Post-conflict reconstruction stretches the capacities of international institutions and they turn to NGOs to answer the challenge. This book explores how the interactions between international public institutions and NGOs have affected peacebuilding in the post-conflict situations of Bosnia, Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Post-conflict reconstruction stretches the capacities of international institutions and they turn to NGOs to answer the challenge. This book explores how the interactions between international public institutions and NGOs have affected peacebuilding in the post-conflict situations of Bosnia, Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Established to help people jumpstart their lives and economy after over a half century of conflict, the South Sudanese microcredit sector collapsed in 2012, six years after its takeoff, to the detriment of some 80,000 participants. Microcredit Meltdown is an account of the ambitious launch and premature downfall of the Southern Sudanese microcredit industry. Through a mixed methods ethnographic approach, the book charts the state and non-state actors that embarked upon economic development after war, the assumptions built into microlending, and the impact of ideologies and social norms on economic practice. The text compares industry theories with the experiences of borrowers and finds that microcredit failed in South Sudan due to false assumptions that were inapplicable to this post-conflict environment. Yet the over promising and under-delivering commercial microcredit was not isolated to South Sudan or even post-conflict settings. The Juba microcredit story is an instance of the broader global shift toward the commercial microcredit model. Initiated to get badly needed capital into the hands of poor people, instead the focus became sustaining a lending program. The text shows how the ideological and material constraints of the commercial microcredit paradigm were woefully misaligned with local socio-cultural realities, and created the collapse in South Sudan.

It has become commonplace to observe the growing pervasiveness and impact of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). And yet the three central approaches in International Relations (IR) theory, Liberalism, Realism and Constructivism, overlook or ignore the importance of NGOs, both theoretically and politically. Offering a timely reappraisal of NGOs, and a parallel reappraisal of theory in IR—the academic discipline entrusted with revealing and explaining world politics, this book uses practice theory, global governance, and new institutionalism to theorize NGO accountability and analyze the history of NGOs. This study uses evidence from empirical data from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia and from studies that range across the issue-areas of peacebuilding, ethnic reconciliation, and labor rights to show IR theory has often prejudged and misread the agency of NGOs. Drawing together a group of leading international relations theorists, this book explores the frontiers of new research on the role of such forces in world politics and is required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.

Most regions of the world are plagued by conflicts that are made insoluble by a confluence of complex threads from history, geography, politics, and culture. These "frozen conflicts" defy conflict management interventions by both internal and external agents and institutions. Worse, they constantly threaten to extend beyond their local geographies, as in the terrorist bombings in Boston by ethnic Chechens, or to escalate from skirmishes to full-scale war, as in Nagorno-Karabakh. Consequently, such conflicts cry out for alternative approaches to the classic, state-focused, and sovereignty-based conflict management models that are practiced in traditional diplomacy—which most often produce rather short-term, ad hoc, fragmented interventions and outcomes. Drawing upon the cases of the South Caucasus, the Western Balkans, Central America, South East Asia, and Northern Ireland, Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management offers a theoretical and practical solution to this impasse by arguing for regional collective interventions that involve a long-term reengineering of existing conflict management infrastructure on the ground. Such approaches have been attracting the attention of scholars and practitioners alike yet, thus far, these concepts have rarely involved more than simple prescriptions for regional cooperation between grassroots actors and traditional diplomacy. Specifically, says Anna Ohanyan, only the cultivation and establishment of regional peace systems can provide an effective path toward conflict management in these standoffs in such intractably divided regions.

Armed non-state actors (ANSAs) often have economic aims that international law needs to respond to. This book looks at the aim of Islamic State to create an effective government, with an economically independent regime, which focused on key oilfields in Syria and Iraq. Having addressed Islamic State's quest for energy resources in Iraq and Syria, the book explores the lawfulness of the war with Islamic State from a variety of legal aspects. It has been attempted to make inroads into the most controversial aspects of contradictions in the application of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, particularly when discussing the use of extraterritorial armed force against ANSAs, and the obligation to protect civilian objects, including the natural environment. The question is whether the targeting of energy resources should be regarded as a violation of the laws of armed conflict, even though the war with Islamic State being classified as a non-international armed conflict. Ambitious in scope, the study argues that legal theory and state practice are still problematic as to how and under what conditions states can justify resorting to military force in foreign territory, and to what extent they can target natural resources as being part of state property. Furthermore, it goes on to examine the differences between international and non-international armed conflicts, to establish whether there is any difference in the targeting of energy resources as part of the war-sustaining capabilities of either party. Through an examination of the Islamic State case, the book offers a comprehensive study to close the gaps in jus in bello by contextualising the questions of civilian protection, victimisation and state responsibility by evaluating the US's war-sustaining theory as a justification for the destruction of a territorial state's natural resources that are occupied by ANSAs.

This book examines the impact of current and emerging digital technologies on global environmental governance, and in particular on environmental civil society organizations. Technological innovations are constantly emerging: internet and social media platforms, blockchains, big data, and artificial intelligence are some of the most common or promising digital technologies of our times. Through case studies and the analysis of concrete applications of digital technologies, this book shows how these digital technologies can be deployed to support global environmental governance, and in particular a multi-stakeholder approach to the protection of the environment. It provides an overview of the diverse uses of these digital technologies by civil society organizations (CSOs) in global environmental governance. In this fast-changing context, the capacity of environmental CSOs to manage and benefit from digital technologies, and to produce and distribute information, can strengthen their participation in global environmental governance. Their key roles, including advocacy, monitoring, knowledge production, fundraising, nudging individual behaviors, and project implementation, greatly benefit from the use of these technologies. By examining some of the most-utilized current digital technologies and presenting some of the most prominent emerging ones, this book aims to illustrate how active civil society organizations operate, and how ICTs support some of their roles, and therefore their participation in global environmental governance. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental studies and politics, global governance, political sociology, geography and communication studies along with policy makers and communication specialists from the environmental community.