by our researchers, the Global Security Program
hopes to provide a wide range of ideas, analysis, and recommendations for meeting the most significant global
challenges of the twenty-first century.
James Der Derian, Director
PROJECTS
TARGETED SANCTIONS
Thomas J. Biersteker and Sue E. Eckert, Principal Co-investigators
This project investigates the use of financial and legal instruments to apply
coercive pressure on transgressing parties—leaders and the elites who support
them—to change their behavior, while making international sanctions more
effective and less injurious to civilian populations. Originally formed in
1998, the team has worked with international experts and the United Nations
Secretariat to develop best practices in implementing targeted sanctions.
Among the project team’s accomplishments in this period are authoring
Targeted Financial Sanctions: A Manual for Design and Implementation—
Contributions from the Interlaken Process, which was presented to the UN
Security Council in 2001 and participation in the three sanctions reform
processes sponsored by the Swiss (Interlaken), German (Bonn-Berlin), and
Swedish (Stockholm) Governments.
Since the conclusion of these processes, the project continues to contribute
to scholarly and policy debates about multilateral targeted sanctions. It
hosted two sanctions reform workshops for the United Nations Security
Council in May 2003 and July 2004 at the Watson Institute, and provided a
special training session in November 2004 for a new member of the Security
Council. These meetings serve to familiarize Council members and others
with tools to design and implement more effective targeted sanctions.
In 2004–2005, the project focused on the dissemination of its findings
through a series of articles and reports, which included “Émergence,
évolution, effets et défis des sanctions ciblées” in Géoéconomie (Revue
trimestrielle, n. 30, été 2004) and then presented an English-language
update of the paper at the opening plenary of the Dag Hammarskjöld
Foundation symposium on “Respecting International Law and International
Institutions” in Uppsala, Sweden (June 2005). In addition, members of the
team authored two chapters in International Sanctions: Between Words and
Wars, edited by Peter Wallensteen and Carina Staibano (Department of
Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University): “Targeted Sanctions and
State Capacity: Towards a Framework for National Level Implementation”
and “Consensus from the Bottom Up? Assessing the Influence of the
Sanctions Reform Process.”
TARGETING TERRORIST FINANCES
Thomas J. Biersteker and Sue E. Eckert, Principal Co-investigators
This project emerged out of the Targeted Sanctions Project. Following
the 9/11 attacks and resulting passage of UN Security Council Resolution
1373, the team focused on international efforts to suppress the financing of
terrorism. Developing an analytical framework to evaluate implementation
of international rules to counter terrorist financing, the team authored in May
2004, “A Comparative Assessment of Saudi Arabia with Other Countries
of the Islamic World,” which became an appendix to the Council on
Foreign Relations’ second report of an Independent Task Force on Terrorist
Financing (www.cfr.org/pub7111/). Biersteker has been an original member
of the Task Force since it was formed in 2002. The team is conducting
similar studies and is extending the geographic and substantive focus of this
comparative analysis to assess progress in this aspect of the global effort
against terrorism.
This year, the team worked on the manuscript “Countering the Financing
of Global Terrorism,” which will be published in early 2006. The edited
volume will provide a state-of-knowledge assessment of terrorist financing,
with particular attention to how terrorist groups raise and move funds, as
well as the special challenges for the control and regulation of terrorist
financing. It is the outcome of a workshop with Harvard’s Kennedy School
of Government and an authors’ conference supported by a grant from the
United States Institute of Peace.
In conjunction with several UN member states and the secretariat, the
team is also addressing specific challenges to successful implementation
of multilateral measures to combat terrorist financing, such as the legal
and human rights implications of terrorist designations, and understanding
informal sectors and networks which terrorists increasingly utilize for
financing.
Finally, Thomas J. Biersteker and Sue E. Eckert traveled worldwide to
present project findings. Consultations included the MacArthur Foundation;
the European Commission; presentations on the financing of terrorism and
global efforts to regulate it at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul; the New
Hampshire Institute of Politics; the Italian Pugwash seminar in Andalo,
Italy; the Freie Universität; and the University of Lancaster (UK). Biersteker
also presented lessons from the UN’s counterterrorism experience for the
implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1540 at the Royal
Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London and at the
Institute for Nuclear Materials Management in Washington, D.C.
For more information about the Targeted Sanctions Project, visit
www.watsoninstitute.org/TFS/targetedfinsan.cfm.
For more information about the Targeting Terrorist Finances Project, visit
www.watsoninstitute.org/project_detail.cfm?id=51.
Team members for both projects: Peter Romaniuk (doctoral candidate, Political
Science), Kate Roll ’06, Barron Youngsmith ’06, Jesse Finkelstein ’05, and Justin
Ouimette ’07.
THE GLOBAL SECURITY PROGRAM UNDERTAKES THE ANALYSIS
OF TRADITIONAL INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND CONFLICT ISSUES
AND LESS TRADITIONAL CONCERNS LIKE TRANSNATIONAL CRIME,
NETWORKED TERRORISM, AND INFORMATION WARFARE.
L–R:
THOMAS J. BIERSTEKER
SUE E. ECKERT
6 WATSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ANNUAL REPORT 2005 7