‘You don’t need to love us’: Civil-Military Relations in Afghanistan, 2002–13 (original) (raw)

Humanitarian Spaces: Understanding Military-NGO interaction in conflict and disaster

This paper is a precursor to an in-depth study being carried out with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and RMIT University, outlining the need for improved understanding of the challenges and opportunities of Military-NGO interaction in complex post-conflict spaces. It is well known that military and NGO operations occupy overlapping spaces in conflict environments, with distinct and divergent cultures and mandates for those operations. However, their understanding of and attitudes towards each other and their missions are equally significant in defining their capacity and willingness to work constructively in tandem. Indeed, the minimum requirement of civilian and military organisations is to work in the same location, if not necessarily cooperatively or collaboratively. Harris highlights that as a result of geo-political and combat developments globally, key actors now regularly find themselves outside of their traditional zones of operation – militaries as peacekeepers, transitional police; NGOs operating in increasingly violent environments, while attempting to maintain independence. Humanitarian Spaces outlines important differences in the meaning of common terminology, such as “humanitarian” and “CIMIC/CMCoord”, the combination of significant security needs and human needs necessitating distinct multi-sector responses to conflict, and the difficulties of perceptions of conflict response operations by those affected, as key difficulties to be investigated by the proposed project. The full study aims to build an enhanced understanding of the NGO-military interface in post-conflict engagements, with a view to improving practice and outcomes in these complex environments. The study is to look at the ADF and NGOs with significant presence in Australia to establish a deeper picture of the current level of civil-military interaction, discern the main drivers for these interactions in a range of settings, and to as what the parties perceive to be the specific key benefits from improving these interactions, and a path to achieve such improvement. This paper provides overview of the current landscape in civil-military discourse and the identifiable challenges and developments. It continues to assess where the proposed study will sit within that discourse and the benefits of further investigating lines of communication in this space.

Civil-military coordination and UN peacebuilding operations : feature

Conflict Trends, 2006

Literature dealing with civil-military coordination (CIMIC) has mostly been concerned with the relationship between humanitarian actors and their military counterparts. In the United Nations (UN) peace operations context, however, the humanitarian-military interface is only one of several civil-military relationships. This paper is concerned with the question whether a different set of principles and guidelines is required for civil-military coordination in UN peace operations. The question is relevant because almost all the UN principles and guidelines for civil-military coordination have been drafted for the humanitarian-military interface, and most have been generated by the humanitarian community from a humanitarian perspective. In contrast, most contemporary UN peace operations are mandated to manage * Cedric de Coning is a Research Fellow at ACCORD where he is an advisor to the Training for Peace in Africa and the African Civil-Military Coordination programmes. He is a DPhil student with the Department of Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch.

Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) & the Military in Complex Emergencies~Collision of Mindsets

Journal of Mediation & Applied Conflict Analysis, 2014

This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and the military in modern complex Peace Operations, whether or not mandated by the United Nations (UN). The relationship between the two has often been marked by acrimony and mutual exchange of accusations for the claimed lack of success for advancing a joint agenda nested within the Comprehensive Approach. It suggests that the need for cooperation and mutually agreeable objectives between both sets of actors has never been more pressing. The paper further argues that much of this ‘Collision of Mindsets’ is predicated on fundamental ‘fault lines’ of cultural differences accentuated by a lack of understanding or unwillingness to see the others perspective, and that, correspondingly, each needs to actively embrace an agreed Modus Vivendi so both can share and cooperate on the stage of modern crisis management/humanitarian scenarios.